Champion Seahawks ready to 'run it forward' in '26 — SkimNews
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- AJ Barner said watching the championship banner unfurled at Lumen Field on Wednesday will be "special," but the tight end who scored Seattle's only offensive touchdown in the Super Bowl is ready to "turn the page" to 2026.
- Coach Mike Macdonald coined "run it forward" in the spring to replace talk of "defending" the title or "running it back," saying he hadn't sensed "an ounce of complacency" from his players this offseason.
- Macdonald framed Wednesday's banner drop as "the first step in this journey," not a culmination — telling his team the Week 1 rematch is where the 2026 work actually begins.
- Leonard Williams said he'd been impressed with how the Seahawks have handled post-championship success — "better than I would have expected" — noting nobody in the building is "patting themselves on the back."
- Williams called Seattle's 29-13 Super Bowl win over New England, celebrated at the downtown Seattle championship parade, "one of the most special moments of my career and my life," then said he "quickly forgot" about the game when his wife gave birth to their first child a month later.
Why it matters: The Seahawks' deliberate vocabulary shift from "defending" to "running it forward" addresses the rarest challenge in the NFL: only two teams this century have repeated as Super Bowl champions, and Macdonald is publicly signaling he's identified that trap. With a Week 1 rematch against New England — the team they beat 29-13 seven months ago — the opener becomes an immediate litmus test of whether the new mantra holds when the result still counts.
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