Seattle safeties Earl Thomas, Kam Chancellor met ‘Family’ style

RENTON, Wash. – The bonding of a championship team, the meshing in the middle of what has become among the top NFL defenses of the last 40 years, didn’t begin on a practice field.

It wasn’t hatched in a draft room or at the NFL combine, or even in any games. It began over a 2010 episode of “Family Guy” inside a hotel room in suburban Bellevue.

Pete Carroll was in his first spring as Seahawks coach. Even though Seattle had veteran Lawyer Milloy at safety that season, Carroll and his staff knew that would be the last of Milloy’s 15 seasons in the league. They knew the foundation upon which the team would build its defense and thus its identity would be first-round draft choice Earl Thomas and fifth-round pick Kam Chancellor as the safeties.

But before those two could co-exist as free and strong safety up the middle of the defense, they had to get along with each other. So Carroll made the intense, football-only Thomas room with the less-heralded Chancellor in the team hotel during minicamps and training camp the spring and summer of 2010.

“The first time I did meet him we were in a hotel watching ‘Family Guy,’ ” Thomas said Thursday of the animated Fox television series, an adult-themed cartoon lampooning American culture. “That was kind of awkward, because all I did was watch SportsCenter back then.”

Five years later, three days before he and Thomas anchor the Seahawks’ defense against Green Bay in the NFC Championship Game, Chancellor laughed at the memory.

“Yeah, he called me weird for watching ‘Family Guy,’ ” Chancellor said. “I don’t know, I just like watching ‘Family Guy.’ There’s a lot of humor to it.”

For most. Not so much for Thomas. He seems to only smile when he tackles, hits and intercepts.

“You’ve got to be a person with an open mind, though. You’ve got to have an open mind and like to hear jokes and stuff like that,” Chancellor said. “I mean, it’s just a lot of humor in that show.

“Yeah, you have to (laugh) sometimes. He takes his job very seriously, which he should. Sometimes you’ve got to loosen him up sometimes, show him how to have a little fun, a little dry humor.”

Did Thomas at least ask Chancellor to change the channel?

“No, I didn’t. I didn’t,” he said. “I just asked him, ‘Bruh, you watch ‘Family Guy?’ ” like that.

“And that was it.”

Now Thomas is a two-time All-Pro. His partner, Chancellor, has been picked for multiple Pro Bowls and came with two votes of joining Thomas as an All-Pro this winter. They are the centerpieces of the “Legion of Boom.”

They have an unspoken understanding of where each one is going, where the other will be during plays. That makes the middle of Seattle’s top-ranked secondary a pair of harmonious, hard-hitting heroes.

Thomas roams like a rover in softball, the freest of free safeties who relies on his preparation and his instincts to react to the ball. Chancellor is more assignment-true, thumping ball carriers closer to the trenches like a linebacker while still covering tight ends, running backs and wide receivers inside and out.

“It’s crazy how when you come together and you never dream of right now,” Thomas said of he, Chancellor’s, Carroll’s and general manager John Schneider’s five years together in Seattle.

“We just talk about how good we want to be,” he said. “But when you actually put the action in and you actually see it come to life, that’s special.”

Thomas and Chancellor unabashedly use another word not all that common in football to describe what bonds them to each other and their teammates.

Yes, “love” is a large reason why the Seahawks have led the league in fewest points allowed for three consecutive regular seasons. Seattle’s is the first defense to do that since the 1969-71 Minnesota Vikings.

It’s yet another example of Carroll’s vision for rebuilding the Seahawks, and how he acted upon it – through trust and relationships.

It’s why the team’s road rooming list also pairs Cooper Helfet and Marshawn Lynch. Helfet is a former lacrosse player at private Johns Hopkins and a part-time model and son of a South African. He is Caucasian and a native of white-collar Marin County north of San Francisco. Lynch, of course, is an African-American from a hard part of Oakland – an, uh, independent personality who would positively never be mistaken for a lacrosse player.

“Coach Carroll is a mastermind in a lot of ways,” Thomas says.

“We didn’t see it. But he saw it.”

The result is a core reason the Seahawks cite for being one victory away from becoming the first team since the 1982-83 Washington Redskins to win consecutive NFC titles at home, and the first NFL team to reach the Super Bowl after winning it since the 2003-04 New England Patriots.

And about that episode of “Family Guy” five years ago: Who ultimately won that battle over the remote in their hotel room?

“Most of the time he’d either be asleep or on his phone,” Chancellor said of Thomas, laughing again. “So I watched “Family Guy” as much as I wanted.”