Time is ticking in the Super Bowl. A blitz of navy and green swarms New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye as he throws downfield out of desperation. Maye’s shoulder tilts. The football is knocked away, plunged into Seattle Seahawks linebacker Uchenna Nwosu’s arms. Nwosu hustled, finding the last burst he needed for a pick-six.
Of the millions of Seahawks fans celebrating the play that sealed a dominant Super Bowl LX victory, perhaps the one grinning the most was one of the connoisseurs in the booth helping write up the play.
“That sealed the game,” said Seahawks outside linebackers coach Chris Partridge ‘02. “After that touchdown, it’s like, ‘Oh, shoot. We just won a Super Bowl.’”
Partridge’s football journey began as a freshman living on the first floor of McKeen Hall, playing as a Leopards linebacker.
He played under two coaches at Lafayette College — the late Bill Russo and four-time Patriot League winning coach Frank Tavani — before returning to College Hill as a coach himself. He led the team in tackles when he broke a seven-game skid against Lehigh University in 2002, after an ACL tear sidelined him.
“He was telling people well before the game started, ‘We’re gonna win,’” said Lafayette head football coach John Troxell ‘94, who coached Partridge as an assistant and was later his colleague, of the rivalry matchup. “He was telling the students, ‘We want you to rip down the goalpost.’ And they did.”
Partridge said he “felt really connected to the place,” as he coached Lafayette’s defensive backs and special teams in 2005.
“I wouldn’t choose anywhere else,” he said.
“Some guys, they just want to talk football all the time,” Tavani said. “You can tell, and that was Chris. But he also knew how to have a good time.”
“We remember asking him for help, trying to understand the X’s and O’s of what we were doing,” said Barret Diefenderfer ’02, Partridge’s roommate and teammate. “In hindsight, you just see how that has set him up for a phenomenal coaching career. That’s just how his mind operates.”
Partridge arrived at the Seahawks after stints under head coaches Lane Kiffin and Jim Harbaugh. He was fired by the University of Michigan in a larger sign-stealing scandal — though he was later cleared of wrongdoing — and made headlines for a mid-game scuffle against the Los Angeles Rams staff members during the regular season.
Partridge called himself a “fiery” and “passionate coach.”
John Loose, Partridge’s defensive coordinator at Lafayette, said he visited his student when he was a defensive coordinator at the University of Mississippi; he was “awestruck” by Partridge’s coaching.
“He’s ready for that head football job,” said Loose, who said Partridge’s biggest strengths as a player were his work ethic and leadership.
Partridge’s time at the Seahawks consists of rinsing and repeating. Rigid schedules of watching film, executing game plans and treatment. Thursday practices are the most challenging, he said.
“It takes some time to look at the practice, the plays that are being run,” Partridge said. “I try to pride myself on not giving a player the same look twice, because it’s just a wasted rep.”
That approach paid off. He watched the Seahawks shut out the Patriots in the first three quarters, sacking Maye on six occasions — two carried out by linebacker Derick Hall.
“It was incredible, just an incredible feeling,” Partridge said of the post-final-whistle feeling, as he got to meet his wife and kids on the stadium’s turf.
Partridge plans to keep coaching at the Seahawks, calling the team “unselfish” and a group that “puts their egos at the door and just wants to win for each other.”
He said that at the Seahawks’ last team meeting on Tuesday, “nobody wanted to leave.”
“Everyone was sitting there, saying, ‘Let’s go. Can we practice? Can we keep playing?’” he said. “It was real, and it was authentic. We just won the Super Bowl, but we were ready to keep going.”
