Robert Turbin rejoins Seahawks, Russell Wilson is thrilled. ’Turb and I are best friends’
Robert Turbin packed his bags for the trip north from California with particular intent.
He was counting on his Seahawks tryout last week to be a one-way trip.
“They asked me how it felt, I said ‘normal,” the 30-year-old running back said of his tryout early last week for Seattle, for which he won a Super Bowl in 2014 and played in another the following year. “It felt normal being here, working out, running routes on this field and being around the coaches. A lot of familiar faces in the building.
“I felt good about it. I packed my bags when I came here for the workout with the intentions of not going back home.”
But the Seahawks didn’t offer him a job last week. Turbin remained out of work. He was out of the NFL for the 14th consecutive month since a shoulder injury made him expendable from the Indianapolis Colts.
Early last week, rejected by even the team that gave him his NFL break as a fourth-round draft choice in 2012, Turbin trudged back to Sacramento.
But...
“When I did go back home, I didn’t unpack,” he said. “I actually left my bags packed in my car, in the trunk of my car.
“I said, ‘Somehow, someway, hopefully we’ll get back there.’
“Then, the next week came. And here I am.”
He’s finally unpacked that bag.
He’s in Seattle, ready to help the Seahawks (11-4) in their biggest game this season, their NFC West championship game Sunday night against San Francisco (12-3) at CenturyLink Field.
The attention across the Pacific Northwest and the nation this week has been on the Seahawks signing back Marshawn Lynch Monday.
Turbin signed back with Seattle that day, too. You just had to look harder. He is the under-the-radar addition to help Seattle’s depleted backfield. He agreed to his contract for the rest of this season hours before Lynch got his.
Sunday night will be Turbin’s and Lynch’s first games in 14 months. It’s their first Seahawks game in nearly five and four full years, respectively. It comes after Seattle lost 1,250-yard rusher Chris Carson to a cracked hip, number-two back Rashaad Penny to torn knee ligaments and third runner C.J. Prosise to a broken arm.
“It’s a great feeling. It’s like a dream come true,” Turbin said. “It’s like getting drafted all over again.
“This is the place I wanted to be, if I had my choice. God made it happen. I’m here. I’m extremely blessed, and excited for the opportunity.”
It’s the only one he’s had all season.
Turbin has been grinding through daily workouts with his physical therapist each morning then trainer in the afternoons in Sacramento throughout last offseason, the preseason and the first 16 weeks of the NFL regular season. But he had exactly one call this calendar year from a team before Seattle. That was from Oakland, in March.
“That was about as good as it got,” he said.
It got so bleak for Turbin, he asked his trainer to slow down the workouts. They seemed pointless by the fall, in the middle of this season.
“It was really tough. Last year I was injured in week six (while with the Colts),” he said. “I dislocated my shoulder and I was in a tough spot mentally at that time. Probably tougher than any other time in my life, because I was just didn’t know what was going to happen next.
“I understood where I was at in my career. You don’t do anything but get older in this league. ...
“We had our times where I was talking to my trainer like, ‘Hey man maybe we can just dumb it down and go a couple times a week, three times a week maybe.’ Same thing with my physical therapist every morning. We ultimately decided against that. I just wasn’t raised like that, to quit, ever. Seventeen weeks in a season, we’re just going to do everything we can for 17 weeks the best we can every single day. Just in case, because you never know in this league. ...
“We wanted to keep football as a priority for 17 weeks and we did that. And the opportunity presented itself.”
The Seahawks also tried out fellow NFL veteran running backs Alfred Blue and C.J. Anderson the last two weeks. But coach Pete Carroll and GM John Schneider chose the familiar and hugely popular Lynch and Turbin to energize the locker room. It was filled with players shaking their heads over all the injuries to the running backs, and at Seattle’s 27-13 home loss to five-win Arizona last weekend. That knocked the Seahawks out of controlling their path to home-field advantage throughout the NFC playoffs as the top seed.
The morale boost from signing Lynch has been obvious. K.J. Wright, the longest-tenured Seahawk, said the 48 of 53 teammates who have never played with Lynch have been “starstruck” at him this week.
Less obvious: Turbin’s signing is hugely and particularly popular with the team’s most important player, the face of the entire franchise.
“Turb and I are best friends,” quarterback Russell Wilson said Thursday.
“He was in my wedding. A guy that I’ve been super close to ever since day one. I’ll never forget when we had the (NFL) rookie symposium (in Ohio in the spring of 2012). It was the first time all of us Seahawks being together and everything. I walked into my hotel room and there was Robert Turbin. He was my roommate. I remember us sitting there listening to oldies and just jamming out and having fun. Talking life, getting to know each other and everything else.
“Fast forward, we went to the event and everything those couple days or whatever it was. I remember us going to Canton, being in Canton and going to the Hall of Fame and walking around and talking about where we wanted to go and how we wanted to get there. Every day, we’ve always supported each other.”
Wilson has stayed in regular contact with Turbin since he left the Seahawks following the 2014 season and signed with Cleveland then Dallas for 2015. Turbin played for the Colts from 2016 through the shoulder injury in October of last year. In 2016 he became a short-yardage touchdown maker. His seven TDs rushing for Indianapolis that season were six more than he had in his career to that point. It was seven more than he had in his three seasons as Lynch’s understudy in Seattle.
“Our roads have been slightly different, but they’ve been the same. We’ve always supported each other and always been together, even when we’re apart,” Wilson said.
“He’s one of my best friends in the world. A guy who works extremely hard. A guy who’s ready to play, excited to play. He’s a guy who’s tough as nails.”
Turbin has looked sleek in Seahawks practices this week, as if all those daily workouts have paid off. The Seahawks won’t find that out for sure until Sunday night against the 49ers’ swarming, attacking defense.
That’s not his only challenge this week. Turbin and Lynch are having to learn the terminology of Seattle’s second-year offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer. It’s different than what predecessor Darrell Bevell was calling plays, formations and line calls when Turbin and Lynch were last Seahawks.
What plays can Schottenheimer call, what can he not run, with his two new backs three practices into their Seahawks redux?
“Well, it definitely makes you ponder a little bit more about certain things: Hey, can we do this? Can we do that?” said Schottenheimer, who was the Colts quarterback coach in 2016-17 when Turbin played for Indianapolis. “Some of it is trial and error. Honestly, some of it you go out there and you say, OK this play looks good, but let’s go out and see if our guys can understand that scheme. A little bit is patience. ...
“There are challenges. But at the same time, they’re both really good football players. Again, they’ve both had a little bit of the system in previous stops.”
Turbin says he’s ready for the division-title game, even on short notice with new terminology.
After all, Carroll and Schneider didn’t sign Turbin and Lynch to have them watch Sunday’s game.
Turbin could have stayed home, with his bag still in his car packed, to do that.
“Fortunately for us, we’ve been in this spot before. We’ve been in these kind of games before,” he said. “The hardest thing is just picking up on our assignments and what we’re supposed to do. Luckily with that, both Marshawn and I have some familiarity with the offense. So, we’re able to get some things fairly quickly. You get into some of those 2-minute situations where Russell is throwing signals out there and he’s saying some code words that we might be unfamiliar with. That’s probably the biggest challenge, especially when things are going real fast. Especially coming into game time.
“We’ve been in our books, we’ve been studying. Coach Chad (Morton, his position coach) has done a great job. Coach Schotty has done a great job really just staying on top of us about knowing what we’ve got.
“Come Sunday I think we’ll be prepared.”
This story was originally published December 27, 2019 at 6:31 AM.
