PHOENIX -- The doors to John Schneider's office at the Seahawks Super Bowl compound are wide open, a light breeze drifting into the room. It's another fairly perfect day in the desert, though the view offered, of the hotel parking lot and the freeway just ahead, is less than spectacular.

Schneider, it seems, notices none of this himself. The Seahawks general manager is behind a large desk, scattered with papers, with two large computer screens keeping him busy, one on either side of the desk. Then there is the big projection screen to his left, which he uses to watch game film. Another big screen is about 20 feet in front of him, where he is monitoring the press conferences his coaches and players are conducting with the media. There are schedules and agendas taped to a large wall behind him and a white board where he can jot down notes and reminders to his right. The man is clearly working.

He has just finished studying some film before you arrive and he'll be back at it shortly after you leave. There isn't all that much he can do in his position to directly impact this game, but then again this week, for him, isn't just about Sunday's Super Bowl. Soon enough he will be scouring the waiver wire for talent, meeting with owner Paul Allen to set the budgets and parameters for the 2015 season, and, as was the case with last year's roster, likely having to make difficult decisions and part with some popular and successful players. All that work, with the focus on keeping this perennial pursuit of excellence going. He and coach Pete Carroll remain one of the most aggressive and proactive front office regimes in the NFL. Winning a Lombardi Trophy last year, and being on the cusp of history in defending it, has done nothing to slow them down.

Schneider can vividly recall the series of meetings and conversations that helped define the course of the offseason following last year's Super Bowl defeat of Denver. He understands the complexities of team building, especially as Seattle's roster continues to spawn stars who then, of course, require being paid exponentially more than their entry-level contract figures. Quarterback Russell Wilson will be the embodiment of that process this winter, with the former third-round pick primed to jump from $662,434 to upwards of $20M a season. Maintaining a winner ain't easy, and it certainly ain't cheap, but that's the chore in Seattle.

John Schneider and Pete Carroll say they're in constant contact with owner Paul Allen on tough calls. (USATSI)
John Schneider and Pete Carroll say Paul Allen's input has been key on tough calls. (USATSI)

"We knew at this time last year that we were going to have to make really tough decisions in order to sustain some success," Schneider said. "Pete talks all the time about competing in every facet and doing things better than it has ever been done before and what that means to me and the message that I always send is we want to be a championship-caliber football team so that every year your fans are thinking that every year we have a shot. With that comes tough decisions and you're going to take some bullets for a while when you make those decisions, but need to be able to make those tough decisions and fix the things you think are deficiencies as quickly as possible and try to keep as many of your core players as you possibly can and still stick to your attitudes, your outlook, your identity."

Cutting ties with 'heart and soul' guys

By this time last year, internally, the Seahawks already essentially knew that several of the players who had helped them transform their defense, in particular, were gone. Chris Clemons, Sidney Rice, Red Bryant, Walter Thurmond, Brandon Browner and Breno Giacomini -- all key starters during the rise of this organization under Scheider and Carroll, were going to be gone in 2015. They had become luxury items that Seattle could not afford, given the constraints of the salary cap and the need to continue getting emerging stars like Earl Thomas and Richard Sherman and key players like Cliff Avril, Doug Baldwin and KJ Wright the new contracts they merited. Kam Chancellor, Max Unger and other key players had already gotten new lucrative deals the season before. Factoring in Wilson's looming negotiations at the end of the 2015 season, there was not going to be too much wiggle room.

"There's a domino effect and there were some of our guys at the combine who had a ton of teams speaking to them," Schneider said, "and we just weren't positioned to tell them exactly where we going to be and right, wrong or indifferent, they had to make a decision and some had to move on. We just weren't in that position and we did not want to disrespect them with an offer that would not be appropriate to their level of play."

The priority, above all else, was getting Michael Bennett re-signed, with him more vital than ever to a front seven that was going to be losing Bryant and Clemons. Schneider achieved that early in the offseason. The Seahawks were holding out hope that Golden Tate, a receiver they very much wanted to keep, would have a market that took some time to form, with the club monitoring it closely. Ultimately, however, with so many more contracts looming in 2015 and beyond, the Seahawks lost out on him, with Tate signing a deal with the Lions worth $6M a year, with more than $13M in guaranteed money.

"We're using long vision at all times," said Carroll, who himself signed a hefty contract extension after the Super Bowl win, as big a signing as any. "John has done an extraordinary job of seeing into the future, what's necessary to keep things moving ahead and all of those decisions, we just work through every one of them and treat them with tremendous care because of the players and the makeup and the connection, the chemistry that guys bring to your team. That's what makes it so difficult.

"But, it is what it is. You have to do that. You have to go through that process and make the choices. We lost some really good players from last year's team and we knew that we were losing some heart and soul guys. But, they were the decisions that we had to make to make the choices to move ahead and also to continue to reward the guys."

The decision to jettison Harvin

The boldest move, and one that had the biggest real-time impact by far, would not come until October. It was only 19 months prior that the Seahawks had acquired Percy Harvin from Minnesota in a blockbuster trade, then made him one of the five highest-paid receivers in the game. But now, with the trade deadline looming and the team in an identity crisis and Harvin a growing malcontent, Schneider and Carroll spent hours talking to each other about the direction of the team, and having difficult conversations with Allen about its direction.

Harvin wasn't impacting the games much, even though now healthy, and the team had effectively won a Super Bowl without his services in 2014 due to health issues. He was becoming a negative factor in the locker room and dividing the team to at least some degree, and now the stewards of the franchise were ready to admit that the gamble was not working out, and it was time to cut their losses with the trade deadline looming.

"You have to have an owner that gives you support and is willing to help," Schneider said. "I had tons of conversations with Mr. Allen about it and Pete and I obviously talked about it all the time. We took a shot on a highly-explosive player, a guy that arguably could have been the MVP of the year before (2013 with the Vikings) if not for the injuries. But there were just a number of things that didn't go well from the start with his hip. And it was just clear that it wasn't really meshing and coming together and we just wanted to make that decision as quickly as we could in order to try to get back to playing the kind of football we had played the previous season when he was injured.

The decision to deal talented but volatile WR Percy Harvin helped the Seahawks hit the reset button.  (USATSI)
The decision to deal talented but volatile WR Percy Harvin helped Seattle hit the reset button. (USATSI)

He was phenomenal when he played, but it just became apparent for many, many reasons that it wasn't going to be a long-term fit. So we needed to identify it and I had the support of ownership to move forward."

The Seahawks were just 3-2 in mid October, spiraling somewhat, losing sight of some of their core roots in the run game and trying to find ways to get Harvin more involved. It wasn't working, and even though Carroll and Schneider knew some key players had grown close to Harvin and there would be some initial pushback from some after opting to deal him to the Jets for a conditional pick, getting nothing in return to help them for this season, they felt they had to move on.

"We made a big statement going after Percy," Carroll said, "and he's an incredible football player and an amazing competitor. As it turned out, we just thought it was better for our team to move on where we had come from in a sense. We went back to more of the format that had gotten us here and it just seemed like the right idea and the right thought. It was a very difficult choice. It was an unpopular choice from the outside in, but it was the only choice that we could make at the time to do the right thing for us and hopefully it'll work out for him as well. There was a big impact of that, but we had to endure that and since we've come out of it we've found what we were looking for really in that decision."

Carroll held a team meeting in the aftermath of all of this -- the Harvin trade was followed by a loss to the Rams that dropped the Seahawks to 3-3 -- and players like Chancellor came to the fore and helped reset the mindset of the team. Grievances were aired and the Seahawks have lost just once more all season, getting the top seed in the NFC again and finding themselves back in the Super Bowl again.

The Harvin trade also became a springboard of preparing for the 2015 season in many ways. Getting the Jets, whose general manager John Idzik at the time was a former Seattle executive, to assume Harvin's contract, worth $11M a year, freed up a considerable amount of cash to spend for the rest of 2014, and Schneider honed in on two more top defensive players -- Avril and Wright -- for extensions, both of which got done.

"It basically allowed us to sign KJ and Cliff," Schneider said. "And that's two very strong core players on our team."

A little move with a big impact

And it also allowed for one much smaller move the team made deep in the offseason that helped them reach this point as well. Receiver Chris Matthews, who recovered the onside kick that helped fuel the remarkable comeback win over Green Bay in the NFC Championship game, was someone who the Seahawks had been trying to get back on their practice squad at various times after a nice showing in training camp. Eventually securing him ended up being huge.

"He was a guy that was just like calling every week for the first five weeks of the season," Schneider said. "He was like, 'Hey, when can I get back on the practice squad?' and his agent was busting his tail for him, wearing me out trying to get him back on the practice squad and we just didn't have a spot, didn't have a spot, didn't have a spot. And finally we were able to get him back on, and here he is playing in the NFC Championship game and he makes a play like that at the end of the game. It's a pretty amazing story."

Of course, with Wilson's negotiations just ahead, the construct of the 2015 Seahawks will certainly change. Look around the NFL, and many clubs that jumped their quarterbacks into the $20M stratosphere have suffered at least to some degree (Atlanta and New Orleans certainly have; Baltimore had to part with a bevy of older vets after winning the Super Bowl and rewarding Joe Flacco with a massive deal). No matter how creative the sides get with structure and salary-cap gymnastics, the reality is the quarterback will be taking on a dramatically bigger chunk of the yearly allocation of salary funds.

And no one in the Seattle organization would be surprised if running back Marshawn Lynch, who threatened to sit out or retire before this season without a new contract, pulls the same routine again this coming offseason. Some around the NFL expect Lynch, who has one year worth a maximum of $7 million left on his deal, to demand closer to $10M a season. If it comes to that, I wouldn't expect Seattle to budge. They were prepared to move on with other running backs if need be last year before he agreed to a revised deal with some new wrinkles but without a major boost in pay. Regardless, some interesting conversations with the star runner are on the horizon.

Undoubtedly, more change is ahead, and Wilson is about to achieve a degree of generational wealth very few in this game, or any field, attain. The 2015 Seahawks will have a superior young core -- Schneider and Carroll have ensured as much already with the flurry of extensions they've brokered over the past 18 months or so -- and Wilson will be among the game's highest paid by then, and no one would doubt they'll be contending again.

"We feel like we have a plan to make that work with Russell, but we know there are going to be a lot of hard decisions that come with that," Schneider said. "We knew we're going to have to continue to play young people, and coach Carroll and his staff recognize that. They are very willing to do it and they've showed that the last five seasons and we can't change that type of philosophy.

"There's going to be some players that have to make a decision on whether or not they want to stay in Seattle or move on, and there is no ill will if they do move on because it's understandable. We're trying to get as many good football payers as you possibly can and you can't compensate everyone to the level they would want to be compensated. It's impossible. So you try to do what's best at every position for every player and you try to be honest with them. They're not always going to like what they hear, but they know it's the truth and hopefully they like our culture enough and what we have going on enough to try to stay."