When Jon Ryan left the University of Regina in 2004, where he was a receiver and a punter on the football team, he had a simple goal.
“I just wanted to play one game in the CFL (the Canadian Football League),’’ said Ryan. “That was my first goal. Because I thought that if I could play one game of professional football I could call myself a professional football player forever.”
Ryan, of course, went on to play a few more than that — 191 in the NFL and 74 in the CFL.
“Never in a million years did I think it would go 19 years like it did,” said Ryan.
Now he’ll be able to call himself a Seattle Seahawk forever.
Ryan, 42, planned to fly to Seattle on Monday to sign a one-day contract with the Seahawks on Tuesday, so he can officially retire as a member of the team for which he spent most of his career, playing 159 games from 2008 to 2017.
Ryan played his last pro game in 2022 with the Edmonton Elks at the age of 41.
He’s had periodic talks with president of football operations John Schneider about signing a one-day contract to retire as a Seahawk.
Unbeknown to Ryan, signing a one-day contract, while strictly ceremonial, does indeed mean that for 24 hours he will be an official member of the team.
“He said we had to do it before the draft, because it does take up a roster spot for the day, which I was unaware of,” Ryan said with a laugh Monday morning.
The timing finally worked out for Ryan to do it this week, allowing him to combine his two favorite things — baseball and football.
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Ryan planned to attend the Mariners game against the Reds on Monday night and on Tuesday head to the VMAC with his wife, comedian Sarah Colonna, to sign one last contract.
Then he plans to head to a nearby pub to celebrate with as many Seattle-area friends who can fit through the door.
It’ll be the party Ryan didn’t really get to hold when his Seahawks career ended the first time in 2018, when he was cut to make room for rookie phenom Michael Dickson, who had been drafted the previous spring.
When the Seahawks cut Ryan, they did so midway through the preseason so he could try to latch on with another team. Ryan had only the rest of that day to hang out in a nearby cafe and say goodbye to whoever stopped by before heading to Buffalo in an unsuccessful attempt to make the Bills’ roster.
The 18 months since he last played, he said, has allowed him to put his career in proper perspective.
“It’s nice now to be able to kind of look back on all the good times we had,’’ he said.
Ryan arrived in Seattle shortly before the 2008 season after he was cut by the Packers, where he had played two seasons after beginning his career with two years in the CFL.
The Seahawks signed Ryan after cutting Ryan Plackemeier.
“I was just trying to keep my job,” Ryan recalls.
He finished fourth in the NFC in punting that season, a rare bright spot in Mike Holmgren’s final season as coach, and kept hanging on through Jim Mora’s ill-fated 2009 season and the first two 7-9 campaigns of Pete Carroll before things took off.
Most fans remember Ryan for one play — his touchdown pass on a fake field goal to Garry Gilliam that sparked the Seahawks’ improbable overtime comeback win over Green Bay in the 2015 NFC title game.
“Individually it was the greatest moment of my career with the Seahawks for sure,” said Ryan, who holds team records for longest punt (77) and most punts (770).
Ryan recalled Monday the play was first practiced on Thursday after coaches noticed that the Packers had “a tendency to crash down on the weakside pretty consistently.” That left linebacker A.J. Hawk as the only player back in position to defend a fake.
Ryan said the Seahawks practiced it only four or five times full speed on Thursday and Friday before the Sunday game.
The play, which the Seahawks fittingly termed “Charlie Brown,’’ left Ryan with the option to run or pass based on what Hawk did.
Trailing 16-0 midway through the third quarter, the Seahawks saw the look they wanted and gave it a shot.
Ryan first decided to run, with the Seahawks needing 10 yards for a first down. When Hawk rushed quickly toward the line of scrimmage, Ryan stopped and flicked the ball over his head to Gilliam.
“My very first thought was ‘Damn, I stepped over the line,’ because it was supposed to be a run at that point and it turned into a pass pretty quickly,’’ he said. “I was pretty relieved when I didn’t see a flag.”
Ryan’s next act proved almost as memorable — with his momentum taking him to the Green Bay sideline, he turned and saw Packers coach Mike McCarthy and responded with his own version of Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers’ famed “discount double check” championship belt celebration.
“It was spur of the moment,’’ Ryan says. “I looked up and saw Mike McCarthy, a guy I have a tremendous amount of respect for. I love the guy. But he was also the guy who cut me in Green Bay, so I sort of gave him a friendly point in his face and a little discount double check. Looking back, that was a terribly cocky thing to do. But I had fun with it. I don’t think there are any hard feelings.”
Ryan says from about 2016 on he knew his playing days might be numbered.
He was always a baseball fan, so he began to consider opportunities to run or own a minor league baseball team, which eventually led him to Alan Miller and the two became the majority owners a year later of the Portland Pickles of the West Coast League, a collegiate summer wooden bat league.
“I didn’t realize I’d play five or six more years,” he said.
Indeed, after his release from the Seahawks he played two seasons with his hometown Saskatchewan Roughriders and one more in Edmonton in 2022.
Ryan and Miller have since bought into two other minor league baseball teams — the Lake County Captains, a team in Eastlake, Ohio, that is a High-A affiliate of the Cleveland Guardians, and the Cleburne (Texas) Railroaders, an independent team, and Dallas Jackals Rugby.
Ryan does a bit of everything, from working with the finances to mentoring younger employees. He says he’d estimate he’s already seen 35 games this season.
“It’s hard to call it work when you’re sitting watching baseball for half the time,’’ he said.
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