The 1 reason Jarran Reed, Bobby Wagner, Bruce Irvin, Marshawn Lynch came back to Seahawks

Bobby Wagner just did it, exactly a year after the team dumped him.

Marshawn Lynch did it.

Bruce Irvin, Quinton Jefferson, Justin Coleman — and now, Jarran Reed.

They’ve all left the Seahawks, often (as with Reed two years ago) while on the receiving end of cold NFL contract business.

Yet they’ve returned to Seattle.

In 2021, Reed refused the Seahawks’ demand he renegotiate his contract to a more team-friendly cost for that season. So general manager John Schneider tried to trade the defensive tackle Seattle drafted in the second round in 2016 out of Alabama. When that failed, the Seahawks cut Reed.

He signed with Kansas City for 2021, for $5.5 million. That was less than Seattle was asking Reed to re-do his Seahawks deal down to. He played one season for the Chiefs then last season with Green Bay, for $3.25 million.

Now here Reed is, back at two years and $9 million with the Seahawks. He freshly re-signed with Wagner last month for second go-rounds in Seattle.

Reed said he knew the day he left the Seahawks he’d be back.

“It was just when,” Reed said Wednesday.

Why do they keep coming back?

“The Seahawks let you be you as a person. To them, I think it is more than just football,” Reed said on an online Zoom call.

“In some organizations, it’s strictly football. And they want you to be a certain type of way, act a certain way, look a certain way, and dress a certain way.

“But here, they let you be you. They let your personality show in the most respectful way. I feel like you as a person can be free. You can play better that way when you are free as a person. You can express yourself as a person and who you are, which I think everybody has a right to do.”

Reed says in the Seahawks culture “you have fun around there. You have fun, you have a good time, and you actually enjoy being at work. All of those things accumulate to just wanting to be there....so this is a place that I want to be at and wanted to come back to.”

Pete Carroll’s the lure

By saying “the Seahawks” let him be him, the 30-year-old Reed means specifically Pete Carroll does.

The 71-year-old head coach has built his entire leadership brand and legacy of 13 years leading the Seahawks on connecting with each player as a person, on and off the field. He covets relationships. He builds them from the first day guys join the team past the day they leave.

Richard Sherman ripped Carroll and the franchise for cutting him in 2018 to save $11 million, months after he tore his Achilles tendon. He immediately signed with the rival San Francisco 49ers.

Last summer into fall, the now-retired Sherman was on the Seahawks’ practice field helping Carroll coach rookie Tariq Woolen into a Pro Bowl cornerback.

In the 2019, Carroll and Schneider supported and stayed with Reed through his league suspension from the first six games of the 2019 season. That was following an incident of alleged domestic violence in suburban Bellevue. The commissioner’s suspension under the league’s personal-conduct policy came 20 months after prosecutors declined to charge him and closed the case.

“Pete is a great coach,” Reed said Wednesday. “Like I said before, that’s where I grew up at, as a person, as a player, and as a man. Pete is a great coach. He is one of the better and more fun coaches to play for around the league.

“Just like I said earlier, he lets you be you. ...The energy around there is great. And I can go on for days about that, just getting a chance to get back and play for Pete.

Asked what Carroll told him in the spring of 2021 when the Seahawks cut him, Reed said: “Nobody really wanted to part ways, but the door was always open. That was the one thing that I knew.

“However everything falls down on the business side of football...that’s on them. We just knew that when I left, I knew there would always be a possibility of me coming back, but it was just when. They had to move on, I had to move on — but it eventually led us back to here, back to me being a 12 again.”

Pete Carroll’s way

Carroll has acknowledged he keeps relationships for human reasons and to keep a competitive edge. Just in case for football, and to stay friends for real life.

“I’m always going to hang with them. I’m never going to leave ‘em, and I’m going to be there at the end of all of the good stuff and all of the bad stuff, I’m going to still be there,” Carroll said at the league’s scouting combine in Indianapolis last month.

Carroll was responding to a question about Russell Wilson reportedly asking Seahawks chair Jody Allen to fire Carroll and Schneider before they traded their franchise quarterback to Denver last year.

No, in Carroll’s mind he hasn’t written off Wilson as a friend, either.

The coach calls it “growth challenges.”

“That’s it. You know, I’m hanging, and it doesn’t matter who the guy is,” Carroll said last month. “If you look at all of the guys that have come to our program, just not go back to the college days but just here in Seattle, regardless of what has happened, has taken place or the things that have been said at all, if you hang with them it all comes back around.

“And I’d like to demonstrate that faith in the relationship and the depth of what we did together, and hang through whatever the growth challenges bring to us along the way.”

Reed’s fit

From 2016 through ‘20, Reed played in a 4-3 Seahawks defense. He had 10 1/2 sacks in a breakout 2018, a prodigious number for an inside tackle.

Last season, Reed played in Green Bay’s 3-4. The Packers’ scheme is similar to the system Carroll switched Seattle to last season, a new 3-4.

Reed’s return is part of Carroll’s overhaul of the Seahawks’ front seven on defense.

The team signed lineman Dre’Mont Jones from Denver to an uncharacteristically rich, splashy, $51 million deal on the first day of free agency last month. Seattle also re-signed Wagner for inside linebacker after his year away. The team signed linebacker Devin Bush from Pittsburgh.

The Seahawks also have the fifth- and 20th-overall picks and four selections among the first 52 selections of the draft in two weeks to keep rebuilding the defense.

Reed can’t wait to fit in to what Carroll’s (re)making.

“When we get in and get rolling, I think I will fit in perfectly,” Reed said. “Regardless of the scheme, 3-4, 4-3, or whatever they want to play, I know I’m going to fit in. I think it is actually valuable, too.

“I think it will be similar, because I can go all of the way back to Alabama. We played that system at Alabama, as well, so I am very comfortable in it. I don’t think there will be any type of issues and I can just slide in and fit perfectly, as long as we know the terminology that we are using and different types of other things like when we play in certain personnels.”