I saw his new twitter name https://twitter.com/poisonpill76
@PoisonPill76 and i've read conflicting articles, some say our GM was to cheap to pay him others say hutch wanted to leave.
WHy did he leave?

He didn't HAVE to sign that poisoned offer sheet. He signed it cause he wanted to stick it to the businessman.

Ruskell wasn't smart enough to franchise him or give him his $$$ and left a bad taste in Hutch's mouth.

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He got pissed off when Ruskell and co. allowed him to test the market as a RFA instead of sign him to a huge contract or at least give him the franchise tag. He felt betrayed and thus celebrated the whole poison pill aspect of his contract with the Vikings.

At least, that is how I remember it going down.

Ruskell was an idiot for not signing Hutch to a huge extension.

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"WE ALL WE GOT! WE ALL WE NEED!"

To his credit, he knows he screwed up major, and had this to say...

The Seahawks reached their first Super Bowl under Ruskell, but they also lost All-Pro guard Steve Hutchinson for no compensation, a mistake that Ruskell jokingly told his wife he didn't want to follow him for eternity.

"Let's look at that will again," he told her, "and it says burial, but let's go for cremation so they won't be able to write, 'Here lies the man that lost Hutch' on my tombstone."

http://seattletimes.com/html/seahawks/2 ... awk04.html

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"WE ALL WE GOT! WE ALL WE NEED!"

The fact that Rusky didn't see the value we had in that offensive line, or the value of linemen in general baffles me.

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Ruskell/Reinfeldt thought they were doing a Hutch a favor by allowing him to test the market using the Transition Tag.. initially not a bad idea because so many players got pissed off when slapped with the franchise tag.. Well, not franchising Hutch pissed him off to the point where he felt disrespected and left..

The only other person nearly as pissed off as Hutch was Holmgren when he found out that Hutch was transitioned.. Coincedentally, Hutch is the last person in the NFL to given the transition tag.

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Where can I find Seahawks98.com???

That's exactly right. All of it.

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"WE ALL WE GOT! WE ALL WE NEED!"

It wasn't that Ruskell/Reinfeldt were too cheap to pay him, they were following a more conventional logic that said guards don't make tackle money. Steve was a special kind of guard and he knew it, and the application of the Transition Tag (which paid him the average of the top 10 guards in the league and gave him more freedom to "shop around") rather than the Franchise Tag (top 5 average and much more restrictive) made him feel like the Seahawks felt he wasn't valuable enough to them. The "poison pill" that the Vikings put in were 2 conditions that the Vikings could meet and the Seahawks couldn't that, if violated, would guarantee him the full $49m of their contract offer. The Seahawks were forced into a position where they had to let him go.

No, he's not. Max Starks (2008) and David Akers (2011) have received it more recently.

One other point to remember is that this was shortly after three straight seasons where the Seahawks could not reach an agreement with Walter Jones and had to franchise him. Ruskell understandably did not want to risk getting into the same situation with Hutchinson. Unfortunately--as is the case with most of his tenure here--Ruskell was reactive instead of proactive. He thought Seattle would be able to match any offer Hutch would get and thus avoid the possibility of franchising Hutch multiple times and got caught flat-footed when the Vikings slipped the poison pill into Hutch's contact.

People sure are cutting Mr. Poisonpill76 there a whole lot of slack for acting like a jackass in response to the perceived slight. Say what you will about Ruskell's mistake, and it was a huge one, Hutchinson was still a prick, and I think it shows in his new nickname.

I think he also thought Hutch was a little too big for his britches and that this was some "tough love" to teach Hutch a lesson that Guards are the 2nd tier of the offensive line and should be paid as such.

I really don't think Ruskell's decision was an ego thing. He thought he was negotiating in good faith, which isn't smart when dealing with the contracts of elite players. It was a miscalculated risk, although I thought it made a lot of sense at the time to let Hutch try to establish his own market value.

They both acted like tools. The Hawks touched base with Hutch about extending him before the season was over. His agent's very words were Hutch 'intended to test the waters in free agency' In light of that, Ruskell decided that the franchise tag might result in a prolonged holdout, so he opted for the transition tag, so Hutch could test free agency, as he said he wanted to do, and the Hawks would have the right to match any offer. This approach worked well for one of our guys prior to Hutch (I forget who exactly), but Hutch #sigh!# viewed the lack of the Franchise tag as disrespect. There was also input from our salary cap guy (Reinfieldt), so i think that's where the perceived slight may have come from.

Hutch is still very much to blame for allowing the poison pill into the deal. Had that not been there, the Hawks would have matched anything the Vikings offered. They even went as far as reworking Big Walt's contract in order satifsfy the conditions of the poison pill, but the 'arbitrator' decided the Hawks couldn't do that 'after the fact' which is really fishy because intent of the transition tag includes allowing the incumbent team to match offers from other teams.

For that arbitrator to allow language in the contract that basically said Hutch's salary from the Seahawks had to satisfy the conditions of the poison pill before anybody had a chance to even read it is completely ridiculous.

The vikings sleasy ownership and GM suffered a lot of backlash from the league for making the transition tag basically worthless. From my understanding, the new transition tag terms have been revised, so as not to allow that type of under-handed activity.

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"A couple years from now Wilson will be forgotten about and you will forget I said he would fail" (Cboom, 2012)

Because Hutch is and was a total douchebag. Plain and simple.

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I'll agree with this.

And add that Ruskell was an incompetent GM.

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Beast Mode...try BORG MODE

Driver of the PC/JS Bandwagon since 2010

The loss of Hutch was huge. When they signed SA to that big contract instead of Hutch I was furious. They could have kept them both if they worked it right.

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"What Jefferson was saying was, Hey! You know, we left this England place 'cause it was bogus; so if we don't get some cool rules ourselves - pronto - we'll just be bogus too! Get it?" -- Jeff Spicoli

It was so stupid on Ruskell's part because the difference between the transition tag and the franchise was really small as I recall: well under $1 million. The transition tag provided barely any protection as we all saw. Because Ruskell got cute and tried to penny pinch with one of the best players in the league, the team got burned. Of course, Hutch didn't have to sign a poison pill contract but he did.