Seahawks Training Camp: Real Belief in Geno Smith, and Making Another Championship Run

First-round picks Devon Witherspoon and Jaxon Smith-Njigba, a loaded backfield and free-agent acquisition Dre’Mont Jones have Seattle on the rise.

Seattle is always stunning this time of year, and I’m starting the West Coast swing of my camp tour. Here are five takeaways from Seahawks camp …

• The team’s sophomore class has hit the ground running. They’re playing faster than they were a year ago. The corners. The tackles. And one guy in particular that’s worth watching is former second-round pick Boye Mafe, who looks ready to take a nice step in his second NFL season. Mafe’s tough, and came back stronger and more confident, and is drawing comparison internally to Cliff Avril, who was an integral part of the Seahawks’ championship teams. With similarly tough, strong rookie Derick Hall also in the mix, the team’s gotten younger on the edges of the front seven, and deeper, too, which seemed more important Thursday with fourth-year pro Darrell Taylor showing up to practice in a sling.

Smith is a fan favorite at training camp, and seems poised to have another big year after putting  together a phenomenal offseason :: Steven Bisig/USA TODAY Sports

• Another area of depth for the Seahawks, clearly, is running back. And that’s been tested early in camp, with Kenneth Walker III, another member of last year’s banner rookie class, and rookie Zach Charbonnet nicked up. Charbonnet returned to practice Thursday, Walker’s still out and that opened an opportunity for seventh-round pick Kenny McIntosh, who’s already turning heads. The Georgia product’s got real juice and pass-catching ability for a rocked-up 215-pound back, and fell in the draft in April because of shaky pro day and combine performances. The Seahawks took him—a second back in their draft class—when they heard where bidding on him as a potential undrafted free agent was going. They may wind up looking pretty smart for it.

• Both first-round picks have come as advertised. No. 5 pick Devon Witherspoon’s everything teams loved about him predraft—feisty, tough and competitive, with his only drawback being that he’s a little shorter (which is where Seattle made an exception for him that they usually wouldn’t). Meanwhile, the 20th pick, Jaxon Smith-Njigba came in with the approach and savvy of a seasoned pro, and has given Seattle the route-running weapon it was looking for out of the slot. And one pretty cool aspect of it is how the two have been matched up with each other pretty consistently in camp, and have brought the best out of each other competitively.

• If there’s an area the Seahawks have some level of concern, it’d probably be on the interior of the defensive line. The team does have capable vets there, in big-ticket free agent Dre’Mont Jones and returning vet Jarran Reed, but could certainly use more depth. And I wouldn’t rule out Seattle going and finding some on the trade market or the waiver wire in the coming weeks.

• You can see how locked in this Seahawks group is in camp, and a part of that is in the lack of any real drama. There was some concern about how Uchenna Nwosu’s contract situation would play out, but that was put to rest after his agent flew in for a single day and hammered out a deal with the Seattle brass. And with last year’s loaded rookie class, and another one behind it showing signs of doing what the 2022 group did, much of the outside questioning of the Seahawks comes down to whether Geno Smith can repeat what he did last year. Inside the walls here, though? There is real belief in Smith, who continues to make the right decisions on and off the field, and put together a phenomenal offseason. I left here feeling like this team should be getting more attention than it has—and that maybe, just maybe, the young core here is poised to go on a run over the next few years. We’ll see.