The defending Super Bowl champs brought in a sleep physician to speak to the rookie class about the importance of rest.
The Seattle Seahawks will have a middle-of-the-road strength of schedule ranking in 2026 as they defend their Super Bowl title. The team sits 14th in the NFL's toughest schedule outlook, with the Seahawks' opponents this year adding up to a .514 win percentage from a year ago.
Against that competition - really, in any season - rest is crucial. In that metric, the Seahawks may also have an edge over their competitors.
The Big Lead noted each team's rest differential as equating to the "sum of rest days to vs. opponents across 17 games."
Seattle ranks tied for seventh among teams with a positive rest differential with +8 days of rest over its 2026 opponents.
That's a full weeks worth of an edge over the competition, so in order to take advantage of that time, the Seahawks recognized when to call in professionals in the industry.
The team website explained how the organization invited sleep physician and performance expert Dr. Cheri D. Mah to the team's rookie minicamp to teach the first-year NFL players the importance of sleep.
"Sleep is a weapon," Mah said, concluding her presentation after diving into the biology of how players can utilize their resting hours in the best way. "It is a highly underutilized, under-leveraged area of performance enhancement. If you're willing to do everything it takes to make yourself the best athlete possible, you'll see these benefits, but you have to give the time and energy to it, just like you do every aspect of your training. If you're not willing to do it, I will tell you that the guy next to you is going to, so use it to your advantage."
Typically, the Seahawks are among the teams that travel the most throughout any given season due to long flights to and from the Pacific Northwest region. This year, however, two of their NFC West counterparts on the West Coast will travel more.
The San Francisco 49ers will travel an NFL-high 38,105 miles to and from their road games this year. The Los Angeles Rams rank second with 34,847 miles in the air to look forward to.
Seattle sits at a somewhat-favorable 10th ranking at 22,056 miles of travel. Certainly not the worst ranking, but still one of the teams with a collection of long trips on the schedule. The Seahawks will have a Week 2 visit to the nation's capital, a Week 15 game in Philadelphia, and a Week 17 game at Carolina as the longest cross-country tours.
With a crop of inexperienced rookies joining the team, the Seahawks' vice president of health and player performance, Sam Ramsden, found it crucial to introduce the team to the power of sleep during the offseason.
"Sleep is the number one way to recover," Ramsden said. "Without sleep, without proper sleep, good sleep, quality and quantity, a lot of your dreams and a lot of your programs and processes aren't going to happen the way that you want them to. It's foundational."
Ramsden, who writer John Boyle chronicled as a tenured veteran of the organization, "has seen the NFL, and the Seahawks in particular, evolve in significant ways when it comes to player health and performance." One of those advancements is a more thorough, intricate look at how sleep can be improved and used as a tool to find an edge.
"To use one of coach [Mike Macdonald's] sayings, it's old-school methods with new-school principles," Ramsden said. "He gets it in terms of how important sleep is … We're just trying to help understand how we can help our players with sleep hygiene. And that evolved into travel and how our body clock can be affected by how much we travel."
Even with the Vince Lombardi in tow, the team is leaving no stone unturned when it comes to finding an advantage over not just teams in Seattle's loaded division, but every team in the NFL ahead of this season.
"There's good science behind it. That's one thing that's important to Mike, if he doesn't know something, he wants to know it," Ramsden says. "He's super curious that way. Who are the experts, who are the people that can help us? ... Sleep is a very simple, very obvious edge to chase, but it's a pretty elusive edge, because it's often sacrificed."
