PHOENIX—John Schneider was running late.
The Seahawks general manager and president of football operations had an informal media session scheduled with local media on Monday afternoon at the NFL Annual Meeting, but Schneider had a hard time arriving at that meeting due to all the well-wishers stopping him to congratulate him on his team’s Super Bowl title.
So goes the life of a head coach or executive of a team coming off of a Super Bowl victory. All 32 teams are present each year at the NFL annual meeting, but only one can be the team that won a title the previous month.
“Yeah, but I do it to, ‘Great job, that was impressive,'” Schneider said of his well-wishers. “We’re just constantly doing this all throughout the year, every day, then all of sudden it’s over. Then you turn around like a week later and you’re starting on next year, and it’s a totally different team, a different season. But yeah, it’s cool.”
As Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said earlier in the day, the Seahawks aren’t heading into the 2026 season feeling like they’re the “defending champ,” but that doesn’t mean there aren’t real effects from playing into early February, or that Schneider and the rest of the organization can’t take lessons from the last time the team was coming off of a title run.
More on that topic and other things we learned from Schneider’s time with the media on Monday.
1. Schneider and company will bring lessons learned more than a decade ago with them into this season.
Every season is unique and, to Macdonald’s point, no team can really just pick up where it left off the previous season, no matter how many players are back. But while the 2026 team and season will be their own unique things, that doesn’t mean the 2025 season, which extended into early February, won’t affect this year’s team. As Macdonald noted earlier in the day, the Seahawks will adjust their offseason workout program to give veteran players more break, and from Schneider’s perspective, there are plenty of lessons to be learned from what the Seahawks 2014 and 2015 teams experienced coming off of Super Bowl seasons.
“There’s a lot of things within football operations that we need to improve on and be cognizant of,” Schneider said. “What happened the last time? Where are we taking this franchise? What are we going to look like in the training room, strength and conditioning, the fields? There’s a lot of other stuff that goes into it—it’s not just the roster and the coaches—there’s a lot of other stuff that supports all of those people. So we’ve got to be cognizant of a lot of things there, lessons learned there, and lessons learned from a team building standpoint for sure.”
2. There are also lessons to be learned from past drafts after successful seasons.
As Schneider has detailed in the past, one issue the Seahawks found with draft classes last decade was that there were players coming in who idolized star players like Richard Sherman, Kam Chancellor, Bobby Wagner, Earl Thomas and Marshawn Lynch, and could at times be so reverential towards those players that they weren’t able to compete with them. That led, Schneider said, to a bit of revamping to the evaluation process to make sure the Seahawks were bringing in the right type of competitors, and now that new picks will be coming in to play on a team with start players who just won a Super Bowl, it will be more important than ever to get that part of the evaluation right.
“Yeah, we’ll be way more cognizant of it,” Schneider said. “How do they feel about (Devon Witherspoon), how do they feel about Leonard (Williams), (Byron) Murphy? There’s got to be a level of confidence, self-efficacy that we have to dig deeper into… Not just being fans of these guys, but like, ‘I want to take their jobs.’ The competition just rises to the top.
3. Offensive line continuity will be “huge” for the Seahawks in 2026.
At this time last year, Schneider was being asked frequently about his team’s offensive line, which had lost one starting guard and had question marks about both of the other interior line spots. A month later, the Seahawks picked guard Grey Zabel in the first round, and with center Jalen Sundell and right guard Anthony Bradford eventually grabbing hold of their starting positions, the Seahawks had a consistent lineup and much improved line play last season. The Seahawks also got extensions done for starting tackles Charles Cross and Abraham Lucas, which means that the Seahawks have all five of their starting linemen back in 2026, as well as some young players they’re excited to see develop, including 2025 draft picks Bryce Cabeldue and Mason Richman.
“It’s huge,” Schneider said. “You look at continuity, it’s so hard to have that continuity these days. We had it Green Bay with (center Mike Flanagan) and those guys that were together for like eight years… To have that continuity is rare.”
