Realtor, ex-XFL Seattle Dragon Godwin Igwebuike has been Seahawks’ best player lately

The Seattle Seahawks’ best player the last month is a former Seattle Dragon.

He’s an XFL refugee. He was out of the NFL for two years. He thought the coronavirus pandemic ended his football career.

“Yeah, man, at that point,” Godwin Igwebuike said Wednesday, blowing air through his closed lips.

“Pffft...”

As if his career had vanished.

“At that point, I was expecting of course to go straight into a (NFL) minicamp, or get an invite,” he said. “When COVID hit, all of that obviously got canceled.

“It definitely went dark for a lot of guys in my position, and inevitably didn’t get any invitations.”

Igwebuike got free-agent tryouts in the middle of the 2020 season, with Green Bay and Detroit. Neither team signed him.

“Man, I was trying to figure out if I was going to hang the cleats up, really,” he said.

He had played five games for San Francisco and one for Tampa Bay as a rookie defensive back on special teams in 2018. In 2019, he played for no one.

In 2020, he got one month into the XFL’s rebirth season, playing safety for the Dragons, before COVID-19 halted the league’s operations in March of that year.

Entering 2021, no NFL had called him through two entire seasons. The graduate of Northwestern was home in his native Columbus, Ohio. His mother had been a real estate agent for 30 years. So he got his license to sell homes with her in Ohio.

At age 26, Igwebuike thought he was on to the rest of his life. His post-football life.

“I mean, shoot, at that time it had been a minute since I’d played (in the league). It’d been two years or so,” he said.

“I flipped a couple houses with my mom. That was a blessing, honestly. I was staying at the (parents’) house, anyways. At that point, I didn’t have my own place.

“When you are on the streets, you just try to find ways to make it.

“But I knew what I wanted. I knew what my heart’s desire was. I knew what I was praying for.”

Now he’s the Seahawks’ kickoff returner. He’s been their best one in 10 years.

His sprints for 40 and 50 yards have been sometimes the only spark for a team that has lost five of its last six games and sits on the brink of playoff elimination entering its must-win game Sunday against the New York Jets (7-8) at Lumen Field.

His path to a primary job with Seattle — the Seahawks, not the Dragons — has been unlikely.

Or how many real-estate agents you know also return kicks for NFL teams?

Detroit Lions revived Igwebuike’s career

In late January 2021, two-plus seasons removed from last playing in the NFL, with Igwebuike idling at his parents’ home in Columbus, the Lions called him back.

Why?

“Beats me, honestly,” he said this week, chuckling.

Igwebuike has endured 26 player transactions since Tampa Bay signed him as an undrafted rookie free agent in 2018. His career path across three NFL seasons reads like an agate, small-type, back records page in a newspaper.

Signed. Waived. Assigned to the practice squad. Released. Signed. Waived. Claimed. Signed. Waived. Claimed. Signed. Waived. Tryout.

The Detroit Lions signed him to a reserve/futures contract for the 2021 offseason. He knew what that meant: He was a practice player for spring workouts and, if he lasted that long, minicamps and organized team activities into June.

Actually being on the team during Detroit’s training camp and preseason, let alone season? That was still a realtor’s dream.

In one of those offseason practices with the Lions in the spring of 2021, Igwebuike was a defensive back carrying the ball a couple times in a “box” drill with other defensive backs closing from four corners on a ball carrier. Detroit special teams coach Dave Fipp was impressed with how elusive Igwebuike was in tight spaces in those drills.

Sensing a dead end for him at defensive back with Detroit, Igwebuike campaigned for the kick-returner role plus another new job with the Lions: running back.

Between offseason workouts and summer training camp, as if a teen trying to get into college football again, he sent Lions head coach Dan Campbell and assistants his high school highlight tape as a running back, from his old online account with a recruiting software service.

Yes, he was already on the Lions’ preseason roster at the time.

“I did send them my high school highlights. On Hudl,” he said.

“You should check them out, too. I was doing something down there.”

The lobbying worked. A new NFL career was born. The defensive back was now a running back. And a kickoff returner.

“(Fipp, the LIons’ special teams coach) just let me know pretty much before fall camp, which is when I switched to running back that he was going to try to get me out there as the kickoff returner, as well,” Igwebuike said.

Other than a couple times at Pickerington North High School in the Columbus suburbs, he’d never returned kickoffs.

“I didn’t have many expectations,” he said of being Detroit’s new returner last season. “I was, like, ‘All right, shoot, whatever I can do to get out there on the field.’”

Seahawks impressed. Sort of.

Seahawks’ scouts noticed Igwebuike returns 28 kickoffs with a 24.9-yard average and a long of 47 last season for the Lions.

Detroit then signed him back this spring for 2022. But the Lions waived him at the end of this preseason, in late August. Seattle signed him three weeks later to its practice squad. But the Seahawks released him Oct. 28.

For two weeks he was at the new home he and his wife Ari had just purchased near where he grew up. The Seahawks had told him upon releasing him they were impressed and wanted him back.

“I’ve heard that before,” he said.

But then Nov. 8 the Seahawks re-signed him back onto their practice squad. Then, kickoff returner DeeJay Dallas sustained a high-ankle sprain in Seattle’s win at the Los Angeles Rams Dec. 4.

Enter the house seller and former Dragon.

Igwebuike has been a spark since the first half of his first Seahawks game. He ran back a Carolina kickoff 50 yards to set up the touchdown that got Seattle back in that game Dec. 11; it made the score 20-14. He returned the second-half kickoff 30 yards that day.

Last weekend at frigid Kansas City he ran back the Chiefs’ first kickoff 48 yards, past midfield. He is averaging more than 28 yards per try on nine returns. That’s 6 yards better per return than Dallas had been averaging. Dallas didn’t have one kickoff return longer than 30 yards this season.

Igwebuike’s average is 5 yards better than the Seahawks got out of Dallas, Dee Eskridge and three others returning kickoffs in 2021. He’s been almost 6 yards better than Seattle got from Travis Homer, Freddie Swain and four others returning kickoffs in 2020.

You have to go back to 2012 and Leon Washington to find a Seahawks kickoff returner averaging better yardage than Igwebuike has this month. Washington made the Pro Bowl for his return work 10 years ago.

“Godwin has given us a boost coming back. He’s jumped in and has been a factor in the last couple of games,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said. “I’m really excited about what he’s doing in kickoff returns.”

This week, Igwebuike earned a full-time spot on the 53-man active roster when Seattle signed him from the practice squad. He took the spot of rookie safety and special-teamer Joey Blount, who went on injured reserve.

“Man, I’m still in awe. It’s been an incredible blessing,” Igwebuike said. “Starting the season off at home for a couple weeks, getting a chance to be here, then going back home again and getting re-signed, I took everything a day at a time.

“I just appreciate Coach Carroll and all these guys giving me an opportunity.

“I definitely feel blessed.”