Seattle Seahawks: 15 greatest players in franchise history

Seahawks DT Cortez Kennedy played for Seattle from 1990 through 2000

Cortez Kennedy was the second Seahawk to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. This happened in 2012, and he should have been inducted before that. NFL players can be voted into Canton five years after their careers ended. Kennedy stopped playing in 2000 and there is zero reason he should haven't been enshrined in the mid-2000s. But that might just be another example of the bias directed against the Pacific Northwest.

Kennedy was part of the NFL's All-Decade team in 1990s, and he had perhaps the best season by any interior defensive lineman ever in 1992. That season he won the league's Defensive Player of the Year award when he had 14 sacks, 4 forced fumbles, and 92 tackles. Not only is that a really high number for a defensive tackle, but that he collected all those sacks means he was constantly disrupting when sometime he was by far the best player on Seattle's defense.

This is likely why Kennedy's career numbers are not higher. He played on many mediocre teams in Seattle and didn't often have a lot of help. He still managed to have 6.5 or more sacks in six different years. Tackles for loss were not an official statistic for the NFL during the majority of Kennedy's career or his numbers would have been massive there as well. In his next-to-last season when he wasn't quite the same player he was earlier in his career, he had 13 TFLs. Imagine what the early 1990s were like for him.

Kennedy earned eight Pro Bowl nods and was named first-team All-Pro three times. He was second-team All-Pro once. Sadly, Kennedy passed away in 2017.