John Schneider: No Green Bay out clause in new deal with Seahawks

RENTON – General manager John Schneider said his new deal with the Seahawks does not include any sort of out clause that would allow him to leave for the same position with the Packers.

His previous deal with Seattle reportedly had such a clause, which Schneider did not confirm nor deny. But, when asked Thursday, he said his new one does not.

“No. Nope,” Schneider told a group of reporters. “There’s been lots of whispers about a lot of things. It’s a small league and I’m from a small home town.”

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Schneider is from De Pere, Wisc., which is just south of Green Bay. He got his start in the industry as an intern with the Packers in 1992 and spent 12 seasons over two stints as a member of the organization’s personnel department, including the eight that preceded his hiring by the Seahawks in 2010.

His extensive ties to Green Bay and the Packers’ front office as well as his success with the Seahawks have led to speculation that there could be mutual interest in Schneider taking over as the team’s general manager whenever Ted Thompson’s run there ends. The reported out clause in his previous contract would confirm that there was, but that’s now a moot point with no such clause in his new deal with the Seahawks, which will run through 2021.

Asked if there’s any significance to his contract being two years longer than the one coach Pete Carroll signed right after, Schneider said there isn’t.

Reiterating what he told John Clayton on 710 ESPN Seattle earlier in the week, Schneider said he was never worried that either of those deals wouldn’t get done. There had been some outside concern among fans, though, with training camp approaching and neither Carroll nor Schneider signed beyond this season.

But Schneider again pointed to the time of the year as a factor in the delay with his deal, explaining that busy summer schedules of the individuals involved in a negotiation often cause things to take longer than they otherwise would. He said that happened last summer with Russell Wilson’s agent while the two sides were working on the quarterback’s extension, which wasn’t finalized until the night before training camp began.

Schneider may have been incommunicado himself for a brief time during his own contract negotiation.

“Plus, I lost my phone in the ocean,” he said about a recent trip to the San Juan Islands. “I was playing ‘Uno’ and I pushed it off the side of a boat.”