San Francisco 49er beat reporter Michael Silver recently came out with an interesting little article detailing what 49er head coach Kyle Shanahan had planned for the Seahawks last Sunday. Essentially, he placed a bounty out to get DK Metcalf tossed from the game. He showed his defense a highlights of all the times DK had lost his shit, and he said there would be a nice present from Santa for any player who got under his skin enough for him get ejected.

It doesn’t take a genius mind to imagine 49er defenders had spent most of the game trying to incite DK Metcalf into a meltdown. So, I kinda credit DK for keeping his cool up until the last few minutes of the fourth quarter when after an interception, he used a relatively harmless suplex move to tackle Fred Warner, only to see Warner lateral the ball to a teammate, and then shove with his body weight on the back of his neck, the same neck he had broken in college. After that inciting incident, DK lost it, grabbed Warner’s face mask, and was ejected out of the game after it was clear that the 49ers were going to runaway with their decisive victory.

I hope Shanahan got Warner a really dope jet ski on Monday. I am sure the entire collective of the 49er Faithful shared the same euphoric joy watching all that go down. I wouldn’t be surprised if Silver had a big old shit eating grin spread across his face when he submitted his article.

You are free to react to this news however you want to as a Seahawk fan. You can be like me, and call Shanahan a chump coach, or you can be like others, and think that Shanahan is genius for doing it.

Personally, I don’t think he’s a genius at all for this. He didn’t need his defense to get DK Metcalf ejected in order to beat the Seattle Seahawks, not with the way Seattle’s defense has been matching up with his offense, nor the way his defense owned Seattle’s offense.

Nope. In my mind, this was a punk move by the coach. He didn’t just want his team to beat Seattle, he wanted them to have extra fun doing it, and they did.

As a Seattle Seahawk fan, how does that make you feel?

The head coach of your main division rival does not respect your team on any sort of level, at all. He has no fear matching his team up against them.

In fact, in order to make any contest fun, he’s now got to rub it in extra during the win. He’s got to make it a super fun spectacle for the 49er Faithful to bathe in kinda like the mean girl in Season Four of Stranger Things.

I am not a psychologist, but I have been around the block enough times to recognize certain things. When I look at these 49ers and their head coach, I see a smug arrogance that thinks they are way ahead of everyone else. That’s fine. They are playing on fire right now, and have kinda earned the right to be arrogant. That’s not what really bothers me, though.

What really gets under my skin is that they do not fear the Seattle Seahawks in any way, shape or form. If Kyle Shanahan did, I do not think he would have shown his team the DK meltdown highlights in order to create a bounty. If his present day team was facing the 2013 Seattle Seahawk squad on Sunday, he wouldn’t have thought to poke that bear. I guarantee that.

The Seattle Seahawks won Super Bowl XLVIII because Pete Carroll and John Schneider constructed a roster that was so mean, and nasty, and dominating, that Kirk Cousins could have been the quarterback they took 75th overall in 2012 instead of Russell Wilson, and he would have led Seattle to that Super Bowl victory. This is the undeniable truth of our Seattle Seahawk history.

Seattle’s entire identity was built around pissed off and hungry pit bulls and grizzly bears littered all throughout that roster a decade ago. They terrified opponents.

Defensive backs didn’t want to tackle Marshawn Lynch because he was intentionally looking to harm any dude who dared to do it. Receivers and tight ends didn’t want to catch balls thrown over the middle of this defense because Seattle had a strong safety built like a defensive end, and they had a freakishly fast free safety who shot out of his position like a canon ball towards anyone attempting a catch. Quarterbacks got nervous because defensive coordinator Dan Quinn devised a pass rush that made Michael Bennett almost unblockable inside and Cliff Avril too quick to handle outside, and they didn’t want to throw to their right because of Richard Sherman at cornerback. Tacklers got tired of tackling because Seattle had a huge and physical offensive line that wore their bodies down over time. Defensive backs and linebackers got stressed out because they weren’t sure when a play would break down for Seattle’s offense and Russell Wilson would use his legs to make a huge play.

A decade ago, the NFL had a Seattle Seahawk problem. They almost didn’t have an answer for it. This is sadly not the case anymore. It’s the opposite.

The undeniably hard truth about these Seattle Seahawks today is that there is not a team in this league that fears them. That upsets me way more any chump move the 49ers decided to do against a hot tempered DK Metcalf last Sunday.

Kyle Shanahan thought it would be fun to punk this team. He knew that his team wasn’t facing a defense with a fierce front seven that might try to put a little something extra on Brock Purdy if DK got ejected. He wasn’t at all concerned about how the Seattle secondary would hit his receivers. He saw these Seahawks as ducks in a barrel, and he just wanted some extra fun.

He allowed the information of what he was planning for DK Metcalf to reach Michael Silver for publication. He was more than happy to let the world in on his joke. That’s how much respect that he has for the Seattle Seahawks. That’s how much he fears any matchup against them in the future.

I am sure that not only does he believe he is winning the physical battle against Seattle, he now believes he is setting himself up to win the psychological one, as well. I think that is the true motivation behind all of this, why he planned it, and why he let it be known to a 49er beat reporter.

Pete Carroll has lost his way. I believe this now. For whatever reason, he has deviated too far away from the recipe that allowed him to win a Super Bowl in Seattle.

Perhaps it started in 2015 when he allowed for the trade of Jimmy Graham to perhaps appease Russell Wilson and his agent, and the team dealt away the leader of its offensive line in Max Unger as a part of that deal. Unger was a beloved member of Seattle’s locker room, and the stabilizing presence of their offensive line. Graham was an opponent Seattle defenders never respected because he played with a large ego and was soft.

It is perfectly natural to imagine the resentment that built up not only after that fateful transaction. Not only did Pete seemingly try to make Russ the hero at the one yard line during the Super Bowl against New England only to watch it fail in the worst way possible, now he was rewarding Russ with a tight end that did not match the mentality of the team that led them to back to back Super Bowls in the first place.

Pete Carroll chose to placate the quarterback over his core philosophy of how this team was built and operated. He weakened a clear strength of the roster, and he didn’t adjust his offense to play to the strength of its new shiny toy. The rest is history.

Seattle became a team good enough to make post season appearances, but not good enough to advance to the highest points. They never sucked enough to be in positions to draft players like Vita Vea, and to add insult to injury, they reached on players like LJ Collier. Eventually, their legacy driven quarterback had enough, and forced his way to Denver, and now here we have it.

Pete Carroll now has a team that does not feature any feared run game, and his defense is a sad dysfunctional shadow of itself that does not even know what it wants to be. They aren’t physical enough to compete with San Francisco, and they aren’t smart enough to be a good finesse team, either.

In the end, I think he is, in fact, the one to blame for all of this. I have been a Stan of his for many years, but even I cannot shake away this reality.

After all, he is not just the head coach, but he is also the Vice President with overriding powers over general manager John Schneider. Ultimately, the buck stops with him, not Schneider, and that is why I believe these next four games might be do or die for him.

In short, Pete Carroll has four games left in this season to find his way again. I hope he does it. Carroll could absolutely get his team up for a late season rally. I am just kinda pumping the breaks on that.

Presently, I see a Seattle team that is playing with too much dysfunction, and it is drawing up memories of Jim Mora Junior’s lone year as the head coach of this team in 2009. I see safeties and linebackers on defense perhaps now making business decisions on the field. I see a lack of adjusting schemes to better fit the talents that Seattle has to play with. I see players acting out in frustration.

I see a team that looks like it is on the verge of a dramatic free fall, and until Seattle starts to mount wins again, I have no reason to see it in any other way. Therefore, what I need more than anything else is that I need big time changes moving forward after this season has concluded.

As dire as this situation feels to me now, I actually do not necessarily need a change from Pete Carroll, per se. What I need most is actually a return to Seattle being a feared organization again, but if Pete Carroll cannot deliver that, for whatever reason, I need whoever it is out there who will.

I need Seattle to be the team who will get under the skin of Kyle Shanahan again. Even when Seattle was struggling to maintain dominance in the division in recent history, they always proved a tough out for San Francisco. They are not that anymore.

I need the 49er Faithful to feel anxiety and frustration again just like they have for most of the past two decades. If Carroll cannot commit to whatever it takes to bring that back, I need a new head coach who will.

Over the past year or more, I have seen fans cry out for a more innovative younger offensive minded head coach, and I totally get that. Sean McVay and Kyle Shanahan and now Mike McDaniels have made former offensive coordinator to HC storylines the new sexy thing, and many now firmly believe that you need an offensive minded head coach to succeed this day and age in this league.

I won’t argue against the merits of transitioning from Carroll to an offensive minded head coach, but for me, that should not be the driving reasoning behind a new hire. Nay, more over, I just need that next guy to be a total bad ass who his players will love and bite off knees for.

If I can’t have Dan Campbell, I want a dude who will revel in coaching up a hard hitting, tough blocking, fierce fighting team that nobody will enjoy playing against on Sundays. I don’t care if that is an offensive minded coach, or a defensive minded one.

I want someone who will look at San Francisco with Kyle Shanahan, and will be willing to dig deep for ways in which he will his squad will piss off, annoy, and fluster them. It could be Ben Johnson, the hotshot OC at Detroit who a lot of people seem to love, or with fun irony, it could be Jim Harbaugh. It could even be the current OC of the Eagles.

In my mind, it could also be Dan Quinn or Robert Saleh who have coached with Shanahan and know his tendencies well. People can scoff at both defensive minded coaches, but I won’t write them off. Saleh is stuck in a shit situation with the highly dysfunctional Jets and yet his team still fights hard for him. With Quinn, I see a coach entirely worthy of a second chance and he is a guy who players will absolutely run through walls for.

Everywhere Quinn goes, players play hard for him, and love him. Some believe that the true demise of the Legion Of Boom wasn’t that the league caught up to them, but that Dan Quinn left them. That says something to me.

It could also be Dan Lanning down at Oregon who is as fiery and bad assed as it comes as a coach. If you have any doubts, go surf the web on some of his pregame speeches. He’s a foaming at the mouth pit bull who gets his guys playing hard, fast, and furious. I like that dude a lot.

And yes, it could absolutely be Kalen DeBoer at Washington with the way he coaches up the details and the resiliency his teams exude on the field.

I could even make a strong case for Kevin Stefanski in Cleveland with the way he continues to have the Browns fighting despite their shit quarterback situation.

Ultimately, though, at least in my mind, it could still be Carroll. Maybe he’s now grown tired of being a nice guy with his underperforming roster, and is ready to shake things up. Again, he has four games left to turn this around, and make it a season.

All I know is that I want a feared NFL team playing in Seattle again. That’s what I want from these Seahawks more than anything else.

I want a team that is going to give Kyle Shanahan a hand full when he’s preparing against it, and he isn’t going to have time to think about chump moves again. I want a team that will force him lose his own gasket in the late stages of a game.

This is what I want for these Seattle Seahawks. This is what I need.

Go Hawks.