Gerald Everett, wild card in new Seahawks offense, another case of playing multiple sports
Of all Gerald Everett may become this year as the new wild card for Russell Wilson in the Seahawks’ remade offense, the tight end who is so much more than a tight end may already be...
...a unicorn?
Pete Carroll says Everett is perhaps the most unusual not just tight end, but receiver, the coach has had with the Seahawks.
“This is a guy with an excellent range of ability, and probably the thing we like best is how competitive he is,” Carroll said this week leading his 12th training camp in Seattle.
“He’s really tough. Runs with the ball as hard as anybody we’ve had here in the receiver position.”
That’s saying something. Carroll’s had the relentless Doug Baldwin, one-time All-World tight end Jimmy Graham and now the record-setting Tyler Lockett and DK Metcalf catching and running for the Seahawks.
A huge reason Everett runs so hard and is so varied?
All you coaches and parents who insist sticking kids in one, often-pay-for-play sport is the only way to become a professional athletes, close your eyes: Like his new Seahawks teammate Ahkello Witherspoon, Everett didn’t play only football.
He hardly played it at all growing up.
The more sports, the better
He played some youth-league football growing up outside of Atlanta. But he spent most of his time in everything but football.
He was a sprinter in the 4x100- and 4x400-meter relays, a high jumper and triple jumper in track. He was a shooting guard in basketball. He was an outfielder in baseball.
“I was decent hitter,” he said. “I wasn’t a slugger, but I was a decent hitter.”
He spent his freshman through junior years of high school at Martin Luther King Jr. High in DeKalb County, southeast of Atlanta. For his senior year he transferred across the county to Columbia High School, to play basketball for coach Phillip McCrary, a legend in Georgia for 598 hoops wins and five state championships. Columbia had just won two consecutive state championships in basketball, and Everett wanted to be part of a third to get a college basketball scholarship.
A family member persuaded him to try football.
“Had he not done that, I don’t know where I’d be right now, honestly,” Everett said, chuckling.
“Football wasn’t really a priority for me in high school.”
Columbia’s football coaches saw at a 6-foot-3, 180-pound senior and multi-sport athlete fall basically out of the Georgia sky into their school and enticed Everett to play for them, too.
He said teammates saw “Making plays my senior year they were like, ‘Who’s this guy?’ You know, like, ‘We’ve been here three, four years.’
“Playing the combination with other sports really helped me with that.
“I would advise kids, people growing up: play as much as you can. Get out and play. ...
“Just do as many sports as you can.”
Why did he finally go out for football his senior year at Columbia High?
“Trying to get a scholarship,” he said.
It worked.
Well, eventually it worked.
Everett instantly became an all-state wide receiver. He played in Atlanta’s Georgia Dome in a state all-star game. But because he’d played just one season of high school top-level football, schools did not offer him a scholarship.
Late in the recruiting year he signed a last-minute offer from Bethune-Cookman, a predominantly Black university in Daytona Beach, Florida. But his heart wasn’t in it. He decided to instead enroll and play for Hutchinson Community College in rural central Kansas in 2012-13, to try to earn a major-college scholarship the longer way.
He did, to the University if Alabama Birmingham in August 2014. Four months later, the university president announced he was shutting down the UAB football program.
So Everett transferred again, to the University of South Alabama for the 2015 season. He earned All-Sun Belt Conference his first year there, with 41 receptions and eight touchdown catches. After 49 more catches and four touchdowns as a senior in 2017 Everett got an invite to practice and play in front of NFL scouts at Senior Bowl.
The Rams made him the fourth tight end taken in the 2017 draft; L.A. coach Sean McVay selected him in round two.
Reunited with Waldron
His first NFL position coach, with the Rams: Shane Waldron.
“It’s been a blessing,” Everett said. “It’s been a fun ride.”
That ride has come full circle.
Waldron is now Everett’s offensive coordinator, in the coach’s first year with Seattle. Everett’s second season with the Rams, they rolled through the NFC to Super Bowl 53. There, Bill Belichick and the Patriots annihilated McVay’s offense in New England’s 13-3 win.
Waldron became the Rams’ passing-game coordinator. He featured Everett all over Rams formations: outside as a wide receiver, in the slot, inside tight on the line as a traditional tight end, even into the backfield. Everett often wrecked smaller defensive backs trying to tackle him in the open field.
“I’ve moved around in different positions,” Everett said. “There has never been one specific one that I’ve played.”
No Seahawk knows the quicker, more run-oriented, shorter passing-game system Waldron is installing this summer better than Everett.
That was a huge reason Carroll and the Seahawks sought him out in free agency.
Asked how far ahead he is of his new teammates in knowing Seattle’s offense, Everett said: “I would have to say, percentage-wise, maybe 50%, just because I’ve been doing some of the same things the last couple years.”
The other 50%? Waldron isn’t just boiler-plating the Rams’ system into the Seahawks’.
Metcalf said the Seahawks are running routes he didn’t see the Rams using the last two seasons, when Waldron was L.A.’s passing game coordinator.
Everett chuckled at that.
“There’s a lot that goes into a play, from a details perspective. I don’t think he would have seen it,” Everett said of the pass patterns and plays in the Rams’ offense. “He probably saw what we wanted him to see.
“It’s a lot of misdirection. A lot of ‘eye candy.’ All the plays start out looking the same but are different, whether they be play-action pass or running or passing.
“So, of course he wouldn’t see it. That was kind of the idea behind it.”
While Wilson and everybody else dives deep to learn Waldron’s new terminology and system, it’s not new to Everett. That’s allowing him to immediately take on a leadership role as a fifth-year veteran in Seattle.
“Being as it’s a new team and a new city, it’s not really a factor to me,” he said. “I’m just trying to come out and be that player that I’ve always been, and the player they (Seahawks) wanted me to come here and be.”
Chasing the Lombardi
His familiarity with Waldron wasn’t the biggest reason Everett signed a one-year deal worth $6 million, all fully guaranteed, with Seattle.
“Trying to chase a championship,” Everett said.
“Playing with the Rams, we had a championship culture there. We had a couple good runs. But I want to win a Lombardi. And I know that some of the guys—well, most of the guys—share that same goal. Russell has won one, Pete—they know what that looks like, so I wanted to go somewhere that was going to be a contending team.”
For many in the NFL, where little beyond the here and now is guaranteed, a one-year deal is an insult to a free agent.
But not this year. With the usually soaring salary cap going down this year because of the pandemic from $198 million to $182.5 million, free agents were willing to sign one-year deals. Stadiums are expected to be full again this season across the league, and the NFL’s new, mammoth media-right deals kick in starting in 2023. The cap is expected to grow to $200 million or more next year then into the $220 million-plus range for 2023 and beyond.
So the 27-year-old Everett isn’t insulted by his one-year contract. He’s motivated to be playing this season to re-set his market value next spring.
“Each day in the NFL is fortunate,” he said. “But whether it’s a one-year deal or a four-year deal, you’ve got to treat every year the same.
“I mean, as soon as you get complacent that’s when you find yourself out of the league.”
That’s why Everett was in San Diego this spring into summer training with Wilson, at the quarterback’s offseason home.
“We all are trying to develop some kind of camaraderie, and some kind of chemistry, but Russ and I have definitely been clicking since back in April and June, going out to San Diego and running routes, just leading into training camp,” Everett said.
“It just feels good having a guy that can be anything. A dual-threat quarterback.”
What’s Everett learned about Wilson?
“Just his work ethic,” Everett said.
“Playing with the Rams for the past four years, I mean, you see the plays in the late fourth quarters. Him and Tyler, him and DK hooking up, and just putting them back on top.
“It’s frustrating from the other side. But being here and seeing how he really works, up close and in person, it’s a sight to see.”
This story was originally published August 5, 2021 at 12:04 PM.
