The business of the franchise quarterback is the most compelling personnel theater in the NFL. By extension, it's the most compelling non-game theater in sports, even more than a similar drama with the NBA.

In basketball, superstars dictating their desired employers, and hustling up a superstar buddy or two to join him, has become standard operating procedure. But the smaller number of players makes positive outcomes far more likely in hoops, because football requires 22 starters and 53 total, and has separate units for offense and defense.

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If the panicky desperation of Patrick Mahomes Sunday didn't remind you of Russell Wilson in recent years barely running ahead of the bulls of the NFL, you may have just moved to the area in the past month.

But the biggest local takeaway in Tampa Bay's surprising 31-9 evisceration of Kansas City (box) in Super Bowl LV was the echo from 2014 and Super Bowl XLVIII: In pinnacle NFL games, a great defense pops off rivets of a good offense.

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Congratulations are in order for Tom Flores, who was the lone finalist in the coach category and will be part of the Pro Football Hall of Fame class of 2021. Word of the overdue selection came during the annual NHL Honors program Saturday night ahead of Super Bowl LV.

Flores won two Super Bowls as coach of the Raiders. He also won titles as a player and assistant coach, a three-job distinction he shares only with fellow Hall of Famer Mike Ditka. Flores was the first Latino to be head coach and a quarterback in the NFL. Bravo.

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One of the consequences of the pandemic for many is an abrupt re-jiggering of timelines, because the future is no longer what it was purported to be: Certain, and depending on age, long-term.

Threats are sudden, existential and many. My favorite retort to such thinking was rolled out years ago by Seattle author and former Post-Intelligencer writer and copy editor Tom Robbins in his masterpiece, Still Life With Woodpecker.

"It's never too late," he wrote, "to have a happy childhood."

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Listening to Shane Waldron talk about Pete Carroll's football truths, he sounded almost like an idolatrous son. And since Carroll recently waved good-bye to his son/assistant coach, Brennan, who left the Seahawks to become offensive coordinator at the University of Arizona, that makes a lot of pop-psychology sense.

Nah. Too easy.

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Down the road, there will be time to discuss bi-polar disorder and the role it played in turning former Seahawks offensive lineman Chad Wheeler nearly homicidal, and who and what was responsible for allowing it to happen.

But Monday morning, Wheeler's victim, who will not be named here in an attempt to make her life slightly less miserable, had her first forum in King County Superior Court.

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Of more interest than Friday afternoon's official announcement of Shane Waldron to succeed Brian Schottenheimer as offensive coordinator was the filling of a second Seahawks coaching vacancy.

Waldron's former college teammate and longtime friend, Andy Dickerson, was hired to be running game coordinator. Dickerson also was an assistant coach with the Rams, in fact the longest tenured (nine years) of head coach Sean McVay's staff.

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I'd like to ask a favor simultaneously of the Seahawks and the rest of the NFL, and even the broader big-time sports community, to which we devote a disproportionate amount of interest, affection and disposable income.

Because an innocent woman lies in a Seattle-area hospital after being beaten nearly to death by her boyfriend, who is now a former Seahawks player, and because mental-health issues for athletes are no longer taboo material for public discourse, I'd like to ask for an explanation about what teams and leagues do to ascertain whether a prospective employee is as fit psychologically as physically for a high-stress job.

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The Seahawks certainly haven't beaten the Rams much. So they are taking one to join them.

Shane Waldron, for the past three seasons the passing game coordinator with Seattle's nemesis under head coach Sean McVay, but has never been an NFL offensive coordinator, reportedly has been hired by coach Pete Carroll to replace Brian Schottenheimer.

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The Tom Brady haters are pulling obliques, hamstrings and biceps in their communal retch over his arrival at another Super Bowl, the 10th for the Anointed One. That's fine -- we all prefer villains for our pretend lives, rather than our political lives.

But if we hold off our Brady annoyances for just a bit, I'd like to offer some attention to the fact that SB LV is the first in which the host stadium has its own team.

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As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a downright fool and a complete narcissistic moron.

-- Journalist H.L. Mencken, Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920

Wednesday was a day when we weren't primarily sports columnists or sports fans, or athletes, coaches, children, spouses or parents. We were Americans first.

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After the weekend of division-round NFL playoffs, the Seahawks have to be a tad happier Monday that their season ended with the home loss the previous weekend to the Los Angeles Rams, however ignominious it was.

Better to find out early, at home, you weren't championship caliber, rather than have your helmets handed to you after another futile mid-winter trip amid the pandemic to the cheese freezer.

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For the longest time during Russell Wilson's season-ending Zoom conference Thursday, I felt like a rookie rush end trying to pin him in the backfield. With an almost perpetual smile, he took each question and swooped and soared with bromide-rich answers that dodged facts, insight and candor.

Indeed, Russ again was cooking -- an eggless omelette.

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While blame for the Seahawks' early departure was widespread, one person paid for it with his job -- offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer "parted ways" with the club, which announced what amounts to a firing Tuesday afternoon via Twitter.

The news was startling, given that coach Pete Carroll, when asked about staff changes following the unexpectedly limp 30-20 loss to the Rams Saturday that ended the season, said, "I'm counting on everybody coming back." Schottenheimer also rates some credit for an offense that scored 459 points, most in club history.

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Recently I asked Pete Carroll on Zoom about whether there was someone or something he has relied upon when it comes time to fill vacancies on his Seahawks coaching staff. Since the NFL's annual Black Monday of coach firings was pending, I figured it was a good time to learn about methods and practices.

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Here's my attempt to summarize in two words the state of the Seahawks, based on developments and conversations over the past several days, as well as recent history, that concluded the weirdest season in the club's history:

Yes, but.

Yes, the Seahawks have been to the playoffs nine times in Pete Carroll's 11 years. But they haven't been to the Super Bowl since the 2014 season.

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The post-mortems that follow the conclusions of pro football seasons necessarily involve discussions about coaching changes, contract extensions, pending free agency and draft needs. Before we get to those discussions -- and suddenly there seems more time for personnel stuff now in Seattle than was anticipated -- let's get to one item that lingers from the Seahawks' awkward collapse Saturday.

Did the Seahawks lose the battle of wills with the Rams?

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After the first home playoff loss in Pete Carroll era, after the worst postseason performance of Russell Wilson's career, it was plain Saturday at the Loo that something was broken with the Seattle Seahawks.

Granted, the ferocious defense of the Los Angeles Rams did a lot of the breaking. But some things in the Rams' way-too-easy, 30-20 playoff victory (box) came pre-broke, destined to help end the season in what many, including bookies, felt was premature fashion for a 12-4 Seattle team that won the toughest division in football.

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On the eve of the NFL playoffs Friday, LB Bobby Wagner was voted to the Associated Press's All-Pro first team, and SS Jamal Adams and WR DK Metcalf to the second team. This is the most prestigious of the pro football awards given annually, and those selected deserve hearty congratulations.

Now that we're in the awards season of the most peculiar year in NFL history, I'd like to offer up a new accolade:

Team That Figured It Out on the Fly Award.

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In times that now seem almost quaint -- before we stared Wednesday into the abyss to see what an American collapse looks like when the federal government is in the hands of a gangster -- the NFL was pulled into a national political controversy.

In September 2017, President Trump, in a speech in Alabama, savaged players who followed the lead of Colin Kaepernick in 2016 and knelt during the national anthem. They offered protest over police brutality and racial injustice: No words, no histrionics, only silent dissent, a right many Americans gave their lives to preserve.

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