The Seahawks’ painful playoff loss to Dallas in January had barely ended when Seattle coach Pete Carroll began gushing about the prosperous times ahead.
“We come out of here with a great feeling about our future,” he said at the post-mortem news conference a few days later.
Carroll immediately began to talk about the Seahawks’ limitless potential.
“You can tell that the nucleus and the core of the team that you need to be a championship club is here,” he said.
It has been four months since Carroll uttered those words, and the Seahawks are entering the final stage of their team-building process – free agency that no longer requires teams to yield a compensatory draft pick when they sign players.