Seattle Seahawks Open Their Title Defense with Hard Knocks Cameras and a Witherspoon Contract Push

The Seattle Seahawks opened training camp this week the way no team in the building has ever opened one before: as defending Super Bowl champions with HBO cameras in their faces. Veterans reported July 24, the first practice ran Saturday at the Virginia Mason Athletic Center, and the dominant theme of the week's Seattle Seahawks news was a roster and coaching staff trying very hard to act like the confetti never fell. "It feels like a revamp, a new energy in the building, honestly," said Jaxon Smith-Njigba, the reigning Offensive Player of the Year. "It feels good to put the past behind us and really focus on the future." That is the right thing to say. Whether a team that went 14-3 and beat New England in Super Bowl LX can actually live it is the entire story of this camp.

Champs Report, and the Message Is Move On

Mike Macdonald spent report day doing rhetorical demolition on last season, and his veterans followed suit. "Those wins last year won't help you this year," linebacker Ernest Jones IV said. "Everybody's going to have a target on our backs, but let's just go to work." Drake Thomas put it even more plainly: "Last year was last year. We want to be this year's version of us." Even the most decorated newcomer-turned-elder-statesman got in on it — Cooper Kupp, entering year ten, warned that "if you get stuck celebrating for too long, you're going to be in trouble." He would know; he has been on both sides of a title defense.

There is genuine continuity to defend. Seattle retained 86.9 percent of its offensive and defensive snaps from the championship roster — the third-highest retention rate for a Super Bowl winner in 16 years — and returns ten of eleven Super Bowl starters on offense, even as roughly 30 percent of the 90-man roster turned over on the margins. In a league built to break up champions, that continuity is the story hiding under the slogans. The fans have noticed, too: the first open practice on July 26 drew a big crowd, and the loudest ovations predictably followed Smith-Njigba around the field.

The Witherspoon Contract Watch Hangs Over Everything

The most consequential Seattle Seahawks news of the week may have come before a single practice: Ian Rapoport reported July 21 that the team and cornerback Devon Witherspoon are in intense negotiations on an extension, with Seattle's offer already north of $30 million per year and a deal described as close. Witherspoon, 25, with three Pro Bowls in three seasons, is reportedly aiming to top the cornerback market — currently led by Trent McDuffie's $31 million-a-year deal — and his camp's talks are said to be further along than Christian Gonzalez's parallel negotiations in New England. To his credit, Witherspoon reported and practiced anyway, no hold-in theatrics, while playing on a $10.1 million base salary. Getting this signed before September would quiet the one genuinely awkward storyline in an otherwise sunny building.

Injuries: The PUP List Is Mostly About Patience

The champs are not unscathed. Seattle opened camp with a notable physically-unable-to-perform group:

• S Nick Emmanwori — offseason ankle surgery on an injury he managed through the Super Bowl run; Macdonald called the procedure "the best for him, for now and the foreseeable future, for the rest of his career"
• RB Zach Charbonnet — rehabbing an ACL tear from late 2025; Macdonald says he has "attacked the heck out of the offseason"
• RB Kenny McIntosh — still working back from the ACL tear he suffered at camp a year ago
• WR Tyrone Broden — also opened on the list

The rule worth remembering: anyone still on PUP when rosters are finalized August 30 must miss at least four games, which makes Emmanwori's ramp-up the one to monitor. Elsewhere the news was good — Tory Horton returned to full practice after the shin injury that ended his season, and Dante Fowler Jr.'s Day 1 absence was purely precautionary. With Charbonnet and McIntosh shelved, the running back room becomes a real camp battle, with rookie Jadarian Price pushing the incumbents for early-season touches.

New Coordinator, Same Quarterback, Familiar Playbook

Sam Darnold's reward for a second straight Pro Bowl season, a second straight 14-win year and a turnover-free postseason is, naturally, his seventh offensive coordinator in seven NFL seasons. Klint Kubiak left to become the Raiders' head coach, and Seattle promoted from within the family, hiring Brian Fleury, the former 49ers run game coordinator and tight ends coach, to keep the scheme in the same West Coast lineage. Darnold, typically, was grading his own championship film harshly — "I missed way too many throws," he said of the Super Bowl win, this from a quarterback who played turnover-free football through the entire postseason and threw for 346 yards and three touchdowns in the NFC Championship Game. Behind him, the room is unchanged: Drew Lock returns as the veteran backup and Jalen Milroe enters year two as the developmental lottery ticket.

The pieces around Darnold remain absurd. Smith-Njigba is coming off a season with 119 catches for 1,793 yards — a franchise record that obliterated DK Metcalf's old mark by nearly 500 yards — on a league-high 162 targets, becoming just the sixth wide receiver to win Offensive Player of the Year since 1972. Kupp gives the room a decorated veteran, and AJ Barner leads the tight ends. The interesting question for Fleury is not talent; it is whether the offense keeps humming through a coordinator handoff for the second consecutive summer.

Hard Knocks, a $9.6 Billion Sale, and Other Sideshows

Seattle is doing all of this on camera. NFL Films and HBO are embedded for Hard Knocks — the first time the series has featured the defending champions since the 2001 Ravens — with the premiere set for August 4 and the finale on September 1. Macdonald joked that he is already mic'd up and adjusting. Meanwhile, the franchise itself is changing hands: the $9.6 billion sale from Paul Allen's estate to tech entrepreneurs Vinod, Neeru and Neal Khosla goes before NFL owners for approval on August 26. Around the edges, the front office kept tinkering, signing undrafted cornerback Brandon Johnson and waiving tight end Harrison Bryant. Ten cornerbacks are now in camp, which tells you something about how this staff thinks about the position Witherspoon headlines. And for the human-interest file the cameras will surely find: Macdonald and his wife are expecting their second child, a daughter, in December — presumably arriving right around the time the Seahawks are hosting the Rams on Christmas.

What's Next for the Seahawks

The calendar sharpens fast for the champs:

• Aug. 4: Hard Knocks premiere on HBO
• Aug. 15: Preseason opener vs. Dallas at Lumen Field
• Aug. 23: at Tennessee
• Aug. 26: NFL owners vote on the ownership sale
• Aug. 28: Preseason finale at Kansas City
• Sept. 9: Season opener vs. New England at Lumen Field — a Wednesday night Super Bowl LX rematch on NBC

The schedule-makers gave Seattle a franchise-record six primetime games, including Christmas at home against the Rams, and a Week 18 finale in Los Angeles.

So this is Seattle Seahawks football in late July 2026: a champion returning nearly everything, a cornerback about to get paid, a coach preaching amnesia while a documentary crew records the sermon. The banner is real and so is the target. If the Witherspoon deal closes and Emmanwori's ankle cooperates, the Seahawks will spend September looking less like a defending champion managing success and more like the thing the rest of the NFC fears most — the same team, a year hungrier, opening the defense against the very franchise it beat for the title.