First games in any pro football season often look like two clumsy guys taking an upright piano down five flights of stairs. They can plot how it should go, but once it gets going, holy crap.

Remember the Seahawks opener a year ago? At home and heavily favored over a Cincinnati Bengals team operating under a new coaching staff after a 4-12 season, Seattle won 21-20, saved only by recovering a late fumble.

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The verdict on the 11-5 Seahawks of 2019 was that it was an otherwise ordinary team that had the extraordinary Russell Wilson and much good fortune, including drawing a foe in the playoffs that was more broken than was Seattle.

Or have you forgotten the Eagles played most of the game in Philadelphia with 40-year-old Josh McCown at quarterback, in the first playoff game of his 17-year NFL career?

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Apparently the charm of Pete Carroll, Seattle, the Seahawks and Allen family wealth has its limits. DE Jadeveon Clowney is joining the Tennessee Titans, according to ESPN.

The Seahawks released their 53-man roster Saturday absent Clowney, who gave the Seahawks a good but not great year in 2019 and escaped into free agency, his longtime goal.

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The only complete NFL season Josh Gordon has played was his rookie year. By his second year in Cleveland, despite missing two games for a drug suspension, he was voted first-team All-Pro after 1,646 yards on 87 receptions, including becoming the first player in NFL history with 200-yard games back to back.

But he can't seem to replicate anything good because he can't stay clean long enough to pass a random drug test by the NFL.

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No discerning NFL fan makes judgments about a class of rookies based on a single preseason. And given the freakish nature of this preseason, a fan would do better to forecast the future of COVID-19 in the U.S. than guess at the football fate of youngsters offered jobs in a pandemic.

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For the first time in his three pro years, RB Chris Carson made the annual Top 100 players list. The rankings are a bit of fluff put out by NFL.com to hype the coming season, and even though no cash is involved, it's a talker among players as well as fans, particularly since the voters are the players.

Typically a humble, deferential sort -- a seventh-round draft pick, you know -- Carson, while appreciative, felt his ranking at 96 sold him short.

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The day after the Seahawks skipped practice to talk about the crisis of race in America, followed by a passionate public discourse from coach Pete Carroll about white ignorance, routine had returned to the VMAC. The Seahawks Sunday had their third and final preseason mock game on a grand afternoon by the lake, and life again seemed about ball.

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Pro football and pro basketball are the only two high-profile industries in America where most of the employees are Black and well-compensated. Which explains why major sports are about to become ground zero in the culture wars that will be turned to 11 until Nov. 3.

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After canceling practice Saturday, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll met with players. He was clearly moved by their words, as well as the events of the week and of the last several months, not to mention the past four centuries.

He took to the Zoom podium to offer a 15-minute monologue about race in America, cajoling his national coaching cohort to stand firm with him, and most poignantly to share the fears Black players were feeling in one of the most fraught times in American history.

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To hear Russell Wilson tell it, the NFL got lucky this week. Had there been regular-season games, players would have gone on strike to protest the police shooting of Jacob Blake.

“Yeah, for sure," said the Seahawks quarterback , answering a question on ESPN 710 radio Friday. "Just witnessing what happened to Jacob and all the things that have added up to this, it’s devastating, truly devastating. And it’s not like this hasn’t been going on for years. That’s the scary part and sad part.

"The difference now is we get to see it every day because of social media and phones.”

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The Seahawks staged a mock game Wednesday at the otherwise-empty Clink, which was football-useful but utterly irrelevant culturally. Another unarmed Black man in America had been gunned down by police, this time in Kenosha, WI. The Seahawks joined others in the sports world furious about another atrocity -- Jacob Blake, 29, was shot seven times in the back, in front of his three children.

Coach Pete Carroll was among the outraged.

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The most noteworthy impediment to the #LetRussCook movement by many 12s is the regular inability to keep the varmints out of the kitchen. Nobody eats when the chef is skittering past the cooktop, looking to climb a footstool.

Seahawks coach Pete Carroll and his viceroy, offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer, understand this, and often call a run-heavy, lower-risk game early. As defenses inevitably wear down, QB Russell Wilson gets busy, by air and land, and the Seahawks, to cite a recent set of outcomes, in 2019 win 10 regular-season games and a playoff game by eight points or less, an NFL record for drama.

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Nothing will change the fact that Earl Thomas was a spectacular contributor to the greatest sustained team success in Seattle's modern history of pro sports.

In his continuing role as NFL drama king, however, he appears to be -- to borrow Russell Wilson's anointed nickname for himself -- Mr. Unlimited. His fans hope the latter speculation doesn't obscure the former truth.

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Sitting masked-up in a socially distanced press box at the Clink Saturday, it occurred to me that I was among a relative handful of journalists locally and nationally who have worked the two major American outdoor sports played in the pandemic-induced void of fans.

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It's probably a bit unfair to ask Quinton Dunbar to give a full version of the strangest non-pandemic event in the Seattle sports year -- two months after being acquired by via trade, the Seahawks conerback was arrested on four counts of felony robbery near his Miami hometown. Three months later, the prosecutors declined to press charges against Dunbar, even though the case continues.

But, hey, life is unfair. What's up with that episode, Q?

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As the gradual acceptance of facsimiles becomes a standard of U.S. life, the Seahawks' first time in shoulder pads since the dark and cold of a January night in Green Bay seemed, you know, like real football.

Blockers blocked, defenders defended, quarterbacks threw and receivers caught.  No tackling yet, but players were knocked down and got up with grass stains. Newcomer SS Jamal Adams even intercepted a Russell Wilson red-zone pass and swooped the length of the field, ball held high.

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As he is prone to do, the guileless Tyler Lockett said something honest and worthy, this time about spending part of daily life sneaking around a virus.

"Practice is kind of like recess," he said. "It gives time to be around people."

The Seahawks' No. 1 wide receiver was speaking about the lesser-understood aspect of the personal quarantines demanded by the NFL if it is to pull off the audacious stunt of having a season outside a bubble in a pandemic -- the loneliness of isolation.

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For the record, Russell Wilson denies he has ever retweeted the popular Twitter hashtag #LetRussCook.

But it sounded Thursday as if he's thought a whole lot about the notion behind it.

In fact, in a 2½-minute response to the much-debated matter -- if you're a non-tweeter, most of the football world insists that coach Pete Carroll throttle back the Seahawks' run game to let one of the NFL's best QBs flourish early as well as late -- Wilson, smiling a lot, basically said gimme the chef's hat.

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For those with lives beyond sports, the first day of NFL training camp is an annual calendar benchmark. It tells us that another too-short summer is slowly being taken  away, and that the Seahawks soon would inhale much of Puget Sound's oxygen for the next five months.

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One of the stranger off-field sagas in Seahawks history presumably ended Friday when Florida prosecutors, citing lack of evidence, surprisingly dropped felony armed robbery charges against CB Quinton Dunbar.

That means the fourth-year pro, acquired in May for a fifth-round draft pick from the Washington Football Team, could rejoin soon a Seahawks secondary transformed from 2019's mediocre outfit. Pro Football Focus rated Dunbar the No. 2 cornerback in 2019.

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