page_title: Seattle Seahawks
section_title: 1976–1982: Expansion era
hierarchical_section_title: Seattle Seahawks / Franchise history / 1976–1982: Expansion era
caption_attribution_description: English: Seattle Seahawks strong safety Kenny Easley celebrating a defensive play against the Washington Redskins during a September 28, 1986 away game at RFK Stadium.
context_page_description: The Seattle Seahawks are a professional American football team based in Seattle, Washington. They compete in the National Football League as a member club of the league's National Football Conference West division. The Seahawks joined the NFL in 1976 as an expansion team. Currently coached by Pete Carroll, they have played their home games at CenturyLink Field in Seattle's SoDo neighborhood since 2002. They previously played home games in the Kingdome and Husky Stadium.
  Seahawks fans have been referred to collectively as the "12th Man", "12th Fan", or "12s". The team's fans have twice set the Guinness World Record for the loudest crowd noise at a sporting event, first registering 136.6 decibels during a game against the San Francisco 49ers in September 2013, and later during a Monday Night Football game against the New Orleans Saints a few months later, with a then record-setting 137.6 dB. The Seahawks are the only NFL franchise based in the Pacific Northwest region of North America, and thus attract support from a wide geographical area, including some parts of Oregon, Montana, Idaho, and Alaska, as well as Canadian fans in British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan.
context_section_description: As per one of the agreed parts of the 1970 AFL–NFL merger, the NFL began planning to expand from 26 to 28 teams. In June 1972, Seattle Professional Football Inc., a group of Seattle business and community leaders, announced its intention to acquire an NFL franchise for the city of Seattle. In June 1974, the NFL gave the city an expansion franchise. That December, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle announced the official signing of the franchise agreement by Lloyd W. Nordstrom, representing the Nordstrom family as majority partners for the consortium.
  In March 1975, John Thompson, former Executive Director of the NFL Management Council and a former Washington Huskies executive, was hired as the general manager of the new team. The name Seattle Seahawks ("Seahawk" is another name for Osprey) was selected on June 17, 1975 after a public naming contest which drew more than 20,000 entries and over 1,700 names.
  Thompson recruited and hired Jack Patera, a Minnesota Vikings assistant coach, to be the first head coach of the Seahawks; the hiring was announced on January 3, 1976. The expansion draft was held March 30–31, 1976, with Seattle and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers alternating picks for rounds selecting unprotected players from the other 26 teams in the league. The Seahawks were awarded the 2nd overall pick in the 1976 draft, a pick they used on defensive tackle Steve Niehaus. The team took the field for the first time on August 1, 1976 in a pre-season game against the San Francisco 49ers in the then newly opened Kingdome.
  The Seahawks are the only NFL team to switch conferences twice in the post-merger era. The franchise began play in 1976 in the aforementioned NFC West but switched conferences with the Buccaneers after one season and joined the AFC West. This realignment was dictated by the league as part of the 1976 expansion plan, so that both expansion teams could play each other twice and every other NFL franchise once (the ones in their conference at the time) during their first two seasons. The Seahawks won both matchups against the Buccaneers in their first two seasons, the former of which was the Seahawks' first regular season victory.
caption: Hall of Fame safety Kenny Easley, a defensive unit leader for Seattle in the 1980s,[26] was a top defensive player in the NFL[27] and one of the Seahawks' all-time greatest players.[28]
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