The Beginnings Of The Seattle Seahawks

 As per one of the agreed parts of the 1970 AFL–NFL merger, the NFL began planning to expand from 26 to 28 teams. In June 1972, Seattle Professional Football Inc., a group of Seattle business and community leaders, announced its intention to acquire an NFL franchise for the city of Seattle. In June 1974, the NFL gave the city an expansion franchise. That December, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle announced the official signing of the franchise agreement by Lloyd W. Nordstrom, representing the Nordstrom family as majority partners for the consortium.

In March 1975, John Thompson, former Executive Director of the NFL Management Council and a former Washington Huskies executive, was hired as the general manager of the new team. The name Seattle Seahawks was selected on June 17, 1975 after a public naming contest which drew more than 20,000 entries and over 1,700 names.

The Seattle Seahawks and Tampa Bay Buccaneers each selected 39 players in an expansion draft held on March 30-31, 1976. The other 26 NFL teams each froze 29 players from its roster. Seattle and Tampa Bay alternated selections from the remaining pool of players. When the first player was chosen from a team, that team then froze two new players. The Buccaneers and Seahawks continued with their selections until three players had been picked from each of the existing teams.

Thompson recruited and hired Jack Patera, a Minnesota Vikings assistant coach, to be the first head coach of the Seahawks; the hiring was announced on January 3, 1976. The expansion draft was held March 30–31, 1976, with Seattle and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers alternating picks for rounds selecting unprotected players from the other 26 teams in the league. The Seahawks were awarded the 2nd overall pick in the 1976 draft, a pick they used on defensive tackle Steve Niehaus. The team took the field for the first time on August 1, 1976 in a pre-season game against the San Francisco 49ers in the then newly opened Kingdome.

The Seahawks are the only NFL team to switch conferences twice in the post-merger era. The franchise began play in 1976 in the aforementioned NFC West but switched conferences with the Buccaneers after one season and joined the AFC West. This realignment was dictated by the league as part of the 1976 expansion plan, so that both expansion teams could play each other twice and every other NFL franchise once (the ones in their conference at the time) during their first two seasons. The Seahawks won both matchups against the Buccaneers in their first two seasons, the former of which was the Seahawks' first regular season victory.

However, before the Seahawks even played their first game, tragedy struck, as the team's owner Lloyd W. Nordstrom died from a heart attack while vacationing in Mexico. Nordstrom had been instrumental in landing an NFL team in the Pacific Northwest, and hiring the front office, but he never had a chance to see his team take the field. The Seahawks, coached by Jack Patera, played their first game on September 12 in a sold-out Kingdome. The Seahawks played a solid game, but had their desperation final pass intercepted in the endzone in a 30–24 loss to the St. Louis Cardinals. The Seahawks would go on to lose their first five games, before beating the 

Buccaneers, their brothers in expansion, 13–10 in Tampa on October 17. Three weeks later, the Seahawks would earn their first home victory by beating the Atlanta Falcons 30–13 behind the 124-yard effort of running back Sherman Smith. These two wins would be the only ones in the season, as the first-year team compiled a record of 2–12, making them the worst team in the NFC. The only team they were better than was the 0-14 Buccaneers.

The strike-shortened 1982 season proved to be a transitional year for all of pro football, but no club fit the transitional description better than the Seahawks. Patera was removed after six-plus years as head coach. Mike McCormack finished the season as interim head coach and then was replaced in 1983 by Chuck Knox, who guided the Seahawks to an 83-67-0 record in nine seasons up through the 1991 campaign.

Knox led the Seahawks to the AFC championship game his first season. Seattle won an AFC West wild-card berth for the first time in its eight-year history and then knocked off Denver and Miami before losing to the Los Angeles Raiders 30-14 in the title game. The team would be competitive the next two years but it took until 2005 for the team to reach its first Super Bowl and in 2013 the team won Super Bowl 48.

The Seattle Seahawks are now one of the most respected franchises in the NFL and in the 21st century the team has compiled one of the best records in the National Football League.