Seattle Seahawks

On June 15, 1972, Seattle Professional Football Inc., a group of Seattle business and community leaders, announced its intention to acquire an NFL franchise for the city of Seattle, WA. Almost two years later on June 4, 1974, the NFL awarded the group an expansion franchise. Nordstrom died of a heart attack on January 20, 1976, just months before the Seahawks played their first game.

The name Seattle Seahawks (a seahawk is another word for an Osprey) was selected on June 17, 1975 after a public naming contest which drew more than 20,000 entries and over 1,700 different names. Thompson recruited and hired Jack Patera, a Minnesota Vikings assistant coach, to be the first head coach of the new team. The expansion draft was held March 30-31, 1976, with Seattle and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers alternating picks for rounds selecting unprotected players from the other 26 teams in the league. The team took the field for the first time on August 1, 1976 in a pre-season game against the San Francisco 49ers in the then newly constructed Kingdome.

During the Seahawks' first ten seasons (1976-1985), summer training camps were held at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, just southwest of Spokane. When the team's present headquarters in Kirkland were completed in 1986, the Seahawks held camp at home for the next eleven seasons (1986-1996), staying in the dormitories of the adjacent Northwest College. In 2007, training camp returned to their Kirkland Practice Facility. The Seahawks are the only NFL team to switch conferences twice in the post-merger era. In 2002, the Seahawks were returned to the NFC West as part of an NFL realignment plan that gave each conference four balanced divisions of four teams each. This realignment restored the AFC West to its initial post-merger roster of original AFL teams Denver, San Diego, Kansas City and Oakland.

Seattle has won five division titles in their franchise history: the 1988 and 1999 AFC West titles, and the 2004, 2005, and 2006 NFC West titles. They have won the NFC Championship Game once in 2005, and lost the AFC Championship Game once in 1983. Prior to 2005 Seattle had the longest drought of playoff victories of any NFL team, dating back to the 1984 season. The all-time Seahawks playoff record is (6-9).

Since then #12 Jerseys have been sold by the team and worn by Seahawk fans, often with the name "Fan" on the back. In the 2005 season the fans were again making a difference in games and were recognized with the presentation of a special game ball for their efforts in a game against the New York Giants, a game in which the Giants committed 11 false start penalties due in large part to the crowd noise.

The team's use of the phrase "12th Man" was in a legal limbo for a while between the 2005 and 2006 season when Texas A&M University sued the team for trademark infringement. In the 2003 and 2004 seasons, a hawk named Faith would fly around the stadium just before the team came out of the tunnel.