As the Seattle Seahawks lean harder into AI for scouting and game-planning, Los Angeles Rams quarterback Matthew Stafford’s wife, Kelly Stafford, is saying out loud what a lot of NFL fans are probably thinking too. Her worry isn’t over the top, just honest, and it hints at where the league might be headed.

“I’m sure everyone is doing this or maybe not, I don’t know… but it just doesn’t feel right,” Kelly Stafford posted on her Instagram story.

Kelly Stafford’s unease doesn’t come from nowhere, either. According to The Athletic‘s Jourdan Rodrigue, Seattle is one of several teams weaving AI tools like Copilot deeper into daily operations, and it’s showing up in places you might not expect.

Brian Eayrs, the team’s director of football analysis and special situations, is using AI to run game models and comb through film, work that used to eat up hours of manual review.

Head coach Mike Macdonald likes what he’s seeing. His thinking is pretty straightforward: if AI can crunch data faster than any coaching staff, that leaves more time for actual coaching, building game plans, and working with players instead of getting buried in spreadsheets.

For Macdonald, this isn’t really about chasing a trend. He told Rodrigue there was always something about the old way of doing things that bugged him.

“That was something that always bothered me about my experiences coming up,” he said. “Why is there so much resistance to trying? Why are we not trying to find the absolute best way to do things?’ It still drives me crazy to this day. How can you live with yourself if you’re just squeaking by?”

And Macdonald isn’t alone in this. Across the league, coaches are quietly experimenting. Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni admitted to Zach Berman that he’s turned to ChatGPT for help finding inspiration when writing motivational speeches for his team.

This isn’t Seattle’s first time messing around with AI either. Back in May 2023, the Seahawks used DALL-E 2 to make fun images of their mascot facing off against rivals like the Eagles, Titans, Cardinals, 49ers, and Steelers, done up as photos, pencil sketches, cubist art, even stained glass.

Now general manager John Schneider is talking about something bigger. With the Khosla family stepping in as new ownership, Schneider believes their AI expertise could push the franchise forward in three areas that matter most: medicine, scouting, and coaching.

“If we want to be the franchise of the future, where can we take this thing?” Schneider said during his August 30 press conference. “Whether it’s in the medical field, scouting, and coaching, wherever, we’re going to do whatever we possibly can to just crush it with these people.”

When asked if Seattle was falling behind other teams on the AI front, Schneider pushed back, though he joked that feeling behind is just part of what keeps the organization hungry.

“We’re doing a good job with it,” he said, “but we can go way, you know, we could take this to another level in a pretty quick manner, I believe.”

Even ownership is getting in on it. Vinod Khosla showed up to his first game as owner wearing custom black and blue Seahawks shoes designed entirely with ChatGPT’s help, right down to tracking down an Italian shoemaker who could deliver them in four days.

“The shoes are a funny story,” Khosla said. “Last week, I said, ‘I’d like something special for this event.’ And I got online and said to ChatGPT, ‘ Design me a shoe and a logo; the logo I tweeted. The shoe, which I’m wearing right now, I said, design it. And it designed this really nice design. You can judge for yourself. But I liked it.”

Between the shoes, the mascot art, and now scouting and medicine, it’s clear AI isn’t going anywhere in Seattle. Whether everyone around the league is fully comfortable with that is a different question entirely.