SEATTLE — Sunday won't be the first time Jimmy Graham has played in Seattle since his star-crossed three-year Seahawks career ended.
Graham first returned to Seattle in 2018 as a member of the Green Bay Packers, making one catch for 13 yards in a 27-24 Seahawks win.
But his return with the Chicago Bears for Sunday's 1:05 p.m. game at Lumen Field feels a bit more poignant.
Graham is 35 and will be a free agent at the end of the season, one in which he has just 10 catches for 121 yards and two touchdowns in 12 games, giving all the appearance of being at the end of the line. (Though it's a career that will almost certainly end in the Hall of Fame, as Graham is one of just three tight ends in NFL history with more than 700 catches, 8,000 yards and more than 80 touchdowns, joining Tony Gonzalez and Antonio Gates.)
He was viewed as the missing piece to another Super Bowl run for the Seahawks, and it also feels like they are at the end of their own run, with a 5-9 record and essentially out of the playoffs with three games left.
In the eyes of some Seahawks fans, the trade for Graham in March 2015 felt like an ill-fated turning point.
Roughly a month after the Seahawks' stunning loss to New England in Super Bowl XLIX, they made what felt like a reactionary move to their final offensive play of that game — when Russell Wilson's pass was intercepted at the goal line by Malcolm Butler. The Seahawks traded their 2015 first-round draft pick and center Max Unger to New Orleans for Graham and a fourth-round pick.
Graham was regarded as one of the NFL's best red-zone threats, a 6-foot-7 former college basketball player who had caught 51 touchdowns in his first five seasons with the Saints, available in part because of lingering hard feelings from a contract dispute the year before.
A dominant red-zone threat is what the Seahawks needed and didn't have on the Super Bowl play that will never be forgotten, hard as everyone in Seattle will try.
Graham already had two seasons of 1,000 yards or more, three Pro Bowl invites and one All-Pro nod.
The Seahawks already had maybe the NFL's best running game with Marshawn Lynch and Wilson at the height of his zone-read powers, but they didn't have a lot of star power at receiver other than Doug Baldwin.
It seemed like a match made in heaven, and Seahawks fans began dreaming of limitless Graham catches and TDs.
"Huge expectations, that was always fun to deal with," Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said this week.
During a 2015 season in which the Seahawks were already dealing with the Super Bowl hangover as well as Kam Chancellor's surprising holdout, Graham had just one 100-yard game and two touchdowns before suffering a patellar-tendon injury in Game 11, ending his season.
Maybe forgotten is that Graham returned to make the Pro Bowl the next two seasons. He turned in the best yards-per-catch average of his career in 2016 at 14.2 with 923 yards, the fourth-best of his career. In 2017 he caught 10 touchdowns.
After the season his contract expired, and Graham signed with Green Bay.
He left Seattle setting nearly every season and career record for a Seahawks tight end despite playing just 43 games. His 18 touchdowns remain tied for 10th-most of any Seahawk. His yards per game of 47.6 ranks 12th, and his total yards of 2,048 ranks 17th.
His averages weren't as far off his Saints numbers, especially when considering the difference in the offenses. He had 4.0 catches per game with the Seahawks compared with 4.9 with the Saints, and 47.6 yards per game compared with 60.9 with New Orleans.
Many joked at the time that all Graham needed to get his numbers to their New Orleans-level was a team that knew how to use him.
But that didn't prove true. Graham averaged just 2.9 catches and 33.8 yards per game in two years with the Packers and quarterback Aaron Rodgers, who has shown he knows how to run an offense.
Graham has done far less in Chicago the past two years — 2.1 catches and 20.6 yards per game.
Maybe it wasn't so much the Seahawks not knowing how to use him but Graham beginning the downside of his career, especially after the patellar injury.
Still, that stigma has always lingered.
And to many Seahawks fans, the cost of Unger proved too much considering how the offensive line has had its struggles since.
Maybe forgotten is the context of the time.
Unger battled injuries in 2014, played just six regular-season games and was replaced late in the year by Patrick Lewis. The Seahawks went 4-0 with Lewis starting at center in 2014, including a 35-6 win at Arizona in the second-to-last game of the year in which the Seahawks set a team record with 596 yards, which still stands. It was a key win, as the Seahawks captured the NFC West and the top seed for a second consecutive year.
Unger had two years left on a contract averaging more than $5 million a season.
The Seahawks figured they could adequately replace Unger — it wasn't clear how long he might continue playing — with a low-cost younger player while adding the kind of dynamic playmaker they couldn't get drafting low in the first round.
Unger not only got healthy — he missed only one game in four years with the Saints — but played well, making the Pro Bowl in 2018, his final season, before he retired at age 32.
Lewis battled an ankle injury the following year and started just nine games (Drew Nowak memorably started the first two games of 2015) and was gone by 2016, with the Seahawks eventually turning to Justin Britt at center in 2016. Britt held it down the next four years, and for what it's worth had a better season rating than Unger in two of the three years from 2016-18.
And true, the Seahawks gave up a lot of draft capital — the pick it gave the Saints was No. 31, the pick it got was No. 112. The Seahawks used the pick it got as one of four it dealt to Washington to move up from 69 to 95 to take a receiver named Tyler Lockett.
New Orleans used the 31st pick on linebacker Stephone Anthony of Clemson. Anthony started every game as a rookie, but after battling inconsistency and injuries he was traded a year later for a fifth-round pick and has been out of the league since 2019, having started just 20 games in his career.
So the Seahawks got three years of Graham and a pick that it used to get Lockett for four years of Unger and a pick the Saints used on a linebacker who basically played one year. Those tradeoffs don't seem all that bad in retrospect.
The Seahawks got Graham to get back to, and win, the Super Bowl, and while it was hardly all his fault that didn't happen, it's that disappointment that may always linger.
