He who may break the Super Bowl: Seahawks’ Rashid Shaheed credits Weber State
Twice — out of high school and again out of college — no one wanted Rashid Shaheed.
Except Jay Hill and Fesi Sitake.
Hill was the head coach at Weber State in 2016. Sitake, now at BYU on his brother’s staff, was Hill’s wide-receivers coach who became Weber’s offensive coordinator as Shaheed was leaving high school.
In the spring of 2016, Sitake found an unrecruited, section-champion track star in the 200 and 400 meters who also played football at Mount Carmel High School in San Diego.
The teenage Shaheed had to convince his parents, Cassondra and Haneef, to play football. His mom ran the 400-meter hurdles at the University of San Diego. His dad, Haneef, was a high-school track coach. Rashid’s sisters Amirah and Aysha were sprinters. Aysha ran at the University of California, up in Berkeley. Rashid did what the family did. He ran. Fast.
He was also a running back and wide receiver in high school football. He wanted to play that sport so much, Shaheed turned down an offer to run track for USC and sign with Weber State.
Yes, Weber State over USC.
“Fesi Shitake is the one who found him, brought him to me,” Hill, now the new defensive coordinator at Michigan, told The News Tribune by phone from Ann Arbor, Michigan, Saturday.
“The minute I saw him on film, I loved him.”
What’s not to love?
Shaheed has been, arguably, the most valuable Seahawk the latter half of this season. He may determine the outcome of Super Bowl 60 here in the Bay Area on Sunday.
Just like he determined the NFC West.
And he had exactly one offer out of high school to play college football. Sitake’s, to play at Weber State.
Many don’t know where it is (Ogden, Utah). Fewer know how to pronounce it correctly (it’s WEE-ber).
“Only one,” Shaheed told the TNT this week, of his total college-football offers.
He was smiling a how-about-that grin while sitting at a table inside the San Jose Convention Center at the Super Bowl.
He’s the Seahawks’ Pro Bowl punt and kickoff returner. He’s already an All-Pro before his NFL rookie contract has ended; it ends with this Super Bowl, by the way (and, yes, the Seahawks are making it a top priority to re-sign him).
His game-breaking, 4.3-second speed in the 40-yard dash makes him a deep threat for Sam Darnold throwing into the New England Patriots to turn the Super Bowl on Sunday in Santa Clara. And just like no one — but Weber State — recruited him out of high school, no one drafted him into the NFL. There were 262 players over seven rounds of the 2022 draft. That included Seahawks left tackle Charles Cross, at ninth overall, and Seattle right tackle Abe Lucas early in round three.
Shaheed was not among those 262 players drafted that year. That was after his second torn anterior cruciate ligament in college sidelined him from the pre-draft evaluations and workouts before the ‘22 draft.
“Everybody just thought he was fast,” Hill said. “And I told these (NFL scouts), ‘You gotta trust me. He’s going to go in and be ready-made to be a kick returner-punt returner in the NFL. But whatever wide-receivers coach gets this guy is going to be elated at who he is as a wide receiver. You’re gonna love him.’
“And I said that to all the frickin’ scouts. And, unfortunately with the injury he had coming out of college, people passed on him.
“I bet they wished they would have taken him now.” The Saints did, albeit an undrafted rookie free agent. A year later, at the end of the 2023 season, he was an All-Pro.
Two years later, he was a Seahawk.
How John Schneider got Rasheed Shaheed
Seattle general manager John Schneider had been talking to — “begging,” the GM said last week— the Saints about Shaheed for months.
In the first days of November, rookie wide receiver and kick returner Tory Horton had two touchdowns in Seattle’s blowout win at Washington.
But in that game, Horton severely injured his shin. Horton and the team didn’t know about the injury for days after that game, until it got worse midweek.
At the same time, Schneider finally just went for it to get Shaheed. He asked Saints GM Mickey Loomis, a former Seahawks executive in the 1990s under then-Seattle GM Mike McCormack, what it would take to get Shaheed from New Orleans.
“Yeah, serendipity, God’s work,” Schneider said last week. “We had been talking to the Saints — and when I say talking, like, begging — for a while. It wasn’t like a big negotiation. They were kind of like, ‘All right, this is what it’s going to take.’ We were like, All right, we’re going to do it.’” Schneider traded two third-day draft picks to the Saints to get Shaheed.
Think he and the Seahawks care about those third-day picks right now, walking into the Super Bowl?
“We had planned on having Tory and Rashid as top, top-end take-the-top-off-guys speed threats. And literally that week, Tory was like,’Man, I’m not feeling real good, something is going on.”
Horton went on injured reserve. The team expects him for the start of training camp next summer.
Shaheed went off.
Offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak immediately put Shaheed into his schemes running fly sweeps and deep routes to stretch defenses. Special-teams coach Jay Harbaugh put Shaheed back to return punts and kickoffs, replacing Horton.
With his innovative schemes and constant chasing for new ways, Harbaugh rightly gets a ton of credit for Seattle having the league’s best special-teams unit.
Harbaugh says Shaheed makes him look like he has the best special-teams unit.
“He’s pretty special,” Harbaugh said. “Super thankful to have him.
“He’s tremendous. Crazy fast. He’s got vision.”
Shaheed’s 100-yard kickoff return for the score that broke open the Seahawks’ win at Atlanta Dec. 2 is the NFL’s longest play this season.
He’s the only player in the NFL with a kickoff return plus a punt return for touchdowns this season. Both came in his latter half of the season following his trade to Seattle. He became the first Seahawk to have a punt return and kickoff return for a score in the same season since 2015, when Tyler Lockett did it during his All-Pro rookie season.
The Seahawks might not even be here this week if not for Shaheed.
Seattle trailed the Los Angeles Rams by 16 points with 10 minutes left in a game for the division lead in December. Shaheed returned a Rams punt across half of Lumen Field for a touchdown. That sparked Darnold and the offense’s comeback to force overtime, then win the wild game, 38-37.
Without that win, the Seahawks wouldn’t have won the NFC West and gotten the top seed in the postseason, with a first-round bye. Without winning the West, Seattle would have been on the road for the entire playoffs. While winning three straight road playoff games with the Seahawks would not have been impossible, that’s not the usual route to a Super Bowl.
Instead, Seattle won two home playoff games to reach where they will be Sunday, in the franchise’s fourth Super Bowl in its 50-year history.
“He’s got courage to be able to ‘run through the smoke,’ as they say,” Harbaugh said, meaning a wall of kick-coverage tacklers.
Literally, through the smoke. Shaheed did that to get the Seahawks into the NFC championship game.
The bye meant the Seahawks hosted the rival San Francisco 49ers in the divisional round. Former Seahawks Super Bowl-champion wide receiver and kick returner Doug Baldwin raised the 12 flag with fans roaring to him high above the south end zone just before kickoff of that game.
Shaheed took that kickoff, cut left then right past every 49ers coverage man, then jumped over the kicker comically trying to trip him with his legs for a 97-yard touchdown into the end zone right under Baldwin. The smoke from pregame introductions was still in the air as Shaheed ran through it for the score.
That started Seattle’s 41-6 rout of San Francisco.
Then he had a 51-yard catch and run down the sideline past half the Rams defense to get the Seahawks going into their win over L.A. to send Seattle into this fourth Super Bowl in franchise history.
All thanks to Jay Hill, Weber State
Shaheed told the TNT this week had Sitake, Hill and Weber State not given him his long college football chance, he would have gone to a junior college to play football instead of running track at USC. He was looking at Laney College, in Oakland, across the Bay from where he will play in Super Bowl 60 Sunday.
Yes, Laney College over USC.
But Hill, Sitake and Weber State changed that. And Shaheed’s life. “Man, being at Weber taught me so much. It taught the true meaning of football and how you have to prepare yourself to be the best,” Shaheed said.
“It taught me to be resilient. It taught me to never be satisfied with what you got.”
Of Hill, Shaheed said: “Best coach I’ve ever had. He taught me how to be a man. I grew up because of him.
“He wouldn’t let me just get away with anything. He would stay on my head, not only about football but outside of the field, in the classroom, off the field.
“I give a lot of credit to him.”
Hill later went to BYU. Kyle Whittingham recently hired him to be his defensive coordinator for the new program at Michigan.
Hill ran his program at Weber State as a family operation.
Literally. Hill’s wife Sara was the team mom. Truly, the Weber State football team mom, inside their home in Ogden, 40 minutes up Interstate 15 from Salt Lake City.
“I had the players around my own wife and kids, a lot,” Hill said Saturday. “My wife would do cooking classes. She would just do things to teach kids how to be good people and prepared for life, rather than just football players.
“Those guys were in our house, a lot. You know, at that level I didn’t have just an unlimited budget where we could take them to any restaurant we wanted. A lot of times when we were feeding the players it was at our own house.”
Shaheed’s college coach says his wife Sara is the biggest Rashid fan he knows — “other than his mom,” Jay Hill said.
Sara Hill and her husband will be watching the Super Bowl from Ann Arbor, with his new Michigan players, on Sunday. They will be rooting number 22 in Seahawks navy blue, as connected as if he was back in their kitchen in Ogden making dinner.
“We’ll be elated (Sunday) when Rashid scores his first touchdown in the Super Bowl,” Hill said. He was laughing. It wasn’t a joke.
“That will be sweet.”
This story was originally published February 7, 2026 at 11:41 AM with the headline "He who may break the Super Bowl: Seahawks’ Rashid Shaheed credits Weber State."
