Luke Willson has a story about his unemployment, how he found out Seahawks wanted him back
Luke Willson has a story on how he stayed in shape while unemployed this month, and how he eventually signed with the Seahawks.
It’s Luke Willson. Of course he has a story.
“I was on my way to the (San Francisco) airport, to go workout for another team, in an Uber,” the 29-year-old veteran, fun-loving tight end said Wednesday before his first practice of his Seattle redux. “And my agent called and said this (in Seattle) might go down. So it was a quick pivot right there.”
His agent told Willson to continue in the car to SFO on Tuesday, because they weren’t sure the Seahawks would get the deal done.
Turns out, as coach Pete Carroll explained Wednesday, Willson’s return was contingent on the Pittsburgh Steelers agreeing to send Seattle a fifth-round draft choice in a trade for tight end Nick Vannett. The Seahawks wanted the proven Willson, a Super Bowl winner with them after being drafted in 2013, over Vannett, a 2016 draft pick who never realized the Seahawks’ expectations for him.
“All right,” Willson told his agent Tuesday at SFO, his home airport since the Oakland Raiders cut him Aug. 31. “I’ll board the plane last then.”
Just as he was about to go through the secured door and down the jetway to his fourth workout with an NFL team this month, his agent called back to tell Willson to fly to Seattle, instead. The Seahawks had a deal done to trade Vannett to the Steelers.
“We were boarding. And I got the call from my agent,” he said. “So I walked over two terminals and flew to Seattle, instead.
“It was a pretty wild 24 hours, man.”
A pretty wild month, man.
After being a star of the HBO series “Hard Knocks” with the Oakland Raiders this summer during training camp, the Raiders released him among their final cuts of the preseason. True to his understated nature—and his relatively modest (by NFL standards) $7.8 million in total pay over seven years in the league—Willson wasn’t at some posh performance center in San Diego or Arizona staying in NFL-ready shape this month.
Willson posted on his social-media pages descriptions of killer workouts he got while unemployed this month. With free weights. In the basement of his apartment building in San Francisco.
“You like that, huh?” Wilson said, laughing.
“You know what? It was a bit makeshift, but I got some good work in there, man. It’s great. When you don’t have a job you go in there at odd hours, when everybody else is working. So I had the whole thing to myself. Got a little music goin’.
“Wasn’t the most ideal performance facility, but I thought it did the trick. ...It apparently was a pretty nice apartment complex, man.
“This was a decent gym.”
The Seahawks drafted Willson in the fifth round in 2013 as a pass-catching tight end from Canada and Rice University. Willson played his first five NFL seasons with the Seahawks (2013-17), and 89 of his 102 career receptions are with Seattle.
He signed before the 2018 season in free agency with Detroit then spent this preseason with Oakland. The Raiders released him Aug. 30.
All of Seahawks headquarters was buzzing with the life of the party being back in the building.
Staffers flagged him down for selfies. Guard Jordan Roos and linebacker K.J. Wright were among the veteran Seahawks who were wearing their shorts 1980s-short going out to practice Wednesday.
That’s to honor Willson’s “Techno Thursday” movement he started in the locker room and on the field a few years ago and carried, with much amusement, through the 2017 season. Willson blared techno dance music from a neon-green, 1980s-style boom box in the locker room on Thursdays before practice in his first stint with the team.
“Although I gave my boom box to my brother.” Willson said Wednesday. “So I’m going to buy another boom box, tonight. And we are going to get it going.”
During those Thursday practices, Willson and his fellow tight ends began wearing John Stockton-short practice shorts to fit the throw-back vibe.
By the 2017 season, Willson’s movement had spread through the entire team. Quarterback Russell Wilson was among the teammates who began wearing his shorts ultra short for Thursday practices, too. Carroll began playing the tight end’s techno music instead of the usual rap through the practices. CenturyLink Field’s public-address system was playing Willson’s music for his touchdowns, of which he had a career-high four for Seattle that season.
The touchdown celebration involved Willson’s teammates joining him for his techno dancing in the end zone.
It even carried into road stadiums. This is what happened when the Cowboys’ stadium sound system was playing one of Willson’s techno sounds during a timeout in a Christmas Eve 2017 Seahawks game at Dallas:
Is Techno Thursday about to become a thing again now that Willson is back with the Seahawks?
“Of course, man. Of course!” he said, sounding almost offended to be asked.
“I mean, I’m assuming. You are hyped about it, aren’t you?”
Not everyone is.
All-Pro linebacker Bobby Wagner said this when asked if he was happy about having Willson back on the team: “Kind of, man.
“I don’t know. We got to check him, man. He might still be mic’d up for ‘Hard Knocks’...
Does Wagner want “Techno Thursday” to come back with Willson?
“No,” he said. “I do not. Let that stay in the past.
Wagner said if he hears “any kind of techno music” he may enlist one of the Seahawks’ rookies to “sneak in and turn it off.”
Too bad, Willson says. The short shorts are coming back, too.
“Yeah, I think so,” he said. “A lot of the guys have kept that going, it seems like. There’s a lot of dudes, I was looking today, that supported that movement.”
“Pretty exciting. Pretty exciting, just being in this building. Bit surreal, still. It kind of happened pretty quick.”
All jokes aside—and with Willson, that’s a lot to push aside—the Seahawks have football reasons he’s back.
Carroll made the point that Willson and Vannett are basically the same type of player: a receiving tight end who can also block and knows Seattle’s offensive system.
Left unsaid: the Seahawks trust Willson to do that job better and more consistently than Vannett did it for 3 1/4 seasons with Seattle. Willson already has.
Willson joins Will Dissly as the two true tight ends on the active roster for Sunday’s game at Arizona; reserve tackle George Fant enters for a handul of plays each game as an extra run-blocking tight end.
The Seahawks love Dissly. He has been the blocker they thought he was and a better receiver than advertised when Seattle drafted the former University of Washington defensive lineman last year. Dissly impressed in four games last season before a torn patellar tendon in his knee ended his rookie season. He came back to full practice in August and resumed his production and trust with Wilson.
Dissly had his third touchdown catch in two games last weekend in the home loss to the New Orleans Saints. He is second on the Seahawks with 12 receptions this season. He has 20 catches and five touchdowns in full career games.
Dissly is starting the second season of his four-year, rookie contract.
Vannett is in the final season of his rookie deal. So the Seahawks had a decision to make in a couple months with him, anyway. This trade gives them back a middle-round draft choice from the Steelers for making that decision on Vannett now, instead of potentially losing him in free agency in the spring.
The Seahawks drafted Vannett in the fourth round in 2016 out of Ohio State, where he was known as college football’s best run blockers and a sure-handed receiver. He has 47 catches in his 41-game career. The 6-foot-6, 261-pound Vannett had a career-high 29 receptions and three of his four career touchdowns last season. He has four catches for 38 yards through three games this season.
He never fully became the run blocker Seattle hoped for with his size when it drafted him.
Carroll put doubt into the idea Willson may be back merely to bridge the month or so before veteran Ed Dickson returns off injured reserve to re-enter the offense. Seattle’s number-one tight end last season had knee surgery in August. The team put Dickson, 32, on its initial 53-man roster for the regular season Aug. 31 then placed him on injured reserve. Doing it that way makes Dickson eligible to be one of the two IR players each NFL team can designate to return to play that season, after eight weeks.
The Seahawks can designate Dickson to return from IR to practice three weeks from now. He can then practice for two weeks before the team has to decide whether to activate him, or leave him on IR for the rest of this season.
“We’ll see. The time is getting down there now,” Carroll said. “He’s working at it. We really won’t know until we get closer. I don’t really have a good assessment for you.
“I’m concerned about it, though. The race is on. ... He’s on schedule, but I don’t know until we get closer, and can start working and can see him. He’s still in the rehab phases.”
Carroll said the Steelers had wanted Vannett for a while, and that Seattle traded Vannett knowing it could re-sign Willson.
Willson wasn’t so sure. He made four visits to other NFL teams in the three weeks since the Raiders released him.
Of the workouts he had with three teams that reportedly included the Saints and Cardinals, Willson said: “I mean, I got positive feedback...minus the whole not-signing thing.
“A bit strange. My first time being on the other side,” he said of not playing football in September for the first time since he was a tyke growing up in Windsor, Ontario. “You know, it was one of those things where I was flying in and out to different places for a bit. It’s weird when things become a ‘numbers game,’ and you don’t really know who to believe—is it really a numbers game? Or that just what everybody says? So it was a bit strange.
“Got hit with a couple pump fakes, which were kind of hard to handle.
“But I am here now, and I’m really excited.”
This story was originally published September 25, 2019 at 4:04 PM.
