Well, that was a suck wet butt experience at Lumen Field yesterday. I walked into the stadium expecting a very competitive game, and what I witnessed was an absolute abyssal beatdown where the Seattle Seahawks weren’t just playing the Buffalo Bills, but they decided that they needed to play against themselves, as well. From start to finish there were so many fuck ups that I started to lose count after a while, and by the time we entered the fourth quarter, I honestly began to laugh in my very expensive seat in the stands.

They left me no other choice. From the opening series where Ryan Grubb called three play action passes in a row that netted zilch without any honest attempt to establish the run first to earn the right to play action pass, to center Connor Williams doing anything possible to prevent Geno Smith from making a play in the red zone, to Mike Macdonald’s defense continuing to be unable to stop the run, to Geno throwing bad passes into triple coverage, to Derick Hall making a boneheaded roughness call on Josh Allen that prevented a key defensive stop, to Dee Williams’ muffing yet another punt return, to Geno drawing a penalty on the Buffalo sideline, to Jarran Reed and Derick Hall fighting with each other on the Seattle side, it all sorta morphed into a shit show comedy act.

I totally understand if you have lost or are losing faith with the new regime in charge of the Seattle Seahawks. Mike Macdonald and his coaches have so much work to do. They need to be helped by John Schneider, immensely, to fix this god awful offensive line.

In fact, Schneider needs to get off his ass and fix this line next offseason as if his entire career and legacy here is on the line. Jody Allen should be on the phone with him today giving him an absolute ear full on how bad this line is playing and how little money he has chosen to spend there where other teams have in comparison.

I get all of your frustrations. I really do, but I also gotta say, realistically speaking, most regime changes involving first time head coaches go through rough patches, and perhaps, just perhaps what we are watching when Mike Macdonald’s Seahawks face Super Bowl quality teams this year like Detroit, San Francisco, and Buffalo, and they lose ugly, is that this is part of the process of what they have to hammer out as a collective of players and coaches together.

This would be my holistic view of looking at the greater picture of this new staff with this team they inherited.

This is the holistic take I strive to have in many walks of life as I am now 55 years old, I have seen a lot of shit, made tons of mistakes in my life, and have squarely had to learn from the school of hard knocks because I was never a silver spooned baby with a wealthy family to help bail me out. You fuck up, and then you figure out how to learn and fix it. This is life on Earth for most of us, and Mike Macdonald and his coaches and these players are no different, neither is John Schneider with all of his status.

I wake up every morning, and I solely rely on holistic approaches of not letting emotion blur reason, faith, or hope. This is how I exist as a self employed landscaper, father, husband, and diehard Seattle Seahawk fan. It is what helps me through my own mediocre existence where so many things that frustrate me are well beyond my control and my own sense of hope can be challenged.

Taking emotion out of frustrating circumstances helps me to see the larger pictures, and the more daunting the task that becomes revealed helps me see that proper tasks that must be done. This is true in all walks of life, and it is very true with these Seattle Seahawks right now.

Let me move forward in this piece by telling a little story about myself as it ties into how we all got here to this place today as Seattle Seahawk fans.

When I decided to start writing this blog, I never intended to become a football shrink for stressed out friends and family. I think I have been doing this for about six years now, and it has, for the most part, been a fun little passion project where I could express my views on the Seattle Seahawks, a quirky little professional football team up in the PNW that I have followed passionately for over forty years now.

A lot of other bloggers and online fan pages of this team had gotten very jaded with Pete Carroll and crew, and I wanted to offer a lighter more optimistic take. I thought I had ample reasons for optimism and I wanted to share the sunshine-y takes.

At the time I started this blog, we had Russell Wilson in Seattle, who was nationally viewed as a top five quarterback in the league, and we had Pete Carroll as the head coach, who many thought was destined to be a one day Hall of Famer. Together, they seemed like the perfect pair. In fact, they seemed so perfect together, that deceased owner Paul Allen thought to choose them over core Legion of Boom players that were heavy lifters of our back to back Super Bowl years.

Over time, that perfect union of quarterback and head coach eroded. The QB got pissed that he couldn’t pass enough in the offense here, and was probably very pissed to see the team pee away two first round picks to the NY Jets for a run stopping safety instead of investing those picks on a better offensive line in front of him, and he eventually orchestrated a trade out of Dodge. Then, the head coach could never get his defense back on track enough again, and he was unceremoniously fired, in result.

Fans, especially young fans all throughout Twitter X, wanted a young hotshot in his place. They either wanted Mike Macdonald, the brilliant young defensive coach from Baltimore, or they wanted Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson. The mere suggestion that Seattle should hire Dan Quinn as Pete Carroll’s replacement practically induced split pea vomit out of these fan’s mouths much like the Exorcist girl. The idea of Mike Vrabel was also repulsive to the hipster crowd of Seahawks Twitter.

No, they wanted Macdonald, or Johnson. They needed young, and fresh, and smart! No NFL retread coaches are good enough for this team even though Pete Carroll was the epitome of an NFL retread and his got us to two Super Bowls and a Super Bowl victory.

Well, Seattle landed Mike Macdonald, and we all got excited over that, right? RIGHT?!

Then, they hired heavily celebrated University of Washington offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb, and that doubled everyone’s excitement, right? Right?!

We had the brightest defensive minded in professional football as our new HC, and we just paired him with the brightest offensive mind in college. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, apparently enough to where all these hipster young Seahawk Twitter X punks want to get rid of both after eight games of producing a 4-4 record, and that’s not the worst of it. I now have to play some sort of pseudo shrink to a number of impatient friends on social media, message apps, and text threads.

Okay, this is now where we all are.

Well, okay. I know my role in all of this now. As we are in the brink of a potential existential crisis as a country heading into this national election, my role in all of this, in my own feeble middled aged mediocre existence, is to be a strong enough voice to reason to tell emotionally tormented Seattle Seahawk fans how it is with this team, for realz, both good and bad.

Mike Macdonald might very well be a talented young head coach with a bright future with upside higher than Dan Quinn, and Mike Vrabel. I think he might, and I am still willing to buy stock in that despite what has happened in these four losses. I think this team is not as bad as these losses make them seem, nor is it as good as these wins make them appear to be.

Mike is trying to figure it all out through this process, and as smart of a coach as he might be, he does not have the Super Bowl experience that Dan Quinn has as a coach, and he doesn’t have the pelts on the wall that a Vrabel has either in dealing with a locker room, and all the shit that can go down inside it when things aren’t consistently going well enough on Sundays. He strikes me as a very bright guy, but not a fiery guy, and because of that, this feels like a critical week for him to get this team back on course, or this season is really going to be a lost one.

I gotta be honest, though, Vrabel was a guy I was very interested in for this gig because of his stature, and his success as a player on Super Bowl teams, and the immediate success he found in Tennessee taking over what had been a garbage team before he got there, and had them playing respectably.

Dan Quinn is a guy I also liked a lot to replace Pete because of his knowledge of the culture up here, and for his ability to lead while being a coach that players really like a lot, and are willing to play hard for. Watching his initial success in Washington isn’t a real surprise for me. I think he is a much better coach than Seahawk fans who didn’t want him up here made him out to be online.

I will also say this right now, I think that if Quinn or Vrabel were the coach of this team right now, we would probably be a 5-3 team with this roster. I don’t think we would have dropped the game against the Giants.

That said, I don’t see this team markably worse with Macdonald, but I think that we have to really step back, and acknowledge as fans that Macdonald is a brand new, never before been head coach, head coach in this league. I think we also have to acknowledge that his offensive coordinator has never called plays against NFL quality defenses until this year.

I think we need to grant these coaches time to figure all of this out with the roster they have to work with this year. I suspect they don’t have all the pieces they need, either, and I think that speaks to a much bigger issue with this team that probably not enough fans want to acknowledge.

Folks, I think we got a DK Metcalf problem.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I got nothing largely against DK Metcalf. In fact, I lean on the side of extending him rather than trading him away for a pick, or picks that won’t likely give this team a worthwhile return in exchange.

No, we got a DK problem because I think this team, specifically Grubb, as an offensive coordinator, needs to rely too much on him for this offense to open up, and function. Allow me to explain this further.

Seattle has almost $60 million dollars tied into their wide receiver room between DK Metcalf and Mister Seattle Seahawk Himself Tyler Lockett. Conversely, Seattle has the cheapest offensive line in the league. John Schneider himself has said that he thinks guards get over drafted and over paid in this league. Let that sink in for a moment.

If you look at things this way, the Ryan Grubb pairing with Macdonald makes sense. Initially, I thought it was a bit of an odd choice to pair a defensive minded head coach with an offensive coordinator who favors a wide open passing offense, as usually defensive minded head coaches value a strong running attack, but eight games into this season, and this debacle against Buffalo sans DK Metcalf makes it all make perfectly clear sense to me now.

Ryan Grubb was brought in to make Seattle’s offense thrive by the usage of DK Metcalf being a vertical threat to take pressure off of a cheap as snot offensive line to eventually open up run opportunities for Ken Walker, who with the ball in his hands in space, is a very special runner of the rock. Without DK in this game, however, there was nobody, not a single receiver tasked to stretch this very so so Buffalo defense.

That is as damning as anything. $30 million Tyler Lockett caught one fricking pass for nine freaking yards, for God’s sake. I would venture to say the $30 Pocket Rocket Lockett is very very not very without the presence of DK helping him out.

In result, this offense that looked very good last week against Atlanta’s very so so defense, ran the ball for 32 yards on 17 carries for an average of 1.9 yards per carry. Conversely, Buffalo ran all over Macdonald’s defense, which is now a painful theme to this season.

Seattle fired Pete Carroll and replaced him with an unproven head coach whose defense really isn’t that much different than the one that fan’s wanted Carroll ousted for about last year. Worse off, Seattle is running the ball worse than they have in years because of the offensive coordinator paired with Macdonald.

Now, without DK Metcalf, a player who many fans seem to have a special axe to grind with, against Buffalo, Seattle wasn’t even able to pass the freaking ball with much effect, and their passing offense might have been their one calling card this year up to this gawd awful point in time.

So, yeah, Seattle does have a DK problem. I actually think they kinda have a DK and Tyler problem, to be even more exact.

They have thrown so much money into these two receivers that they cannot build a functional offensive line paid to the rate of other lines are in this league, and they are relying on Geno Smith to be a hero against constant pressure every Sunday. Without DK in this one, you might as well have asked him to throw with one hand tied behind his back because Ryan Grubb was not giving him many good options outside of a few nice plays to JSN and AJ Barner, and one to Jake Bobo.

Geno Smith played lousy in this game against the Bills, and I say this being a Geno fan. In fact, I thought it was his crappiest game in a while. He threw zero touchdowns and an interception, but he could have thrown three more interceptions with the way he was throwing into double and triple coverage.

I would also say that Geno was not helped by his offensive line (especially his center who stepped on him and also hiked the ball over his head), and he was not helped by Grubb who called three dumb play action pass plays in a row to miserably start the game because the Buffalo defense was instantly in Geno’s grill. It was that kind of day from start to finish.

So, I don’t really know what to say to you fans who feel like you are at the end of your ropes with this club right now outside of just breathe. Take a walk, look at the much bigger picture of all the stuff Macdonald and John Schneider must figure out. There might be some coaching issues within this staff, but there is most certainly personnel issues on this offensive line, and perhaps still the front seven of this defense.

In all of this, I find it incredibly hard to pour most of the blame on top of Mike Macdonald, who is in the midst of figuring out how to be an NFL head coach in real time with a crap ass offensive line, with an offensive coordinator from college who is trying to figure out what he can do in a league of NFL defenses with this crap ass offensive line. The lack of serious focus to improve and invest in this line is killing their chances at early success in their coaching experience up here.

That is not a coaching issue. That is a lack of priority issue on the front office and the man who runs here. This is a John Schneider issue that only John Schneider can fix, or Jody Allen needs to find the person who will.

So, no. I do not think it was a mistake to hire Macdonald. I think this team has to go through this lumps with him, and use this year to figure out who the core pieces on this roster are going to be for him moving into next year.

People are free to rip on him and his defense right now, if they want to, but I will say that up through the first half of this game, I think this defense was holding in well enough if the offense could have just gotten out of its own way. It was the offense that was completely shitting all over themselves. I think the second half was simply a tale of the damn finally breaking against a really good Super Bowl contending team.

And no, I don’t think Macdonald has lost this team as one of my friends suggested to me that he thought he has. I think they are fighting for him, but they just aren’t fighting smart enough.

Maybe that is a coaching thing, but maybe it is also that this is a really young team and players like Derick Hall, who gathered the boneheaded roughness call in the second half, are just getting caught up in trying too hard to make a play that mistakes happen.

So, just let me circle back and say again that maybe, if there is one solid piece of advice that I can give to you fans who were pining a lot of hopes on this team having some special magical first year with Coach Macdonald, I would really just suggest that you find some sort of way to have patience with this process. I think the truth of what Ryan Grubb is trying to do with this offense has exposed the systemic truth about this team, finally, and maybe that is a positive step forward.

Yes, it is true that Sean McVay found instant success in his first year as a first time head coach with the Rams, but that isn’t really super normal with most first time head coaches in this league. Dan Campbell struggled with a very rough start in his coaching career in Detroit, and was a popular laughing stock league wide with fans. Kyle Shanahan coached the 49ers to losing seasons in each of his first three years as their head coach before they ascended to become a Super Bowl quality team.

Seattle chose Mike Macdonald over Dan Quinn and others, knowing that there was a chance of struggling through a rookie year with him with a brand new coaching staff taking over a roster almost entirely of Pete Carroll players. John Schneider is probably banking on this being a process before all the dividends pay off. That’s what I would assume, anyways.

I think it is now up to John Schneider to wake up to his frugal ways in regard to the offensive line and pony up on investing to improve it now. This is the honest truth about this team as I see it moving forward.

In that, I think there is now a very realistic possibility that a number of these players that we have grown to love under Carroll will not be a piece of this thing in a year’s time. I’m not convinced Geno Smith is going to be here as much as I like him. I don’t know if Riq Woolen is a fit, if Tyler Lockett will stick, or even DK, and many others.

Who on this team is going to step up, and become a core Mike Macdonald guy? Is Devon Witherspoon going to be that, or is he going to continue to miss tackles, and now give up passes in coverage? Is Boye Mafe going to step forward and play harder? Is K9 going to quit dancing around in the backfield and decide to go more beast mode in the face of subpar run blocking? Is Byron Murphy going to decide to tear loose as a pissed off disruptive force at DT that he was drafted to be?

This is what I am looking for in these nine remaining games. I want to see who is going to step up and fight with every ounce of their might.

All I know is that Mike Macdonald wants this program to be physical and right now, they are not nearly physical enough. If he wants to build this thing up towards the Baltimore Ravens blue print, they have got to be able to run the ball, and they have got to be able to stop the run.

The best way to do that is to invest in the offensive line, and continue to pour into the front seven. They have got to do this in free agency and the draft. Under this current roster construction, the best way to do that is to probably move off of some of the expensive players who don’t play there.

This is what I see. This is very much the beginning stage of a major process towards building this thing right. So, I would advise patience.

Go Hawks.