After every Super Bowl victory, the winning team makes the trip to Washington, D.C., to celebrate with the president at the White House. But this season, reports began to swirl that Sam Darnold and his team had already declined the invitation. The only problem? The narrative the internet ran with tells a very different story from what is actually happening on the ground.

“The White House has not responded to four inquiries from The Seattle Times. According to an NFL source who was not authorized to speak on the matter, no White House invitation has been extended to the Seahawks as of Wednesday, despite online speculation that the team had declined an invite,” the Seattle Times reported on February 18.

The rumors began after an unverified post on X from a user named Ron Wright claimed the Seahawks had declined a White House invitation. The post generated 4.1 million views. According to the Seattle Times, no invitation has been issued to the team yet, and it remains “unclear” whether President Donald Trump will extend such an invitation to the Seahawks at all.

What makes this story even more telling is how these invitations typically work. When the White House extends an invitation to a championship team, it is a public event. No such announcement has come from the administration. And the Seahawks organization has been equally tight-lipped, with no player, coach, or official making any public statement on the matter as of this writing.

To understand why this tradition carries such weight, it helps to go back to where it all started.

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In 1980, President Jimmy Carter became the first sitting president to formally honor championship sports teams at the White House, inviting both the Pittsburgh Steelers and the World Series-winning Pittsburgh Pirates to celebrate their respective victories.

That gesture of national recognition became a tradition, and for decades, championship teams made the trip to Washington as a matter of course. The tradition, however, has grown far more complicated in recent years.

The precedents that put Sam Darnold’s Seahawks in the crosshairs

The speculation swirling around the Seahawks is not emerging in a vacuum. It is being shaped by a charged political climate and, more importantly, by real instances from the past. History, it turns out, has given this rumor plenty of room to breathe.

The most famous of those instances came in 2018, and it remains the most significant rupture the tradition has ever seen. For the first time in the history of the White House championship visit, an entire team’s celebration collapsed. President Trump stepped in with a public statement to explain why.

“The Philadelphia Eagles are unable to come to the White House with their full team to be celebrated tomorrow. They disagree with their president because he insists that they proudly stand for the National Anthem, hand on heart, in honor of the great men and women of our military and the people of our country,” Trump said at that time.

That statement did not come out of nowhere. It followed a wave of Eagles players (including safety Malcolm Jenkins and defensive end Chris Long) publicly refusing to attend the event. Only five or fewer players were actually willing to show up, per ESPN reporter Don Van Natta. So, Trump called it off. In its place, the White House held what it called a “Celebration of America.”

When the Eagles won Super Bowl LIX last season, those memories came flooding back immediately. Speculation was swift: would history repeat itself? This time, the team did attend. Head coach Nick Sirianni led the Eagles to the White House on April 28, 2025, for a ceremony hosted by President Trump. 

But not everyone made the trip. Jalen Hurts was absent, citing scheduling conflicts. The visit happened, but the image of a fully united championship celebration remained elusive. Which brings us back to Seattle. 

If the White House does extend an invitation to the Seahawks and the team decides to attend, it will be a genuine cross-country journey. Seattle is among the most geographically remote NFL franchises in the entire league, sitting approximately 2,322 miles from Washington.