Leonard Williams’ Seahawks day 1: Winning a Pete Carroll basketball shooting contest
In his first team meeting on his first day with the Seahawks, Leonard Williams didn’t get up and introduce himself to teammates.
That’s too predictable for Pete Carroll.
The veteran coach loves to keep his players curious as to what’s coming next. He loves to enliven meetings, film studies, locker-room talks and just about everything around the actual football.
The coach also has stated this week he wants to re-sign Williams after his contract ends with this season. Williams is in the final season of the three-year, $63 million deal the New York Giants gave him before the 2021 season. He got that months after he ended an 11 1/2-sack season for the Giants in 2020. The Seahawks inherited that ending contract Monday in their trade with New York for Williams.
So Carroll called Williams down Wednesday to the front of the main auditorium at the team facility. He had the new 6-foot-5, 300-plus-pound defensive lineman grab a basketball.
Motioning to the regulation basketball hoop Carroll had bolted into the floor of the meeting room when he first took over the team 13 years ago, the coach told Williams he was now in a shooting contest.
Carroll didn’t pick just any opponent for Williams. He had him shoot against rookie guard Anthony Bradford.
When the Seahawks routed the Giants in the New Jersey Meadowlands Oct. 2, Bradford, playing right guard for Seattle, got into a scuffle with Williams at the end of a 1-yard touchdown run by the Seahawks’ Kenneth Walker. Officials called offsetting penalties on Bradford and Williams, for unnecessary roughness.
“It was nothing, really. Just some shovin’,” Bradford said with a chuckle Wednesday.
Still, Carroll didn’t want any hard feelings to linger between the Seahawks’ newest, prized defensive lineman and the rookie guard. So, they shot hoops in the meeting.
With 30 seconds counting down on the meeting-room’s scoreboard clock — yes, there’s a scoreboard in there for this, too — each lineman took shots from about free-throw distance, 15 feet or so.
The new guy won. Williams sank five shots. Bradford made four.
The implication was Williams wasn’t doing this in team meetings with New York.
“I’ve heard nothing but good things about Seattle, even before I came here, about how Pete Carroll is,” Williams, 29, said. “I’ve heard about these basketball goals.”
He laughed.
“My first meeting today, I saw it all happening, everything that people have told me about was happening right in front of me,” he said.
“I love it, because it breeds competition in here. Everything they do here is about competition. I think that carries onto the field. It creates a competitive mindset in the team. And I love that.
“I did win, actually. I got five shots in 30 seconds. Apparently, that’s a good score.”
Mission: accomplished for Carroll on day one with his new, Pro Bowl line-of-scrimmage wrecker.
“I think he’s probably looking forward to the next one,” Carroll said of team meetings and the man he’s already calling “Leo.”
“He wants to see what’s going to happen next.”
Williams is playing Sunday with a large role in the middle of the defensive line with Jarran Reed and Dre’Mont Jones when the NFC West-leading Seahawks (5-2) play at the AFC North-leading Baltimore Ravens (6-2).
“No, he won’t need much (acclimation),” Carroll said.
The coach smiled wryly and deadpanned: “Really good chance he’ll be active this week.”
Leonard Williams and spearfishing
Williams was born 29 years ago in Bakersfield, California. He moved across the country and went to high school in Daytona Beach, Florida.
It was there he learned to love the shallow, warm, clear waters off Florida’s coasts.
“He spearfishes,” Seahawks safety Julian Love said.
Love was Williams’ teammate in New York from the middle of the 2019 season, when the Jets traded Williams to the Giants, through last season.
Love and Williams were co-defensive captain on the Giants in 2022.
Love says his friend has invited him to go spearfishing with him, but “that’s not my thing,” catching by sight and, basically, dart.
“He’s really good in water,” Love said.
He said Williams is always outside doing something when not playing football.
“He loves nature. He loves outdoors stuff,” Love said.
“He’s a unique guy.”
Leonard Williams’ role
The spearfisher was the sixth pick in the 2015 draft by the Jets, out of USC. His roots to SC, where Carroll coachws, run deep and personal.
Williams’ girlfriend is Hailey Lott. Her father is Ronnie Lott, the former USC All-American who became a Pro Football Hall of Fame safety.
Carroll calls Williams “a classic three-technique” defensive tackle, that is, in the offensive guard-tackle gap. Williams also has played over the center, over the guard and, early in his NFL career with the Jets from 2015-19, defensive end. He was the Jets’ sixth-overall pick in the 2015 draft out of USC. He played three technique on both the left and right sides for the Giants this season.
He says “three-tech” is his preferred spot, but he’ll play anywhere the Seahawks want him.
They want him everywhere, in run defense and in their pass rush.
Reed has been playing up and down the line as a similarly versatile tackle on the interior of the Seahawks’ defensive line. But with only rookie Cameron Young and former practice-squad player Myles Adams as backup interior linemen, Reed and Jones need proven help.
Williams is that.
When he began his first Seahawks practice Wednesday, he towered over teammates who aren’t exactly small.
What’s the message behind trading for Williams in the middle of the season that appears to be coming down to Seattle and defensive division-champion San Francisco to win the NFC West?
“Anytime you see your team being aggressive, always trying to improve the roster, always trying to — even if we are doing well, doing something to try to find ways to be better — it’s always a good thing,” defensive captain Bobby Wagner said.
“We want to win. And (we) will do whatever it takes to win.”
Love got that same message from Carroll and general manager John Schneider from the Seahawks trading for Williams, “that we’re trying to go get this thing. That we’re trying to be the best this year.
“We’re bringing in guys that can help us win games, period. Pete’s been emphasizing that since spring.
“He’s just, we’re going to put it all together to try to win.”
Williams said Monday was a difficult day for him, with “highs and lows.” Each time he talked to someone with or about the Seahawks, he said, he was excited. Each time he said goodbye to the friends he made playing for the Giants, he was sad.
“There were some lows about, I was on the Giants for five years and I built some relationships there,” he said. “Saying goodbye to people you’ve built relationships with is always going to be hard, even if you’re excited about your future.
“I think all-in-all, this is going to be a fun change for me, and I’m excited about it.
Judging by the smiles, jokes and glances to the basketball hoop as he talked about his first Seahawks day, Williams already is happy to be in Seattle.
“I’m excited,” he said, “The team seems fun, had a lot of good energy in the meetings and on the field.”
New York is 2-6 and in last place in the NFC East. Williams knows the Giants were thinking toward rebuilding and the future and not paying another mammoth contract to a veteran lineman who has the team’s highest salary-cap charge this year.
“I think change is necessary sometimes,” he said, “and I’m excited to be with a winning team and excited to show what I can help them do.
“They told me to just be the player that I know I am, that that’s why they brought me here.”
Carroll seemed Wednesday like he can’t wait to see what Williams will do for the Seahawks’ defense beginning Sunday at rugged Baltimore.
“This is about as fun as it gets,” Carroll said. “To get a player of this magnitude, the makeup of a kid, the guy that he is when you bring him into your locker room, he’s an amazing leader and all of that. Tremendous effort guy, an everyday worker, the whole thing. There are so many positives. It’s a real boost to us.
“We’ll move some stuff around, figure it out and how it’s all going to fit together. It’s a real positive and our guys are really excited about it.”
This story was originally published November 1, 2023 at 4:29 PM.
