Out with COVID, postponed, Seahawks’ Gerald Everett finally gets chance to play ex-Rams
It took a lot for Gerald Everett.
Getting COVID-19. Testing negative five times before he could return. Waiting more than two months. Enduring the worst game of his career. Then, waiting through the NFL postponing this game to, of all things, a Tuesday.
But, now, finally, Everett gets to face his former Los Angeles Rams.
“It feels good to finally be able to see some of my old teammates and be able to compete against them in our race to the playoffs,” the Seahawks tight end said. “I was really bummed out that I couldn’t see them last time, but watching it from home will be different than watching it through my visor.
“I’m excited to see them. ...
“I’m definitely excited for it.”
The former versatile weapon in Los Angeles’ offense signed with Seattle last spring. He was to be one of the centerpiece additions to the new Seahawks offense former Rams assistant Shane Waldron installed for 2021.
This fall he became the first Seahawks player in the two-year pandemic with a confirmed positive coronavirus case. He missed two games. That was Seattle’s win at San Francisco Oct. 3 — then the Seahawks’ loss to NFC West-rival Los Angeles four days later.
Everett has to wait through the NFL postponing Seattle’s must-win rematch with L.A. from Sunday to Tuesday to finally play the Rams. The Seahawks (5-8) hope to keep their slim playoff hopes alive against Los Angeles (9-4) in Inglewood, California. It’s the first Tuesday game in Seattle franchise history.
“We are not going to let this affect us at all,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said. “We have already jumped into our adjustment, and we are going to go and play on Tuesday instead of Sunday. That’s the only way we are going to look at the thing.”
It’s the result of the Rams having 29 players go on the reserve/COVID-19 list this past week. Many of those Rams are testing back to playing, just as the league and its players’ union intended with the postponement. Sunday, Los Angeles got back All-Pro cornerback Jalen Ramsey off the COVID list. Star receiver Odell Beckham Jr. came off the list Saturday.
The Seahawks are trying to get top wide receiver Tyler Lockett and season rushing leader Alex Collins to have two negative tests before Tuesday to play against the Rams. Lockett and Collins joined Everett as Seattle’s only COVID cases on Thursday. The Seahawks also had an assistant coach and a couple team staff members test positive this past week.
“I worry about those guys, Tyler and the receivers, everybody else who’s on the staff that came back with the results,” Everett said. “It’s definitely something tough to deal with on the body and on the mental.
“We’re going to stay closely connected to those guys.”
Sunday, Tuesday, whatever day, the Seahawks need a standout game from Everett to beat the Rams, who have won 10 of the last 14 meetings with Seattle. That includes 26-17 at Lumen Field Oct. 7, the night Russell Wilson mangled the middle finger on his throwing hand and then missed a month. It also includes Los Angeles dominating Wilson and the Seahawks’ offense in the NFC wild-card playoffs at Seattle last January.
After that game, coach Pete Carroll fired offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer. He hired Waldron and signed Everett from the Rams to bring in a more run-based, quick-throwing, varied offense featuring the versatile Everett.
Four-sport kid
He was a four-sport star growing up outside Atlanta. He played some youth-league football as a kid. 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.”
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 didn’t get his required scores on standardized tests for college until late in the recruiting process and because he’d played just one season of high school top-level football, schools did not offer him a scholarship.
Plus, as he says now: “I was about 200 pounds soaking wet.”
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.
Waldron spots Everett
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.
“The one thing that stood out with Gerald right away when you put the tape on was his ability to always get open and catch the ball and make that first guy miss, which is something he’s continued to do at the next level,” said Waldron, who was the Rams’ tight end coach at the time.
This season, Everett hasn’t been what Waldron and the Seahawks intended him to be for them. In training camp, he was catching passes as a flanker, split end, wing back, running back, slot receiver and in-line tight end. In August Carroll said Everett “runs with the ball as hard as anybody we’ve had here in the receiver position.”
He looked poised to be a lethal weapon Wilson hadn’t had in a decade with the Seahawks.
Everett has a far-from-deadly 36 receptions in 11 games. He caught a touchdown pass in the first game, a win at Indianapolis. But he’s caught only two more in three months since. The latest was last week, in the Seahawks’ blowout of the Texans in Houston.
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That was one week after Everett lost two fumbles and bobbled then kicked a sure touchdown pass from Wilson at the goal into an interception by San Francisco in the end zone. Seattle withstood Everett’s three turnovers, his most in a game in his five-year career, to beat the 49ers 30-23.
“It was tough both mentally and physically for me,” he said this week. “I know what kind of player I am and what kind of player I want to be eventually, and when I finish my career, the things I want to do. That game didn’t exemplify that, and it was tough. ...
“I responded well last week.”
Waldron, who knows him better than any other Seahawk, wasn’t surprised.
“I think he responded exactly the way we expected him to respond, which is in a positive way,” Waldron said. “Everyone wrapped their arms around him. There was an outlier game, and something we’ve emphasized. We’ve been trying to be the best in the world at the ball security and not turning it over. We have a down game with that.
“He comes right back for the week of practice; you can see it. Just that intentionality, locking the ball up, really putting it away, all the attention to detail throughout the course of the week. All the times he did touch the ball that Texans game, you can really see it’s on his mind. On the jet sweep, doing a really good job finishing with the ball, locked up on the third-down catch.”
Yes, Waldron has called running plays for Everett on tight-end fly sweeps.
It’s those multiple dimensions, and getting him the ball in places that allow him to run in the open field, the Seahawks need more of Sund...er, Tuesday, to finally beat the Rams and keep the meaningful part of their roller-coaster season alive.
“We’ll see. I’m definitely excited for it, and I’m going to keep preparing the way I’ve always prepared,” Everett said.
“I just hope that my number is called.”
This story was originally published December 19, 2021 at 1:05 PM.
