All rookie draft picks signed and reported to Seahawks training camp--for COVID-19 testing
The Seahawks’ rookie draft choices are all signed and in training camp.
The team announced Tuesday, reporting day, the final six of their eight draft picks from April signed their contracts. That was first-round pick Jordyn Brooks, second-round selection Darrell Taylor, third-round choice Damien Lewis, fourth-round pick DeeJay Dallas, fifth-round choice Alton Robinson and seventh-round pick Stephen Sullivan.
Fourth-round choice Colby Parkinson, recovering from foot surgery, and sixth-round pick Freddie Swain had signed previously.
These rookie signings have become formalities in the last two collective bargaining agreements between the NFL and its players’ union.
Before that, rookies would sometimes hold out a day or three into camps for bigger signing bonus and better terms.
Rookie first-round pick Russell Okung missed the first six days of his first Seahawks’ training camp in 2010 while in hard-ball talks on his first NFL deal. I still remember walking on the Eastern Washington University campus when Kelly Jennings drove up on a weekday morning during practice to Seattle’s training camp in Cheney, after veterans had already started work in the summer of 2006. Yes, even Jennings, a forgotten Seahawks cornerback and first-round pick, once had a contract situation before ever playing an NFL game.
Heck, there used to be “training camp holdout watch lists.”
But the CBA ratified in 2010 instituted what is essentially slotted contracts assigned to each choice across all seven rounds of each year’s draft.
Today the salaries and signing bonuses are assigned to each rookie based on where teams selected him. Most of this year’s class of draft choices signed only this week because the COVID-19 virus outbreak closed team facilities to rookies and kept them from getting team physical examinations to finalize their contracts from March until now.
The rookies signed their deals then went immediately to get the first of three tests for COVID-19 each player in the NFL will take over the next four days. After the first test, all players were sent back home, away from team facilities, to await the results the NFL contracted to come within 24 hours and then their subsequent tests.
Though the salaries are now predetermined, though the COVID-19 testing and veteran players across the league opting out of this season are getting all the attention, there remains the humanity of the rookies signing their deals.
Perhaps none of the rookie draft picks—anywhere—appreciated signing his first professional contract on Tuesday more than Sullivan.
When the seventh-round pick says “I believed in myself,” believe him.
His path to get to the NFL is incredible.
As I wrote when the Seahawks drafted him in April, Sullivan still remembers his father beating his mother. He remembers his dad using cocaine in front of his mom, his brothers and him.
He can still see his mom and dad being taken away to jail. He remembers the fear of being taken from the hotel they’d been living in temporarily, the one from which his school bus picked him up every day. He can still feel the cold, scared nights trying to sleep under a freeway overpass.
“I kind of became a man on my own just from learning and watching. Watching coaches. Watching families, and things like that,” he said in an unforgettable Zoom interview online in April.
He spoke minutes after Seattle traded back into the end of the NFL draft to pick Sullivan in the seventh round.
“I’ve been through so much adversity,” he said. “I’ve stayed under a bridge a few nights before. I saw my mom and dad get incarcerated. I saw my dad do cocaine in front of my mom. I saw my dad beat my mom. I saw my brothers and my dad get in a fight.
“It’s just so much that I’ve been through.
“Every single day, I think about that and I think about my situation growing up. You can say that motivates me. It does, actually. It motivates me every single day. Just me thinking about my past and thinking about so much that I’ve been through, it’s a long time coming. It’s been some nights where I didn’t know where my next meal was going to come from, it’s been some nights where I didn’t know if I was going to have clean clothes for school. Just hearing my name called, it’s really a dream come true. I can’t really ask for nothing more.”
Sullivan was in grade school about a decade ago when his parents went to jail and he was sleeping under the bridge with his older brother. He lived with a little league coach for a while. Then with an aunt. The aunt’s daughter and Sullivan lived for a while in a trailer. Some days, they didn’t eat. He bounced between the Dallas-Fort Worth area and Louisiana.
“I was staying with my auntie, but she ended up moving out, and her kids ended up moving out. And it was me and her daughter then in a trailer,” Sullivan said. “Some nights, we didn’t have hot meals. Some nights we didn’t eat. Some nights we didn’t have clean clothes to go to school and things like that.”
He made it to high school, Donaldsonville High School in Donaldsonville, La.
Now the big, athletic tight end from LSU has made it where so many athletes dream of getting—years after being where no one should ever be.
