I have no idea how good Mike Macdonald is going to be as the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, but I have a growing sense of optimism that he could end up being pretty darn good down the line. For one, I think he is a pretty bright fella, and he’s a straight shooter when he speaks. I am pretty good at feeling out personalities, and I feel really good about his. I also like it that, through ten games now, he doesn’t get too high after wins, nor does he get beaten down about tough losses, either.

There is a level headedness about him that I think can lead him down a pretty successful path as a NFL head coach. This is what my gut tells me about this guy.

This doesn’t mean that I have felt doubts creep in with some of these disappointing losses that mounted over the past month of football after a very promising start to the season. I still have some doubts about how this style of offense can connect with his defense, but those doubts are more directed towards the pass happy offensive coordinator than the head coach who is also calling the defense.

What I think it means is that, even in this up and down start to his NFL head coaching career, I get the sense that Macdonald is going to figure it out, and the Seahawk general manager John Schneider is going to figure out better what types of players Macdonald needs to truly see his vision for this team through. In fact, I think this is what we are in the middle of in real time; a process of the head coach and the general manager figuring it out together.

Let’s think about it for a moment.

Last offseason, Seattle waited out the coaching market to poach Macdonald from the Baltimore Ravens after most of the many other head coaching hires were made, outside of Dan Quinn who went to Washington after the Commanders lost their bid for Macdonald. In doing this, Seattle lost opportunities to build their staff with coaches who would have been top candidates as they got plucked up by other teams, and that includes members of the Baltimore staff who would have had familiarity with Macdonald.

John Schneider and Macdonald had to scramble late to bring in their coaches right during the NFL scouting combine was set to begin. At the time, it was exciting to see them steal Ryan Grubb away from Kalen DeBoer, who locally bolted away from Washington to Alabama in college, but what we are learning now is that it is one thing to coach a wide open full throttle offense against college defenses, but it is something else to coach that way in the pros, especially if you do not have a top shelf offensive line.

In hindsight, it shouldn’t be a great surprise that this team has been very up and down through ten games, but that has not stopped the critics and fans from piling on. Blogs that I regularly read have been lashing out towards Schneider and casting doubt all over Macdonald. It has been all over podcasts, as well.

Last week was all about dramatic news breaking around this team, and a lot of people reacting to it with very strong takes. On Monday, Seattle cut its leading tackler in Tyrel Dodson, and then later in the week starting center Connor Williams decided to retire at age 27. On podcasts, and sports radio, and in blogs, so much talk quickly became about how terrible of a job John Schneider did last offseason replacing Bobby Wagner and Jordyn Brooks with two free agent linebackers who are now no longer on the team. A lot of talk, deservedly so, was also centered on how badly Schneider handled building Macdonald a functional offensive line.

I heard and watched multiple beat reporters and podcasters state how much John Schneider needed to be on the hot seat. I felt an impulse to write my own take on it, but decided to hold off. I had already written in the previous week saying that my midseason grade on the Seahawks was an incomplete because of the shambolic state of their offseason line, and I felt like I already dumped enough on Schneider.

So, when this news broke on Dodson being waived and Williams deciding to retire, I decided it would be best to see how their replacements played against a tough San Francisco team first before blasting on Schneider and the team again. I am glad I did.

Who knows what was really going down with both former players, but up until the previous game against the Rams, Seattle was having massive problems stopping the run, and hiking the ball out of shotgun became a clown show adventure all the past month. In this game against the Niners, rookie linebacker Tyrice Knight played pretty damn well as a tackler (and in coverage), and at least Olu Oluwatimi looked like a functional NFL center in a shotgun offense. It seems like Mike Macdonald made the absolute right call on replacing Dodson with Knight, and for all we know with what was really going on behind the scenes with Williams at center, he made the right call with switching out to Olu, as well.

This is just one game, and Seattle has seven more to play on the year, but I am taking these personnel switches as a very good sign that Macdonald knows what he is doing as a young head coach. If I am to compare these moves to what we saw out of Pete Carroll sticking it out with struggling starters in recent years, I will just say that I appreciate having someone at the helm of the ship willing to make tough calls when the ship isn’t sailing as well as it should be.

After all, it was Carroll who chose to keep trodding out Jamal Adams as his starting strong safety when it was clear that he was terrible in coverage, and it was also Carroll who seemed to maintain an affection towards an aging Bobby Wagner who wasn’t really willing to take on blockers like he used to do. Staying stubborn with struggling high profile players because of their contract status and personalities is not a winning formula in this unforgiving league. I will forever remember the home game against the Steelers last December when I witnessed Bobby Wagner getting constantly washed away by guards, and not being impactful in any sort of way against the run, and feeling like that was going to be the end of Carroll in Seattle.

Contrast those circumstances last year to the apparent two game defensive turnaround we are seeing this year with Macdonald, and I am feeling way more confident about the long term outlook over this team, and I am happy to be a positive contrarian to whomever doubters remain out there. I will wear the rose colored glasses for this long tested Seahawk fanbase moving forward.

In these last two games, we have seen Macdonald shift his defensive scheme out of the lighter boxes he had been deploying into more 4-3 type packages with four down linemen, and it has been paying off. I think he deserves a ton of credit to be willing to abandon some of the exotic stuff he has been known for as a coordinator in Baltimore for a more meat and potatoes style defense that is needed in this division against teams like prefer to run the rock. This has been an adjustment that Carroll was unwilling to make last year, at any point.

It is early in Madonald’s career here in Seattle, but moving swiftly off of Jerome Baker in favor of Ernest Jones via a trade, waving Dodson in favor for a fourth round rookie draft pick in Knight, and perhaps Oluwatimi in favor of Williams, and getting this gutsy win in Santa Clara against the divisional bully San Francisco 49ers as a result is most likely going to go a long way for him with a locker room of alphas who need good leadership to succeed. Players are now going to be more willing to buy in because they will believe that he is willing to do whatever it takes, and he will reward those in the lower depths of the roster more playing time if they are working harder than established starters within his system.

So, make no mistake about it, this defeat of the San Francisco 49ers in Santa Clara was the signature win of the year for Mike Macdonald. This is the game that, against the face of all the drama and doubt casting last week, Macdonald had his players playing hard, playing gritty, and playing better than a dominant divisional opponent.

I don’t want to hear how the Niners didn’t have George Kittle in the game, or Nick Bosa in the fourth quarter. Seattle was without a number of starters, too, and the games still have to be played. San Fransisco, across the board, is the more talented roster, and yet Mike Macdonald out coached their head coach in this one. This is a fact that the arrogance that exists inside the 49er culture and fanbase cannot hide from.

Macdonald had answers for the nifty runs Kyle Shanahan is known to call, and he had answers for the pass patterns that Shanahan likes to deploy. This time around, he had his defenders staying disciplined enough to make it very tough on the explosive San Francisco offense.

This is most significant because I believe these two organizations are in two really different places. Seattle has a new head coach with a coaching staff of guys who have no history with him, and they are all learning each other on the fly. Kyle has been in San Francisco for eight years now, and has a staff of coaches who know him inside and out.

In terms of talent, Seattle has some really good skill players, and some nice pieces on their defensive line and in their secondary, but they have an offensive line that is built with run blocking guards who don’t pass block well, and they are paired with an offensive coordinator who wants to air it out instead of run it enough. On the flip side, San Francisco is loaded with blue chip talent at key positions on both sides of the ball, and they all know the schemes inside and out.

San Francisco, even without Kittle, and without Bosa in the fourth quarter, should have comfortably kicked the crap out of Seattle. They should have, and yet they did not.

Instead, Macdonald had his defense rested, scrappy, and disciplined coming out of the bye week, and this caught Shanahan and Brock Purdy off guard. On top of that, while Ryan Grubb still play-called an uneven game on offense, Seattle felt, often times, like the better offense, and Geno Smith proved absolutely clutch at the end after Shanahan and Purdy wilted together on offense in the final moments of the game.

So, the big takeaway out of this one for me isn’t that I have some sort of great feeling about Seattle turning their entire season around, and taking the division away from San Fran now, so much as it is that I think, objectively speaking, I would now much rather be a Seattle Seahawk fan than I would being a San Fran fan right now. This is where this victory over the 49ers really becomes fun.

The 49ers are now approaching becoming a team sailing in troubled waters. I will even go so far as to now say this about them.

I don’t think San Francisco ever wins a Super Bowl with Kyle Shanahan as their head coach. This isn’t me rubbing salt onto the wounds of the obnoxiously toxic Bang Bang Gang fanbase, either. This is just the God’s honest truth on how I feel about them with Shanahan as their skipper.

I think Shanahan runs a great offensive system, and he has been supported tremendously by John Lynch’s brilliance at finding him top end talent. That should be enough for them to win a title, but I just don’t think he’s got the stuff within him to truly be a great NFL head coach.

I think he wilts under pressure, and is a toxic leader when things go South, and I think in a couple years after they have made Brock Purdy one of the richest quarterbacks in the league, the talent around Purdy is going to fall off enough to where Shanahan will be coaching somewhere else. Ownership will see that Shanahan will only ever take this team so far, and they will be determined to replace him with a coach who they believe will take it further with Purdy, for better or worse.

This is what the tea leaves tell me after Seahawks just punked the 49ers such as they did. San Francisco, with their tough schedule, needed this win just as badly as Seattle did, if not more, and they have waaaaaaaay more on the line than Seattle has. This loss to Seattle officially puts their season in trouble, and if they do not make a deep playoff run, or the playoffs now at all, their ownership might be looking at making some really tough decisions down the road in the near enough future.

So, yeah, in this tough division when San Fran has been the big bad boss of it for years now, this is very much a signature win for Mike Macdonald and his staff trying to build something special together in Seattle. This is a pelt that they can now place on the walls of the VMAC.

For me, as a Seahawk fan, I now feel even better seeing this process with Macdonald as probably a two or three year thing before we really see the fruits of what he is trying to build come together. I can be patient for that. I think that there is still a lot of work that lays ahead, but I trust that Macdonald has got the stuff inside him that will now make the right calls at the leader of this regime.

My biggest question mark about this team right now is that I just don’t know if Ryan Grubb is going to cut it here as the OC, or if Macdonald will make a switch to someone who will call a more conventional ball control kinda offense with Geno, or whoever else is at QB. I also think next offseason, ownership must kick John Schneider in the ass to get Macdonald a better guard situation, but assuming that happens and this offensive line improves greatly next year, is this pass happy approach by Grubb a sustainable thing to win titles with?

I have my doubts.

As much as I love Geno Smith, his continual pension to throw a bad interception in this pass happy offensive is really starting to wear thin with me. I love the way he took this game over in the end, and the heroic flourish he ended it with, but I just really need to start seeing cleaner play from start to finish in games. When I look at Geno, and all his traits that make him a quality starter, I can envision him very successful in a run heavy play action style offense Jared Goff operates out of with Detroit, and I think with some improved guard play, that could be a really cool thing with this Macdonald defense.

Does Grubb have it in him to adjust his style as Macdonald has shown an ability to do on defense? We shall see soon enough.

As I close my eyes and envision Seattle becoming a true contender in a year or two, I just see a better balanced ball control offensive attack as the missing element that completes the circle of Macdonald’s started goal of seeing Seattle become a tough, physical, explosive team. Through these last two games against the Rams and 49ers, you can see the sign of the defense turning. Now we need to see the offense match up with it. That might take a full other offseason, frankly, to get the necessary pieces, or even the right play caller.

As fans, I think we should grant John Schneider and Macdonald the chance to see it through, though. I think all of this talk about Schneider being on the hot seat, and maybe Macdonald being one and done born out of frustration of passionate fans long frustrated by poor offensive line play, and that is certainly understandable, but in the end, levelheadedness is what is required to move this thing forward the right way, and I think we have that with the new head coach, and I think John Schneider is still one of the best GMs in the game.

We can look to who contributed big in this matchup to see John’s ability to recognize good talents within the last three draft classes of this team.

Charles Cross, and Abe Lucas played good enough to get this W for Seattle. JSN was, again, the best player on offense. K9 was the other offensive factor who kept Seattle very much alive. Olu Oluwatimi felt like a capable center against a tough defensive front. Devon Witherspoon was the most dynamic defender. Derick Hall and Byron Murphy showed well on the defensive line, again. Tyrice Knight played like a quality linebacker, AJ Barner contributed positively, and Cody Bryant now feels like a hot hand at safety. These are all Schneider guys that he drafted early and well into later rounds the past three years.

So let’s just chillax on Schneider being on the hot seat for a while and see how these last seven games play out with these young cats all contributing together before making rash calls for his job. I am genuinely very curious.

And, I will tell you what, I would much rather be a Seahawk fan right now than a San Francisco fan. I would even take being a Rams or a Cardinals fan over the fate the bang bang gangster faithfuls.

Also, fuck this Deommodore Pretend Tough Guy Lenoir. I am so damn glad that San Francisco recently just decided to overpay to keep him in the Bay Area. It is going to be a fun offseason watching them cut good players in favor for this mid level DB and first rate D Bag, and then pay Brock Purdy $60 million per year to be their savior.

As a Seahawk fan who hates the blinding arrogance that exists amongst everything 49er related, I am happily here for all of this. So, eat a turd Lenoir, and maybe now act like you are worth that big fat contract you just signed.

Go Hawks.

When I was in high school and into my early college years, as I spent more time partying, shaking responsibilities, avoiding the hard work necessary to learn, I could never tell what was worse to receive in terms of a grade; an F or an Incomplete. On the surface, the F felt worse, I put forth some effort, and I failed. As I look back on all my derelictions of duty to learn, however, I think the Incomplete gradings were much worse. I would earn those because I simply wasn’t trying.

I’m a slow learner. I also have pretty significant ADD, some dyslexia, maybe some OCD issues, as well, and life can get away from me pretty easily if I allow distractions to take hold over my intents. In my late teens and early twenties, I was all about being distracted.

When I was in high school, I was just trying to survive not being beaten up by several of the brawny tobacco chewing upperclassmen who genuinely appeared to hate my guts, and I made friends with brawny pot smoking lug heads who loved my odd ball jokes whenever I was stoned, and that was often. I yearned to not be in Ferndale High School in the mid to late eighties, but rather to be in a Van Halen video in sunny Southern California. Those were my aims.

In college, I squandered my time going through the motions on deciding what I wanted to study. I thought about law enforcement, but after taking an entry level course in it, I came to a quick conclusion about how Un Miami Vice my lifestyle would have been dealing with 2AM drunks puking in allies. I also thought about psychology, but the clinical terminology felt too incomprehensible for my party boy brain to grasp, and I came to another conclusion that dealing with the mentally ill also didn’t seem like a whole bunch of fun, either.

When I got reports of Incompletes, my self esteem would sink. I knew that I was fucking up because I wasn’t trying, that I was wasting time being in attendance of classes that I could give two fucks about, that I was more concentrated on chasing highs, and avoiding responsibilities. In my early days of college, I could not shake the pattern that I created for myself as a teenager. Being the life of the party felt too comforting and familiar than being someone earnestly trying to get ahead at in college.

Eventually, my much older, wiser, no-nonsense father would figure out what was going on with me. He sat me down, and talked square with a tone that was neither shouting, nor was it soft. It was direct, to the point, and it shook me out of my haze.

“What the hell are you even doing, kid?”

Indeed.

He talked to me about how I might as well back it up, move back home, and grab whatever blue collar job that I could find either at one of the refineries, or doing construction like my older brother. The disappointment that fueled his words hit me to my core. I knew then, and there, that my level of idiocracy hurt his soul. I hated that feeling.

That was enough for me. I woke up to the fact that I was being an aimless doofus. He successfully challenged me, and a few years later, I eventually graduated the University of Washington having made the Dean’s list a couple times with a degree in drama (my term paper on modern English theatre was awesome). In the end, I did okay shaking off enough of my impulses to party to actually learn, grow, and achieve.

So, why am I sharing all of this about myself with you fine folks on the internet?

I think the Seattle Seahawks have been pretty aimless for far too long about the state of their offensive line, and it is costing Mike Macdonald a chance to be a successful head coach in his first year on the job. We cannot tell how good this offense can or cannot be because of the offensive line. I think it is tied into the defense, as well, if we factor in how much better they need to play to make up for all the screw ups on offensive because five guys cannot block four guys in a game with any regularity.

When I look the work that General Manager John Schneider has done constructing this roster for first year head coach Mike Macdonald, a guy who has never been a head coach before at any level, I have to give this them a big fat all in caps INCOMPLETE with the way Schneider shook necessary spending to build upon this offensive line. I just do.

He cavalierly avoided responsibility spending on much needed veteran guards who were on the market, as he elected to overspend on tight end Noah Fant. Instead, he cheaped out by bringing in Laken Tomlinson weeks later after he was still sitting out there because no other front office was interested in him, and then he didn’t draft an offensive linemen until midway through the third round to compete for the other guard spot.

On top of this, he hired former UW offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb to spear head this offense with a poorly constructed offensive line with seemingly lofty hopes that Grubb, who has never coached in the league before, could magically make chicken salad out of a chicken crap line enough to task Geno Smith to throw more drop back passes than any other quarterback in the league. The results of all of this lazy thinking has become a clown show on Sundays. Grubb is play-calling as if he has the best line in the country like he had at Washington last year, and it is perhaps the worst in professional football.

If you are a non Seahawks fan and want a good chuckle, watch Connor Williams snap out of the shotgun to Geno Smith on Sundays, and then watch the right side of Seattle’s offensive line that rarely seems to play with any confidence or determination. I would encourage Benny Hill theme music to be playing in the background.

This is pretty much how we got here to this 4-5 record after a promising 3-0 start to the season. Anyone watching this team through nine games can see it as plain as day.

We have lost five of the past six games, and we have lost four games in a row at home. The root cause of this points directly to John Schneider not doing enough to fix this offensive line that has been a sore spot for this team for years.

I think it is also very fair to criticize the logic of doing this in the face of hiring an offensive coordinator to run this offense who has a pension to want to throw more than run, and lean on plays almost entirely out of the shotgun. Shotgun offenses need strong offensive lines to succeed. When the quarterback isn’t under center, linebackers can read play action better, and they can get to their drops quicker. Shotgun requires offensive linemen to run block without the aid of a fullback clearing lanes for the runner. Shotgun requires a center to snap perfectly at all times.

Some might give this team an F right now, or maybe a D, if they are being more kind, or a C if they are being delusional. I’m going to grade them as an Incomplete because Schneider didn’t do his work. As to why he did not, I think that is anyone’s guess, but I would suggest that perhaps he way overestimated what Seattle could achieve with the big names of DK Metcalf, Tyler Lockett, and Jaxon Smith Njigba at receiver, and Ken Walker at running back, and now expensive Noah Fant at tight end.

At any rate, he did not put in the necessary effort to improve up front, and I say that knowing that draft pundits really liked Christian Haynes, the guard they took in round three, and acknowledging that Schneider did bring back George Fant at right tackle to hedge for Abe Lucas most likely not being ready to come back from a serious knee injury. There is something about this whole methodology that truly bothers me, though, and I believe we have finally reached a point where things need to change, and we no longer have gum chewing Pete Carroll to blame for the delusional handlings of the offensive line for this team.

Schneider cavalierly stated that he believed offensive guard to be the most over spent on position in the league, and over drafted position, as well. At first, I thought this was maybe a smokescreen heading towards the draft, but then when they took defensive tackle Byron Murphy II with their first pick, I concluded that Schneider was probably being pretty frank, and honest.

He doesn’t see guards as being valuable enough. He just doesn’t want to spend the dollars needed to add decent guards. He doesn’t want to take them in the first round. His desire to see resources go elsewhere is almost akin to me rather going to a U District hippy party in 1990 tripping on acid than studying for a crucial midterm exam that will make or break me getting off academic probation.

What is he even doing here?

Fuck, if I know.

To say that I think John Schneider is potentially now on the hot seat would be a titanic understatement, in my mind. With how team owner Jody Allen was shockingly ready to move onto Russell Wilson in 2022, then Pete Carroll at the end of the season last year, it is starting to feel more inevitable that John Schneider might be the final piece to a trifecta of the figureheads of this franchise for over the past decade to get the axe, if he does not reverse his logic and trends now moving forward.

Simply put. If these rookie coaches do not get it together enough as a staff to either properly adjust to fit the talent deficit on the offensive line, or to magically get this unit playing better enough to warrant Geno continually constantly dropping back to air it out to JSN, DK, and Tyler, John Schneider is going to have some really tough questions to answer when he might with Ms Allen and her henchmen after this season concludes.

Why are we set to pay $60 million towards two receivers?

Why is Dre’Mont Jones getting $25 million?

Why is Uchenna Nwuso getting $22 million, and Noah Fant $13 million?

What is the long term plan at quarterback with Geno throwing all these interceptions and set to be paid $38 million for it next year?

And how on Earth is it that backup right tackle George Fant is making more than starting guards Anthony Bradford and Laken Tomlinson combined?

These are just some of the very tough questions that Jody Allen and her top aids will be, and clearly should be asking. There is most likely more, as well.

Why didn’t John Schneider do more to surround first time head coach more seasoned NFL assistants on his staff?

Why didn’t they think to add a few from the Baltimore staff who would have known how he would like things to be?

Why didn’t they add a few of his Baltimore players who were available in free agency to help smooth out the transitional process of schemes?

Did they magically think that this young staff who didn’t know each other, didn’t know Macdonald, some who didn’t even know the league, would suddenly just sync up with each other?

Last week, I wrote a piece defending Mike Macdonald in response to the growing number of fans who believe that this team needs to move off of him. I still firmly believe that he should be given a longer chance here, but I will be watching this team like a hawk over these last eight games to see how they can better gel, play smarter, cleaner, and whether these coaches can truly adjust away from what is not working in favor of what they can do well enough to gut out some wins.

Right now, I am very reluctant to suggest that they can cling to an explosive passing attack when Geno Smith is turning the ball over at the rate he has been through nine games. I know he has staunch defenders out there who want to continue casting all blame on this piss pour offensive line, and I get all of that, but as I watch Top Billin breaking down how pressure affected his second INT against the Rams, I was right there in the stands seeing how he stared down his receiver and missed an opportunity to hit a very wide open Ken Walker in the same area. It was plain as daylight.

I would also say that, in terms of the third INT, when the right tackle got pushed back and that disrupted the pattern AJ Barner was trying to get to, and that caused the INT as Top Billing asserts, maybe Geno Smith should have sensed that and tossed the ball away to live for another down. So, please just excuse me if I am tired to bemoaning the state of the offensive line in defense of Geno Smith these days. Ten interceptions to eleven touchdowns through nine games is not good enough quarterback play, period, in my view right now, and he has got to clean that up, especially if Macdonald is now able to get better defensive play out of these guys moving forward, as he might be.

So, what does Mike Macdonald and Ryan Grubb do to turn this thing around over the next half of the season, and try to gather more wins than losses to finish the season strong?

That is a million dollar question in my view. I think they are absolutely hamstrung by the state of this offensive line. Maybe Grubb has to shake his impulses on riding with Geno and these explosive receivers in order to get more creative with the run game. God only knows that those two run plays to gain a yard for a crucial first in overtime were anything but creative.

Maybe they internally shake up the offensive line with players they have.

This is a wild idea that I don’t presently see floated out there that maybe now needs to be on the table. Connor Williams has both center and guard experience in this league, and Olu Oluwatimi was a pretty good center in college for Michigan. Perhaps both need to be on the field together, with Williams shifting to guard.

Maybe Williams to guard, where he doesn’t have to worry about his shaky shotgun snaps, and he can just fire out of his blocks looking to level a linebacker, and Olu given a chance to claim the center gig that he was drafted to potentially take over is the best path forward to improved line play through the rest of this year. In doing this, I would take Anthony Bradford out of the line up, and give Olu the chance to play between two veterans in Tomlinson and Williams. Maybe the veteran presence of Williams at guard also helps settle down Mike Jerrell at right tackle if Abe Lucas continues to not be ready (right now, I have zero faith in Abe ever playing football long term again).

This is sorta the very best idea that I can come up with, and it almost feels so logical that I will be supremely crushed coming out of the bye week if these coaches don’t go for it, and then they get flattened in Santa Clara by the 49ers again. I am bracing for this sort of disappointment, to be honest.

This leads me back to John Schneider.

I think the entire messy state of this team is ultimately on him right now, and I have been a huge supporter of his. He chose these coaches, he gave them these players, and he was the one who said after they fired Pete Carroll in favor of Macdonald that they have the team assembled to compete for the playoffs now. He has to own all of this now.

He is also the one who heard Mike Macdonald’s stated goal at his introductory press conference about being a physical team that plays strong defense and runs the ball to win games, and then he hired a pass happy college offensive coordinator, and then cheaped out on building the offensive line. Schneider cannot run from these hard truths. He has to answer to them, and while I am not saying he needs to be fired, I am saying that he must change his approach to building an offensive line. He must.

And look, Seattle is not the only team in this league with a bad offensive line right now. It’s very league wide. Steve Wyche was on Seattle Sports radio the other day guesstimating that there are 18 team in the league suffering from bad offensive line play right now due to injuries and various other matters. Dallas, who has had a great offensive line for years, is suffering this year.

But it is this approach in Seattle that is driving me nuts.

Schneider rarely ever retains the talent he’s assembled even though he has stated that the best offensive lines aren’t always the most talented ones, but they have stayed together so long that they have built a great cohesion and chemistry with each other. Seattle has only ever resigned one of their own drafted offensive linemen under Schneider and Carroll, and that was Justin Britt, weirdly. They let Russell Okung go, James Carpenter go, and Breno Giacomini go; all pretty good, but not great players who maybe, if kept together, could have continued to make of a decent offensive line.

We all laughed when Damien Lewis left Seattle in the offseason to sign a massive contract in Carolina, but was that wise to let him go? He was a decent player here, but not great. Would you take him on this line right now? I know I would.

Even if that price of his contract was too rich for Schneider’s blood, there were other guards on the market worth considering if he would have just spent of them, and he didn’t. Robert Hunt was out there, and he’s proved pretty good. Jonah Jackson, Jon Runyan, John Simpson, and Mike Onwenu are all pretty decent guards in the league that could have also been brought in as an alternative to Lewis, if John would have been willing to spend, but he was not.

So, yeah. I really need Jody Allen to be asking really hard questions, and I need Schneider to be agreeable to shifting gears on his thoughts about how to build and maintain a proper NFL offensive line.

In terms of the rest of this team, I have a hunch Macdonald will get his defense squared around and playing better. They were much better against a good Rams offense. Not great, but a lot better.

I have to say that I am a bit nervous on how Macdonald can handle other tasks required of an NFL head coach, and time will tell if he’s capable. I don’t love the continual lack of discipline on both sides of the ball, and coming from Baltimore, I would have thought the being discipline and sound on all the fundamentals would have been on the forefront of his coaching style. So far, I haven’t seen enough evidence of that.

I need to see signs that he is a true figurehead of a team, and not a coordinator turned head coach feeling overwhelmed at times during the chaos of games. I don’t know what that is I’m looking for, whether it’s chewing out players, working the refs, being a stern and stoic leader, or what exactly. I just need something else.

I just know that Chuck Knox had a real badass NFL head coach feel to him ages ago, and so did Mike Holmgren. There was no doubt on the Seahawk sidelines who the alpha of the organization was with them. Even jolly old gum chewing Pete Carroll had a way that screamed alpha leader.

When I look at Mike Macdonald, I don’t get a real sense about him on the sidelines, yet. I think players respect him, and probably are very aware of how bright he is, but does he inspire? Is he willing to get nasty on a guy who just badly fucked up on a play? How is he going to kick things in the ass that need to get kicked?

You can tell looking at Sean McVay when a Rams player fucks up, how he’s got a temperament, and he won’t tolerant lack of discipline. His counterpart with the 49ers in Kyle Shanahan has that way, as well. Sometimes, I think players need that.

So, I don’t know, I guess I’m saying that, even though I really like Macdonald’s potential here, I sorta feel like he’s very much part of this incomplete grade. It sucks that Schneider gifted him a crap offensive line in his rookie season as a head coach, but this team’s lack of discipline at all phases of the game now has me a bit nervous. These last eight games are critical for him, as a young figurehead leader of men, to kick things in the ass, and truly lead, even in the face of a piss poor offensive line.

This is why I need to see during the second half of the season, win or lose, better execution, better fundamentals, better discipline. These things are not on John Schneider. They are squarely on Mike Macdonald.

I just need John Schneider to wake out of his whiskey fog about the offensive line construction, and I need Macdonald to lead. If they show they can do that, then I will properly grade this team with something else other than a disappointing and deflating Incompete.

These are my thoughts.

Go Hawks!

I gotta be honest. I had a lot of fun at this game. I had fun hanging out with my good buddy, David Hogan, who has sweet seats down towards the Seahawk bench, and I had a lot of fun with the fans in this section. I even had fun with the one Ram fan sitting close to us who genuinely seemed like a pretty cool guy as we chatted about Zakk Wylde, Ozzy Osborne’s former guitarist who performed the National Anthem before the game.

In many ways, despite all the fucked-up-ed-ness of the Seattle offense with continual bad snaps, penalties, and dumb turnovers, I thought this was a pretty fun game to be at with how hard Seattle fought to stay in it, and the chance they had in overtime to still pull out a win. Sure, there were times I was losing my mind with frustration, blowing my cool with the turd bird refs, but there was also times where I got magically swept up in the excitement of Seattle potentially still pulling through.

So, I kinda gotta say that if you have come to this blog hoping to read a rage driven piece about how baldy the Seattle Seahawks pissed away a prime opportunity to beat a very beatable LA Rams team to stay on pace inside a very competitive NFC West division, you may have come to the wrong place. I am sure there are plenty of other rage filled Seahawk bloggers to help you get further riled up about this team after this one. You have every right to feel ready to give up on this team, but I actually found things in this match that do give me hope about the longer future of this team.

Conversely, if you have clicked to this piece for a feel good outlook for this team, hoping that I take it easy on players as they struggled with a bad offensive line, questionable play calling, I don’t think you’re going to totally dig this piece either. There are players on this Seattle roster who are being paid lots of money to function competently as professionals, and they are continually struggling to the point of costing this team wins.

It is one thing if you are a rookie such as Michael Jerrell forced into the starting lineup due to injury, and adjusting to NFL talent you are playing against, but it is something else if you are a seasoned vet who is supposed to be one of the better players at your position in the league, and you are playing as though you are one of the worst, at times. When you are a seasoned vet who is paid well, you are under constant scrutiny, and I am not in the mood of protecting players I like who are under performing.

Let me get right to the Geno Smith stuff now, so that we can press forward with the other pluses and minuses coming out of this one. I don’t really want to hear it about the poor state of this Seattle offensive line anymore, I just don’t. Geno Smith cost Seattle a chance to win this game by throwing three interceptions (one not totally his fault but two others that were horrendously bad and were red zone turnovers taking points off the board).

His second pick of the day will stay in my mind for a long time as it was pick six forced in the end zone against coverage when he had Ken Walker perfectly wide open in the same vicinity and he didn’t opt of him in what would have been a very easy dump off. It was a 14 point swing in the game as to took a potential touchdown away from Seattle, and it gave LA a stupid one.

Had he tossed it to K9, it might have been a very easy score for us. Instead, he stared down into coverage, was hit as he threw into coverage, and he offered Rams safety Kamren Kitchens an improbable pick six gift. That pick was so bad that my mind doesn’t even go to Kitchens picking him off yet again in the red zone minutes later on a pass that was to nobody other than Kitchens. Good God.

Geno Smith had as bad of a day as I have ever seen from him, from a turnover perspective. The three touchdowns he threw and the 360 yards that he threw for make this day seem much prettier than I sorta thought it was from him.

When I think of Geno Smith now in this offense, I think of the new testament quote from Jesus saying “he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.” Ryan Grubb has built this offense to be so reliant on Geno Smith drop back passing that I think we are all forced to live and die watching it.

At times, it looks spectacular. Geno can rip a tight spiral downfield as good as anyone, but then at other times, it looks like a train wreck when Geno presses to make a play when a more patient veteran quarterback would throw the ball away, choosing to live for another down.

I am writing this not to be a dick to Geno, and suddenly jump onto the Anti Geno bandwagon of this fanbase. Anyone who has followed this blog knows how much I have appreciated his play here since taking over for Russell Wilson. I gotta call things honestly as I see them, though.

For the year, Geno Smith has thrown for a lot of yards, completed a lot of passes, has thrown some pretty touchdowns, but has also thrown way too many interceptions for this point of the season, and lately, they are starting to look worse, and worse. In fact, I fear he is reaching Jameis territory, or at the very least, Sam Howell territory.

Which begs the question as to how much more Mike Macdonald can tolerate seeing his pass happy quarterback in this pass happy offense turning the ball over at this rate. For the year, Geno has thrown 11 touchdowns to 10 interceptions. He is now on pace to throw for 5000 yards, 22 touchdowns and 20 interceptions. That is almost exactly what Howell did in Washington last year. Food for thought.

This is probably the right time for this team to hit its bye week, and get a long breather, and for all the new coaches to get together, and properly evaluate what they have on this roster, and how they can best, most realistically stay competitive in a schedule that doesn’t really feel super easy anymore. I suspect, win or lose, we come out of this bye week with some adjustments to scheme, and maybe some adjustments to the starting lineup.

While I am not calling for Geno to be benched in favor of Sam Howell, I am wondering, however, if they need to consider dialing back this offense in a way in which they can be more protective with the football. On the surface it feels like they are being way too cute with all of audibles and pre snap business. Sometimes you just want to see a play come in, and see them man up and run the play.

I wonder if coordinator Ryan Grubb either puts too much on their plate, or gives Geno too much free reign to be constantly changing out of calls. I watched a lot of University of Washington football when Grubb was master play calling that historically good offense, and I do not recall Michael Penix Junior changing things up to this degree. I feel a lot of the times, the plays game in, it was all predetermined where the ball was going, and Penix stayed within the calls.

This is mostly all I want to spend on the Geno elephant in the room. After this game, I am now thinking, for the first time this season, whether the coaches will turn to Howell, if they come out of the bye and lose to San Francisco and then lose to Arizona, and Geno is still being this careless with the football. Personally, I don’t think Howell is better, but at some point they have to evaluate whether he has the chops to be their future starter, and if this team drops to 4-7 by the end of November, I can see the logic then with making this sort of change.

As we head into the bye week, I will expand on more of my thoughts about the Seahawks and the quarterback position in this offense. I know Geno hasn’t been helped with this offensive line, and Connor Williams, who is supposed to be one of the better centers in the league, apparently has forgotten how to cleanly deep snap an accurate football, but I have growing thoughts on what I really truly yearn to see at QB spot for this team down the road.

Now onto the better things to gleam from this loss against the Rams. There are a few things that actually give me a lot of hope about the future.

For one, Jaxon Smith-Njigba finally had his signature break through game that showed us all why he warranted a first round pick status. His 7 catches for 180 yards and two touchdowns was out of this world dynamic, and he could have had even crazier numbers if it weren’t for holding penalties that called back some of his grabs, and a bobbled pass that he couldn’t haul in which resulted in the first INT of the game for Geno.

This team needs its highly drafted players to start showing that those high end investments are worth it. I feel so so about left tackle Charles Cross, so so-ish with Devon Witherspoon, I feel better about Byron Murphy II, and I am actually starting to feel like JSN has the chance to shine in this league very brightly, especially coming out of this game. Last week, he was the only bright spot on a bad offensive performance against the Bills. This week, he might have been the best player in the entire game from either team.

Anyone who follows me knows how much of a believer I am in DK Metcalf, and that I believe the team should hold onto him and extend him, but this performance from JSN makes me think that if the right deal came up for DK, I think I could be okay with letting go. In the same breath, could you imagine what this game against the Rams would have been like had DK played in this one?

I think with how the defense stepped up, we could be talking about a very comfortable win for Seattle at home, honestly. In fact, I am almost certain of it. I think this would have looked like the win we got in Atlanta against a very good Falcons team.

Fans need to understand that DK’s value to this team extends well beyond what he does housing go calls at any point of the game. His unique size/speed ratio forces defenses to constantly has to consider shifting more coverage his way, and that uncorks opportunities to others. The fact that he still puts up gaudy numbers despite this attention should tell you how special he is, but his lapses in judgment when he loses his cool in certain situations blinds a degree of fans from seeing his truer value.

One of the biggest silver linings out of this game, however, is that I think Seattle could have a very special wide receiver tandem in the future with JSN and DK, assuming that Tyler Lockett is probably nearing the end of his solid career here. That is something to be excited about. JSN stepping up like this, gives me so much hope for that.

I also want to shout out very special props for practice squad receiver Cody White stepping into this game, and contributing in massive ways by blocking a key punt, and hauling in two gorgeous grabs down field. Had Seattle won this game, he would have been most certainly that talk of town all week. If there is one Seattle player I am most sorry for seeing us not get the W for, it is Cody White in his stellar efforts.

Now onto the brightest spot coming out of this game for Seattle, in my mind. For as much has you might want to bemoan his decision to not kick the ball in overtime, I think we have to commend Mike Macdonald for adjusting his defense in a very positive way that really shut down LA’s ground game, which is a really good one in this league.

The Rams are winning this year by running the ball. They don’t have the talent they used to have at all the receiver spots, their offensive line is okay, not great, Matthew Stafford is good not great these days, and because of all of this, Sean McVay is leaning into the run much more, and getting a lot out of it.

This was the aspect of this game I was dreading heading into Sunday, Mike Macdonald’s poor run defense versus McVay’s potent running offense. I gotta say, I think Mandonald’s defense more than won that battle.

You could also sense the Stafford getting annoyed and then flustered into inaccurate hurried throws. Sure, we didn’t collect sacks, and he made passes in the end during overtime when they counted, but Seattle’s defense played the Rams well enough to sneak this game out with a win, stopping the run well enough, and putting good pressure on Stafford through much of the game. Personally, I think head ref Clay Martin must have been a big Stafford fan with the way he was bailing out the quarterback with bullshit interference and roughness calls against the Seattle defense.

Still, they held one of the best run games to 68 yards, and they held Stafford to under 300 yards, barely. They also held McVay’s offense to 19 points. They forced four three and outs against MacVay’s play calling, and they are only defense to do this against his offense all year.

So get any idea that Seattle played marginally better on defense than they had during the last few weeks out of your head. They played significantly better, in my view, and this is important.

By hiring a defensive minded coach, I most need to see a massive defensive turnaround for this team from Macdonald this year. I need to feel this defense like I felt it in this game. I need to see games like this one, where this defense plays a good offense tough, and gives our offense a chance.

I am at a point where I could now almost give two flips with what this offense does with a piss pour offensive line that John Schneider fucked over Ryan Grubb with. I need to see a Mike Macdonald coached team play winning defense first and foremost.

In life, we are often faced with situations where we can only control what we are capable of controlling, and we have to live with all the blemishes beyond our control. John Schneider ignored the talent issues at offensive guard to such as extent last offseason, that his job might rightly should feel shaky right now, but Macdonald has enough talent on the defensive side where we should see this defense trend positively moving forward.

In that, I need to see good tackling, and good adjustments. I saw both against the Rams. Our linebackers led this team in tackles instead of safeties, and our first round pick defensive tackle was right there with them. The adjustment that Macdonald made to scheme was abundantly clear, as well. They looked, and they felt stouter up front, significantly more so than in recent weeks.

So, while I am sure many fans are very frustrated with this team now losing five of the past six games after a very promising 3-0 start, I am finding myself increasingly more patient. I don’t frankly care if they go 10-7 or 7-10 this year. I don’t.

The issues on the offensive line have become so glaring that I feel like we are going to need another full offseason to remedy it, and I also feel like there areas of the team like safety that feel dangerously thin, as well. This team has a talent deficit, and there is only so many places where you can point to for blame. The state of this offensive line should make John Schneider’s seat feel hot right now. It just should.

Further more, at this rate, I don’t know if I want to see Schneider make another splash trade at the trade deadline on Tuesday to temporarily patch things up. He made his mid season trades for Roy Robertson Harris and Ernest Jones to patch up the front seven of this defense. Good.

I don’t see a team giving up a good guard or right tackle in a league where there is a talent deficit at offensive line, all together. I would just soon see this team hold onto its future picks, and go hard at offensive line again next draft in addition to finally going spendy in free agency, pretty please.

As it stands now, they got a two week bye before they have to play the 49ers again. They have an opportunity to self scout, adjust as needed, and get ready to play teams tough through eight more games of the year.

Toughness is mostly want I’m after for this team the rest of the way. I really want to see toughness like this defense showed. They played a game against the Rams that was worthy of a victory.

Time for Geno, Ryan Grubb, and Connor Williams to step it up, as well. No more excuses about what is going on at right tackle, and guard. Be better, play smarter, play call smarter, you are paid to overcome, not add to this mess. I am here for it.

Go Hawks.

I don’t do the Twitter X anymore. I joined it a few years ago as a means follow some folks on Seahawks Twitter who I thought were worth following, and I thought it would help push this little blog experiment out further. I also found it useful in terms of getting NFL breaking news.

I kinda sucked at the Twitter X thing, though. I’m not great at self promotion, I don’t yearn to converse/argue online with strangers, I am not an attractive twenty something female who will get likes from all the dim witted bros with my hot takes, and I am too exhausted from my day to days to camp on the app to figure out how to build follows. Homie don’t play that game.

So, I don’t Twitter anymore, and my life feels better for it.

I am no longer spending late evening hours blocking and muting strangers who impart their toxicity. I am no longer going down dark rabbit holes where Elon Musk has allowed brazen racism, sexism, anti semitism, homophobia, xenophobia, and all other wide spread forms of hatred to fill my threads. If he someday sells this platform to someone who will return it to some form of somewhat decency someday again, maybe I will join back up, but honestly, with the toxicity that exists on social media all together, maybe I will choose to continue staying away from it.

It’s not like I have ever been one to placate to the cool kids in order to gain popularity, anyway. I wasn’t this way at age 15, at age 35, and I certainly am not this type at the crusty age of 55. If you follow this blog, it is because you follow the Seattle Seahawks, and you want someone who will breakdown some nuances of the team (and football) in ways in which are relatable, and transferable to you. You might also follow along because you dig some of the quirks that filter through my typing. You might also follow because you are my sister, or someone I did a show with twenty years ago. Maybe you read regularly because you enjoy typos.

So, anyhow, yeah. I don’t do the Twitter X thingy, so I am not privy to all the knee jerk lunacy that floats out there in real time after a bad Seahawks loss under this new regime of Mike Macdonald and company. That does not mean that some of the lunatic fringe stuff doesn’t ultimately filter down my way, anyway.

I listen to a lot of Seahawk related podcasts when I can, though, and I listen to local sports radio stations throughout my day. Therefore, I listen to hosts who are active on the Elon’s dumpster fire platform, and some lunacy that gets tweeted out often gets mentioned while I am driving through crappy rush hour traffic.

Apparently, in this, there are now Seahawk fans who are done with new head coach Mike Macdonald, and are ready to see him fired, even though this team is 4-4, and in a three way tie for the division lead with nine games to go against some teams that look fairly beatable. Some fans are comparing Macdonald to former one and done Seattle coach Jim Mora Junior.

For all the racist, toxic, hate filled bullshit that Musk allows to fill up Twitter X, I am so glad I am not on it to read tweets comparing Macdonald to Mora Jr. I am really glad that I am not wasting breaths of my life scrolling through those type of threads.

Let me just simply state that I do not think Mike Macdonald, in anyway, shape, or form is anything close to Jim Mora Junior was as a young NFL head coach. Time will tell if he becomes as successful here as Pete Carroll, or Mike Holmgren, or even Chuck Knox, but I can state with total confidence that Jody Allen is not going to fire him after one season. Nor should she.

You can lose faith in him after eight up and down games, if you choose. I am not here to convince you that doubts are unwarranted. I will point out again, however, that on top of incorporating brand new schemes on both sides of the ball with a roster made of of largely Pete Carroll players, he has been working with the cheapest offensive line in football that has an unsettled position at right guard, still, and is down to their fourth string right tackle. Through these eight games, they have also faced three top Super Bowl contending teams in Buffalo, Detroit, and San Francisco.

For myself, as I look through these first eight games, the one real bummer loss to me is the game against the Giants at home. If that one really stings for you, as well, I would invite you to look at all the teams this year who have played the Detroit Lions and see how they faired the following game, such was the case for Seattle under those circumstances. The loss record for those teams is pretty glaring, and this list includes good teams, too.

The Detroit Lions are physically beating the crap out of teams on Sundays, and their type of physicality is what Mike Macdonald is striving for the Seattle Seahawks to become. This physical dominance of Detroit did not happen in year one of Dan Campbell’s regime. It took him three seasons before he built them up into a bully team, and it’s now year four for them to be looking like a championship level team.

Here, in Seattle, it took Pete Carroll three seasons for him to build Seattle into the contender he envisioned, and believe me, there were plenty of loud doubters of his on the airwaves of Seattle sports radio back during his first two years here, and into his third season. In fact, there were certain sports radio hosts that I just stopped listening to because their outward disdain for him proved too much for my ears to handle.

In fact, if you want to go further back in Seattle sports history, the start of Mike Holmgren’s career wasn’t a hot one, either. He enjoyed backdoor winning the division in his first year when the AFC West was really bad, but he did not get this team back into the playoffs again until 2003 when he finally had this team built up the way he envisioned. In fact, there were loud rumors in 2002 that Paul Allen was preparing to actually fire him, but a late season flourish of wins led by Matt Hasslebeck saved his ass, and the rest was history.

The only Seattle Seahawk coach who started hot with this team, and kept them reasonably good enough to keep his job intact was Chuck Knox in the eighties, and the closest this team got to the Super Bowl was in his first year where he got them, quite unexpectedly, to the AFC championship game. The rest of their coaches had a process of either building them up into a contender, or failing.

Jim Mora Junior is the only one who was ever one and done with this team, and the circumstances that led to that for him, are not in sniffing distance from Mike Macdonald. They are hundreds of miles away from him.

Mora had many things going on with him being the Seahawks head coach that had it very easy for Paul Allen to move on from him in favor of Pete Carroll. He had a temperament that proved cringe worthy in the press, verbally throwing his kicker under the bus after a close loss midway through the season, calling out his offensive linemen for not being tough enough as players, and just kinda coming across as someone incapable of keeping his composure as a leader men. He visibly felt weak minded under pressure, and out of his depth as a leader of alpha men.

I think he genuinely lost his locker room. It was painfully obvious that players stopped playing for him midway through the 2009 season. It wasn’t just that they were playing bad, and undisciplined, it was like they stopped playing with any effort at all.

Then you had Pete Carroll down in USC going through NCAA investigations, and facing pending sanctions, who was eying this situation in the PNW as a prime opportunity to bolt back up to the NFL again. If memory serves correct, it was his representatives who reached out to Seattle to initially gage interest in whether Paul Allen would be interested in making him their new head coach. The rest was history.

So, it was really sort of a perfect storm that led to Mora being one and done up here. It took his inability to lead this team in his first season with poise, and it took a highly successful, high profile head coach eying the opportunity to coach the organization.

Now, let us look upon Mike Macdonald. Anyone who watches his press conferences and follows his Monday morning radio show on Seattle Sports 710 can plainly see a highly articulate, bright individual who answers tough questions honestly, and always brings to them a sense of level headed poise. He might not be the plucky character that Carroll is, he might not be the hard ass that Holmgren or Knox were known to be, but neither of those things matter to me. As someone who remembers Jim Mora Junior well in his short time up here, I will take Macdonald’s straight shooting, cool headed leadership every single day of the week, and I bet most of the players inside the Seahawk locker room will, as well.

Yes, this defense has been wildly inconsistent, and yes, it is hard to watch continued blown gap assignments, and missed tackles, but let us really realize what this defense strives to be as a scheme. It yearns to be multiple in the way it unleashes its fronts, and coverages. His defenses from Baltimore and Michigan were known for the looks they showed pre snap, and then what they adjusted to post snap as a signature means to confusing quarterbacks.

Let me tell you this straight up, that is really hard to get eleven guys to consistently do together. That type of complexity takes time for players to build the chemistry needed to pull it off. It just does.

In his first year as defensive coordinator in Baltimore, that defense didn’t show positive signs of improvement until the second half of their season. In the first half, they struggled just like this unit is here in Seattle. It took half a season for his players to sync up with each other in it. It should be a reasonable expectation in Seattle that it should be similar here.

Personally, I also think it is a very slippery slope to get caught up in comparing what he wants this defense to be with what Pete Carroll had laid out with his defense here. Even when Carroll started to shift his scheme out of a basic cover three 4-3 defense into a 3-4 multiple scheme, he mandated it to be a very basic scheme that didn’t put too much on the plate of his players. One could argue that when he tried to switch to a Vic Fangio thing, he didn’t commit far enough to it, and therefore, his players were stuck inside some in-between nowhere land of what the LOB thing was, and what then defensive coordinator Clint Hurtt envisioned.

I don’t think Macdonald is interested in any sort of nowhere land for his defense to reside in. I think he knows very well that this thing will be a process up here, and he is going to have his coaches and players stay the course of honing in the fundamentals needed from the eleven players on the field to make it right together. In his mind, the dividends are worth the wait.

As for Ryan Grubb as an offensive coordinator, while my patience has been tried with him in a few of these losses, as the dust settles from the Buffalo debacle, my faith has found an ability to regain itself. I still feel like the offense is the strength of this team right now, and he has done pretty well figuring out how to play call working with a bad offensive line.

In fact, judging with what Macdonald said in his Monday press conference, it feels like they are going to lean further into opening up all the motions and tempos Grubb was known for with the Washington Huskies. That to me is good coaching because they certainly to not have the bodies up front to win by lining up man versus man and win without any window dressing and motion trickery.

I remember a time in Holmgren’s career here when he no longer had Steve Hutchinson on his offensive line, and Shaun Alexander was proving incapable of spear heading this offense as a runner, Homlgren was forced to shift out of what they were known to be as an offensive midway through a season. He opened up the pass game by using diminutive slot receiver Bobby Engram as almost a tight end over the middle of defenses, and everything opened up enough for them to stay competitive. That was good coaching.

I also remember, way back in the day, Chuck Knox being forced to de-commit to what proved to be an ineffective ground game, and he had Dave Krieg tossing the ball all over the place in a run and shoot style attack. It wasn’t Chuck’s preferred way to win games, but in that season, it was effective. That was good coaching.

For me, I love that fact that the other day, Macdonald talked about shrunk costs in terms of losing the stuff that they have been struggling to do, offensively, and leaning further into what they can do really well. This piss poor offensive line is not strong enough to go against decent defensive fronts mano y mano. If they want to score points, they are going to need to embrace finesse, and window dressing. That may not be how Macdonald wants to win, ultimately, but I love that he acknowledges that is how they are going to have to roll for now.

But for those of you out there that still have doubts about him, and wonder if Seattle made the wrong move, I think you need to look at the deeper details of what this team did to bring him up here. If anything, just look at the contract details that he agreed to when he was hired by Seattle.

Jody Allen had him signed to an unusually expensive six year contract for a first time head coach. Usually when first time NFL head coaches are given more meager three or four year deals. Mostly, they have been three year prove it deals. Three years should be the scope for new coaches to lay forth their visions.

Seattle, however, thought enough about Macdonald to give him six year contract, and it wasn’t a cheap one, either. They were actually in a bidding war with the Washington Commanders to secure his services. That should be enough to tell us how they view him, and alert us to the fact that they will probably be patient with him seeing his vision for this team through.

So, you can have all the doubts in the world about him right now, and you can pull your hair out in annoyance if his defense has problems stopping the Rams this Sunday. I suspect ownership is going to have patience with his process, and they rightly should.

The one figurehead of this organization who could ultimately be feeling some heat after the season, if this team continues to struggle would most like be general manager John Schneider who decided, yet again, to go very cheapskate on the offensive line. After all, it was he in a press conference leading up to the draft that said offensive guard is the most over spent and over drafted position in the league as he decided to give tight end Noah Fant more money in his base salary than both the starting guards on this offensive line put together.

If this team collapses because the offensive line could never get its shit together, Geno gets hurt or benched, I think it is going to fall on John more than the coaches to have to answer some very tough questions from Jody Allen. I’m not saying that he is on the chopping block as a GM, but I suspect Macdonald’s job is ultimately much safer. That’s just my hunch.

But here is another thing that we have to be real about as fans. We have no idea which of these players on this team are going to be building blocks for Macdonald as he continues to mold this thing as he would have it. On the surface, I would say that most like Charles Cross, Byron Murphy, Leonard Williams, Julian Love, JSN, Derick Hall, and probably Boye Mafe are pretty safe bets. Beyond them, I don’t see a lot of players that I am overly sure about, and yes, I realize that I am excluding high profile types such as Devon Witherspoon, DK Metcalf, K9, Geno, Tyler, and Riq Woolen.

Has Spoon and Woolen been playing elite ball in this defense, thus far? I don’t feel it, and I wish I did.

Do you want to see this team pay K9 over $10 million a year, or would you rather see that money go to a quality veteran guard (FOR ONCE), and maybe see the team draft another running back with some of his traits?

Is Geno Smith, at age 34, someone you want to see this team drop $50 million a year into around the corner, or is it maybe nearing time to finally start taking shots at quarterbacks in the draft?

I love Geno Smith’s ability to throw from the pocket, and anticipate where to throw, and move to avoid pressure, but in these games where shit goes south, I don’t love his demeanor and antics on the sidelines. I just do not. I think he has a lot to do in terms of managing his composure the way Russell Wilson, love him or not, was always able to do.

And finally, the DK situation that everyone seems to be talking about lately. I said it before and I will say it again, for me, I would prefer to keep him and see him extended. I just don’t know how this team will view him heading towards a third contract, and if some other team offers up a player of similar value at a need position, it would be tough for me to argue against it, or if they actually do get some decent draft compensation, I would get that, as well. I just don’t now if either of those things would ever materialize, and Seattle may just see more value in extending him. Of all the players I feel not so totally sure about, I kinda feel maybe he will ultimately stick around being a part of this thing.

But I digress on all of this stuff. My point is that in the pantheon of all the big names, players, and folks with job titles, I think Mike Macdonald is most likely safest to stay on this current Seahawk island. The team has invested in him.

They surely understand that he is a first time head coach, and this year is most likely going to have a growing curve with him, his staff, and these players. I would imagine that ownership would stay patient with him to the point of 2027 before they would start to raise their eyebrows, if he hasn’t gotten Seattle sniffing true championship contending status.

Time will tell if he will ascend to Carroll, Holmgren, or even Chuck Knox status here, or if he is just another shade of Dennis Erickson. I think in three years, we will have a much better clue one way, or the other.

Right now, it is totally utter nonsense to compare him to Mora Junior. It is probably not even fair to compare him to Carroll, either.

For my part, I really like him a lot as a coach, and I got faith. I think he will get this defense built up into an exciting one, and I have faith that he will insist on more resources used on his offensive line.

His stated goal for the Seattle Seahawks is to be a physical, explosive, overwhelming team to deal with for opponents. I am going to lay patient waiting for this to happen.

You do you, but I am going to find my chill zone waiting.

And I gotta say it that my life is so much happier not being active on Elon’s dumpster fire version of what was once Twitter. Feel free to join my happiness, too, if you like.

Go Hawks!

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.

For the last few days, I have been contemplating writing a wishlist piece about what the Seattle Seahawks might/should do before the upcoming trade deadline. I wanted to include modest scenarios like what we saw last week when they trade for defensive tackle Roy Robertson Harris, but I also wanted to include a few big splashy type trade options. GM John Schneider has a long history of doing a bit of both.

On Wednesday, however, the Seattle Seahawks made a very interesting moderate sized trade with the Tennessee Titans, sending weak side linebacker Jerome Baker and a 2025 fourth round pick in exchange for 24 year old middle linebacker Ernest Jones. While this news has forced me to kind scrap the blog idea I had in mind, my initial reaction to the trade was one of excitement. Upon further reflection, I’m still really excited.

This may very well not be the sort of regime changing mid season trade that defines the Mike Macdonald era quite like the time in 2010 where Seattle shipped a fourth round pick for a backup running back in Buffalo known as Marshawn Lynch and instantly defined the Pete Carroll era.. or is it?

In 2010, a few games through Carroll’s first year as the Seahawk head coach, this franchise was struggling to run the ball, and thus struggling to be the physical team that Carroll envisioned them being. They made the infamous Marshawn trade, it took a while for him to settle in, but a couple months later, we were rewarded with what is now legendarily known as the Beast Quake.

Now, I am not going to suggest the Ernest Jones is going to achieve the same legendary status that Beast Mode is known for in these parts, but I am pointing out to you that Jones is coming in to help fill Seattle’s biggest team need. Mike Macdonald wants a physical football team, and it is tough to be that, if you cannot stop the run. In recent years, this young middle linebacker has been a very good run stopper, as well as being good against the pass.

Now he has ten games to show Macdonald that he can be a bright young middle linebacker to build around. If he does, I think this team works out a long term deal with him.

I have seen some reacting to this news by saying that Seattle gave up too much for a rental. I don’t think they view him as a rental player at all. I am more inclined to suggest that they see him as a missing piece that they intend to keep around.

For one, they know Jones very well from his time with the Rams, and I think they might have been as shocked as anyone when they saw the Rams send him off to Tennessee for a mere fifth round pick instead of rewarding him with an extension around the corner. With all the speculation that perhaps Seattle would pursue one of the Jacksonville middle linebackers that could be on the trade market, this move for Jones makes more sense to me as it further sinks in because of this interdivisional knowledge of him as a player, and he likely wouldn’t have been made available for Seattle in a trade if he was still with the division rival Rams.

From a Seattle perspective, he could have been the top linebacker they were in pursuit of all along, and not former first round pick Devin Lloyd in Jacksonville, as some were speculating they might have interest in. They might have been waiting out the Titans to lose one more game to officially become sellers. It is interesting that in this same day, the Titans were also sellers of DeAndre Hopkins to KC for a mere fifth round pick.

Another reason why I think this trade could end up being a much bigger deal than maybe it looks right now is that Mike Macdonald’s specialty as a defensive minded coach is linebackers. His scheme is set up for a fast, hard charging middle linebacker to make tackles for losses, and also be able to defend the pass. Jones was very good at this in LA, and his play carried through into the Tennessee defense which, despite their losing record, has been very good this season.

When asked about the Jones acquisition in his Wednesday press conference, Macdonald sounded genuinely excited. He phrased the move as being an opportunity to add a really good tough as nails player who will take over at MIKE linebacker while Tyrel Dodson will move to his more natural position of weak side backer that Jerome Baker filled. From these words, it is very easy to parse that Macdonald had been feeling like he didn’t have the MIKE backer he needed.

As others have already noted, it was middle season two and a half years ago when Macdonald had taken over the Baltimore defense, that the Ravens made the trade with Chicago to add Roquan Smith. I am not saying that Jones is as good as Roquan is, but he may prove to be not that far off in this particular scheme. It’s interesting that both play the same linebacker role, and both are built fairly similarly.

If anything, it will be kinda exciting to see how Jones blends in, and if this defense really does start to resemble the Baltimore one as we get further through this season. Last week, we saw this team acquire Roy Robertson-Harris from the Jaguars, and my immediate reaction to that, is that RRH does have a body type and playing style similar to the defensive ends and tackles we have seen over the years in Baltimore. Now we have seen this team bring in Jones who does, at the very least, seem like a poor man’s version of Roquan, and maybe he becomes much more than that once Macdonald starts to really work with him.

Exciting stuff to think about, and I love that Ernest Jones is getting tossed right into the starting lineup against the Bills who are coming in as favorites at Lumen Field. Maybe this addition of Jones gives Seattle a slight advantage of newness that Buffalo won’t be able to prepare for.

One other big way that I think Jones helps Seattle is in terms of advantage is his own knowledge of the NFC West landscape being a former Ram. He will know how to play Kyler Murray in Arizona. He will be very familiar with San Francisco, and he will especially know the Rams. With most of Seattle’s interdivisional games in front of them, adding Jones feels like it is coming at a really good time.

So, on all these fronts, I really, really dig this trade a lot. It feels like a lot to give up, if you are viewing him as a bandaid or a rental player, but if he becomes the starting MIKE backer for the next several seasons, and is really good doing that, just like he has been over the past couple seasons, then this deal is kind of a steal.

Right now, I am working with the assumption that he can, and will be a long term fixture here. If he plays as well as I think he is capable of playing, Seattle can use their franchise tag to work out a deal with him this offseason. This is the direction of where I think this is probably going to head towards. I think he’s going to be long term.

In terms of other matters, I don’t know if Seattle is necessarily done shopping. They might be, but right now, they are slated to have a number of comp picks in the 2025 draft, and I think having those made John Schneider feel like he could pony up a fourth to land Jones.

Could they decide to have some more fun and do more?

Let me share some of the ideas I had in the trade piece that I was mulling over in my head, thinking I might write about.

While it is good to see Abe Lucas and George Fant coming off of IR to practice with the team again, what if they see an opportunity to improve a guard spot, as well?

If the Dallas Cowboys lose to San Francisco this weekend and drop to 3-4, perhaps that makes pro bowl guard Zack Martin available. Maybe the Cleveland Browns will consider moving Joel Bitonio next week. Both players are older, and would be rentals, but they would be significant upgrades to what Seattle is working with now in Laken Tomlinson and Anthony Bradford.

Here is something even more exciting and fun to think about.

What if Seattle pulls off a surprise win against the Bills on Sunday, and they pull even further ahead in the division? Would they feel temped to swing big at Maxx Crosby in Vegas, or Dexter Lawrence with the Giants?

With almost everyone healthy again, they seem set up enough at edge rusher, and defensive tackle, but a chance to land an All Pro player up front on defense is an absolutely intoxicating idea to think about. It would be the big swing at the fence move to fortify their chances of winning this up for grabs division in year one of the Macdonald regime.

When they line up to play San Francisco again in the few week, what if Seattle’s starting front four consists of Boye Mafe, Leonard Williams, Byron Murphy, and Maxx Crosby? What if it’s Leonard Williams, Bryon Murphy, Dexter Lawrence, and Boye Mafe? One scenario offers an immediate electric pass rush, and the other offers one of the stoutest front fours in the league capable of stuffing the run, and mush rushing quarterbacks each and every Sunday.

Seattle’s offense, on the whole, feels pretty decent despite what they have been gutting through on their offensive line. Geno Smith has been doing very well, putting up big yards and fitting the Ryan Grubb offense, they are doing well passing to set up the run. Adding an upgrade at guard would make a lot of sense on many levels, make your strength stronger. It is the trade that would make tons of sense right now.

But what if John Schneider decided to go crazy bold on defense, and reward his first year defensive minded head coach an All Pro piece up front? What if they say, “hey, if we send a first round pick and change for this guy, we have a shot at having a top five defense by the end of the season, and we can just sow up this division with what’s going on with the offense and really make this thing special now” and they just go big after Lawrence or Crosby?

I will admit it, these are the two trade scenarios that I currently obsess about the most. In fact, if I were the GM of this team, looking at the injuries and possible dysfunction with San Francisco, looking at the injuries with the Rams, and the up and down nature or Arizona, I would honestly be very tempted to place calls in for either one of these guys. For all we know, Schneider might already have been doing this.

Other trade avenues that I could see this team pursue would be receiver, if DK Metcalf can’t come back from his minor knee sprain as soon as they were hoping. I have sorta simmered on those thoughts, because I feel like there is hope he will only miss a game or two, and I suspect that they like their overall depth in that area.

The one other trade idea I could ever so slightly see them do is maybe targeting a quarterback of the future, if they aren’t completely sold right now on Sam Howell,.. maaaaaaaaybe. I think it’s kind of a fun thought, anyhow.

As much as I would love to think they could pry Michael Penix Junior out of Atlanta, I don’t think that is going to happen, not with how Kirk Cousins played last Sunday, and Atlanta wanting long term security at that spot. I do however wonder about Will Levis in Tennessee, and if Tennessee decides to just tank it now for a quarterback at the top of next year’s draft.

While I am not the biggest Levis fan, I do recognize that he has the size, arm strength, and athleticism that John Schneider seems to really love in quarterbacks. There was, after all, a lot of thought from national minds at the end of last season that Levis was going to be a player on the rise to becoming a true franchise quarterback, and I think those thoughts are interesting to cling onto a bit, especially with the revitalization of Sam Darnold in Minnesota.

Right now, I think it is highly, highly unlikely that Seattle would pull a midseason trade for a QB of the future player who isn’t likely going to help this team win games now, but I do want to throw this idea out there in preparation for what they might decide to look at in the offseason. They might well like a few guys in college right now, but they might also have an eye for a player in the league who they think they can add and develop. This isn’t to take anything away from Geno Smith, and how they might really dig him moving forward still, but at some point, they have to seriously think heir apparent. My question has more to do with whether they see Howell as that fella.

At any rate, these are my current thoughts. I liked the move for Roberston-Harris last week, and thought it signaled a shift towards what McDonald desires up front, but I really, really dig this move for Ernest Jones. I have a feeling like this move to be much closer to special.

And I have a growing itch to see John Schneider make a big splash move for Maxx Crosby or Dexter Lawrence. I doubt either happens, but I would love it if it did. I would absolutely freak the F out if either happened.

Go Hawks.

Make no mistake about it, beating a talented Atlanta Falcons team on the road, 34-14, is a quality win for Mike Macdonald’s young Seattle Seahawks team. This felt like a true complete game where the offense and the defense complimented with each other well, and special teams had a day, too.

In fact, this is the type of win I have been envisioning this team to collect a lot of ever since they hired Macdonald away from Baltimore, and paired him with former UW standout offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb. They were physical, they were explosive, and they played connected.

This was also the type of win they really needed to get back on track after a rough three game losing streak inside an absurdly short duration of time (eleven days). I don’t want to place too many expectations on these guys right now, but this feels like the type of quality win that a young team finding themselves with new coaches needs to have as they build forward towards what they strive to become.

I think what we are learning as fans is that it is going to be a process. Injuries on the offensive line has hindered the offense’s ability to play consistently. Injuries on defense, and the newness of this particular complex scheme has made it a trial on the other side of the ball, as well.

As it stands, this team is now 4-3, and they are in sole first place inside their division. They won four games by playing good connected enough ball, and they lost three games by playing mistake prone, and at times, disconnected.

You can call me a homer, and come up with all the reasons why the Falcons are more pretenders than contenders, but this was the first game of this season where Seattle played mistake free ball, and that matters. They committed no turnovers on offense, and they created three turnovers on defense. They did this by holding down an explosive Atlanta offense that has scored 100 points inside their last three games, and they did it to them on their home turf. Let’s allow that to sink in, and appreciate it.

Here are some further free flowing thoughts I have about this thoroughly enjoyable beat down in A Town for the Hawks. I got a lot of good ones.

Offensively, I thought this was an ideal attack. Seattle threw the ball 29 times, and they ran it 26 times. That stats weren’t gaudy, but they were efficient. Offensive efficiency matters in this league, if you can generate positive defensive results with it, and Seattle did just that.

Geno Smith had his most efficient game of the season, where he threw for a high completion percent, and it was his first game of the season where he threw multiple touchdowns without an interception. He was especially effective with the play action that was available because Ken Walker was having production on the ground.

Ken Walker was probably the offensive player of the game for me, and it wasn’t just for his production on the ground, or his next level elite touchdown grab, but more so, it was the fact that he did all of this while battling the flu. I can’t imagine what it is like running into 250 pound linebackers and feeling like you have to puke. K9 was The Man in this one.

The real, real star of this game, however, was the entire defense. This defense had to face an explosive Atlanta offense on the road with a quality veteran quarterback who has been playing with a hot hand. They had to do this without their starting safety, and two of their top cornerbacks. They had to rely on a rookie fifth round corner, and a practice squad corner playing throughout the day.

All week, I had been starring at these tea leaves, and had been anticipating Seattle being forced to win another shootout on the road a la Detroit game. Instead, this patched together defense held Kirk Cousins and crew down to 14 points, and more than helped pitched a blowout. This defensive unit did much of the heavy lifting.

First off, I want to say that Macdonald’s defense has a much different feel when it has a healthy Byron Murphy and Leonard Williams playing in the front four. The disruption that Big Cat and Murphy are both able to create as defensive tackles together feels like A Lister material in this league around the corner. Players like Boye Mafe, Dre’Mont Jones, and Derick Hall are able to feed off of that.

The last time the Seattle Seahawks had a defensive tackle tandem like these two, it was in the late 1990’s with Cortez Kennedy, and Sam Adams playing together. Their physical abilities to disrupt inside opened up opportunities for edge players such as Michael Sinclair, Phillip Daniels and Michael McCrary to put up gaudy sack totals. Interestingly enough, one of the architects of that late nineties defense was defensive guru Jim Johnson who Mike Macdonald mentions as an inspiration to his own defensive scheme.

Fast forward back to this present day game, and this Seattle defensive line that now has it’s full compliment of players that went against a very good Atlanta offensive line, and they had their way against them in pass rush situations, and at times, against the run. People can say that Cousins was off, but I think he was flustered by feeling the inside pressures Seattle was getting with their heavily invested in DTs.

I also think the new addition of Roy Roberston Harris gives them even a further disruptor up front, and I am excited to see where this goes. Listed as a DT, RRH got quality snaps at end, and you could feel how well he was able to hold a strong edge against the run, and disrupt as a pass rusher in limited spots.

I messaged friends this morning that I just wanted to see really good defensive line play from Seattle, and did I ever get what I hoped for. This unit wasn’t perfect, but they were so much better than they have been in recent weeks. In this game, you could feel Murphy’s first round draft status, Big Cat and Jarran Reed’s big man power, and Boye Mafe’s speed off the edge.

I want to offer a very special tip of the cap to Dre’Mont Jones. He has been much maligned by fans and media in recent weeks, but I thought he played his ass off against the Falcons, getting pressures, a sack, and effecting plays. When Seattle traded for Robertson Harris, I thought that might be a catalyst to lighting a fire under Jones.

Not like he needs extra motivation as a player, but RRH is a good football player, and Jones had been struggling a bit with other players on the defense, as well. It wouldn’t be so much of a big deal if it were not for the high price Seattle paid him last year as a free agent, but big contracts come with big expectations.

Jones needed a game like this one, and moving forward, Seattle needs Jones to play more like this. Be strong against the run, and play on fire as a pass rusher. If he can build off of this, I really like the edge rusher rotation of him, and Boye Mafe, and Derick Hall, the two young drafted players who’s future appear bright in Seattle for many years.

It is just a game, and they will have a very tough test coming up against the Bills coming to Seattle, but I need to see more of this version of Macdonald’s defense moving forward this year. I need it above anything Geno Smith, K9, and DK Metcalf can be in Ryan Grubb’s offense.

Mike Macdonald’s stated goal for his version of the Seattle Seahawks is for them to be a physical, and explosive team. It is hard to feel the full vision of that with the state of their offensive line (although I thought rookie right tackle Mike Jerrell played promisingly, making his first start in this one), but I think a reasonable expectation for fans this year is to feel it more on the defensive side moving forward as they continue to gel together with healthy pieces again up front, assuming they stay healthy enough together.

I think we can also say that this was perhaps a pivotal game this year where John Schneider’s 2024 draft class showed up when it mattered, and they stepped up. Byron Murphy showed again what a disruptive force at DT he can be. Mike Jerrell stepped in at right tackle and immediately looked better than Stone Forsythe. Nehemiah Pritchett held his own starting at corner in place of Riq Woolen. These guys are the future of this team, and they showed in this one. That might honestly be the biggest positive coming out of this game, along with many of Seattle’s best veteran players playing their best ball.

Fingers crossed that DK Metcalf’s knee situation isn’t serious. Macdonald sounded like the team didn’t think it was, and he had a situation similar to this one against the Chargers a couple years ago when he went off the field on a cart, and was fine the following week.

If the issue is bigger than they anticipate with DK, though, I think that might necessitate a trade, if this team wants to really go after the division title this year with San Francisco now on the ropes a bit. In fact, I want to say that they will almost certainly have to do that.

Folks need to be real about the value of DK in this offense right now. He honestly might be the most valuable non quarterback piece to this machine given the way Ryan Grubb loves to use deep shots to set up the run and underneath patterns. There is no other player in this Seattle offense who can stretch the field like DK can. Tyler is really good, but he can’t do that. JSN is more of an underneath possession YAC guy who benefits playing with a DK.

If DK is out an extended period of time, that could force Grubb into calling games with a short deck to work with. His offensive line isn’t blowing up big holes for K9 and Zach Charbonnett to run through. Can he rely on an older Tyler Lockett to threaten to take the top of the defense off? I have my doubts on that.

This is where the dark side of myself almost wishes it to happen just so the Trade DK side of the Seahawk fanbase can see what this offense looks like without him. Hopefully, they don’t have to witness that reality, but if they do, my inner darkness that enjoys watching people suffer in their own short-sided-ness will fee unbridled “I told you fuckers so’s” in a very satisfactory way.

You know that you’re an asshole when you relish in being right at the expense of things you hold dear, like Seahawk victories. So, in that sense, I hope DK’s knee doesn’t force me into becoming an asshole around the corner. I hope he’s able to play next week.

Anyhow, yeah.

Good get back on track game for Seattle against a quality team. I think a lot of good things came out of this one. I am sure that there’s things I am leaving out, like Noah Fant’s very solid game as a high priced tight end, and Coby Bryant’s great game at safety in place of Rayshawn Jenkins, and Julian Love’s solid game at the other safety spot. I thought practice squad corner Josh Jobe played really well, too.

Who am I leaving out?

Oh, yes, Matt. Tyler Lockett played well, too. Let’s not forget about Tyler!

Does this cover it?

Are you happy a Seattle Seahawk fan?

Or are you still some sort of ogre fair-weathered troll who misses Russell Wilson and wishes the team would have drafted Michael Penix Junior?

Still gotta wait and see with this new crew?

I get it if you do, but I gotta tell you. When this team wins, I really, really like what I see. It’s not all perfect, but there’s a lot of interesting things to like that give me hope for the future.

If they would have continued on with Pete Carroll after last season, I don’t know if I would be feeling this degree of hope. There is a newness to things on both sides of the ball that, while the product doesn’t feel necessarily totally complete, the vision feels there, and I think this team can grow into a very physical and explosive team together with that vision, ultimately. All I need is for this young collection of sorts to continue building together towards that, win or lose.

I’m here for it. I hope you are, too.

Go Hawks.

Now that we are several days removed from the Thursday night debacle against the San Francisco 49ers, I have finally reached a point of some reassuring perspective. Things could be worse for Seattle Seahawks fans. We could be Dallas Cowboy fans, instead.

I am not even joking.

The Dallas Cowboys are a vastly more talented ball club than the Seattle Seahawks. They are more talented on the offensive line, quarterback, receiver, linebacker, and pass rushers. Yet both clubs sit at a 3-3 record, and if you think our home loss with the Giants was bad, the Cowboys suffered a blowout loss at home by what is now proving to be a bad New Orleans Saints team.

There is also all kinds of pressure on the Cowboys to win big this year. Their owner has been very outward about this. If they do not turn their season around, their head coach will most certainly lose his job, and there is chatter that Jerry Jones will strip that roster down for a rebuild. They have committed to 30 year old Dak Prescott, they have put a lot of money into their offensive line, and receiver, and they are going to be starring at a huge contract extension next year with star pass rusher Micah Parsons. Something has to give around the corner.

Now look at the Seattle Seahawks. After a promising start to their season, when they went 3-0 against a soft portion of their schedule, they dropped their last three games inside the span of ridiculously scheduled eleven days. They lost a competitive game against a strong Lions team in Detroit when they were injury riddled on their defensive line. They fell flat against an inferior opponent six days later when the Giants were determined to put up a good fight, and then they had to face the NFC West bully 49ers four days later.

Even in what proved to be a bit of a debacle against the 49ers, the Seahawks, for the most part, put up a fight, and made it a game at the end. If we are being honest, it was a better fight that we saw out them than the ones they put up during the last couple years of the Pete Carroll era, yet there appears to be a contingent of the Seahawk fanbase ready to give up on Mike Macdonald after six games.

Good lord, pump the breaks on that, please, and I say this fully recognizing this team has a lot of issues on the field. In fact, I can say that there were a few disturbing things that happened in the Niners match that I won’t get out of my head anytime soon.

During the loss last Thursday night, we saw Geno Smith throw two picks, and beat his head with a Microsoft tablet on the sidelines. Not a great look. Even worse, we all saw DK Metcalf rip the headset off of his position coach and yell through it at offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb.

Maybe worse of all, we saw Macdonald’s defense get run on again, and painfully so in those final moments, giving up a huge run against San Francisco when we were down by five with a chance to get the ball back, and pull off an upset. Gross!

Time is a great healer, though, and the further I get away from this game against the arch rival 49ers, the better I have clarity that this team is in year one of Mike Macdonald’s regime, and this process of building a contender will take time. Macdonald isn’t going anywhere, and he should be given at least three years to fully build this team up into the contender he envisions.

So, just chill the flip out, impatient Seahawk fans. Go do some meditation yoga, go relax in nature, go have a spa day. Trust the Mike Macdonald process.

As I look at this three game losing streak in the span of eleven days, I feel like this a great launching point for Macdonald and his coaching staff to prove their worth as a staff. I am excited for Seattle to now be that scrappy team to give contenders a go at it on Sundays.

The NFL is tough. Yes, the league hosed Seattle with this last three game portion of their schedule. Yes, this team has had an unfortunate run of injuries on their offensive and defensive lines. Tough. So what. They are professional football players, and their lack of fundamentals on defense and offensive during this stretch has been damning both on the players and coaches. Time to fix this. I think they will.

The blessing is that they are not the Dallas Cowboys. Mike Macdonald is a first year head coach, unlike Mike McCarthy. There is no added pressure to win their division this year, unlike the pressure Dallas faces, and San Francisco faces, as well. The only pressure on Macdonald is to prove to his players that his system works, if they play it right, and to those who may not be buying in, he then must make the right call as a head coach.

If a high profile player isn’t taking to coaching, how much is it worth it to continue riding with that dude? Ditto for a high priced defensive end who is having trouble setting an edge in their run defense, or a high priced linebacker who isn’t getting off of his blocks and staying sound in his gap responsibilities.

This recent trade for defensive lineman Roy Robertson-Harris is a big tell for me. At 6-5 290 lbs, he feels like a classic Baltimore Raven style D liner. He’s listed as a DT, but Macdonald noted he will also play end, and perhaps set a stronger edge against the run than, say, high priced Dre’mont Jones, who has struggled to do that, at times. If I am Jones, I am probably playing my ass off against the Falcons this Sunday.

This could be a signal that the coaches have determined that they need different players to fit this defensive scheme than the ones they inherited from the Pete Carroll regime. It could also mean that they saw an opportunity to improve their defensive line rotation, and Robertson-Harris gives them better depth for their interior pass rush, but one thing is clear. This team’s run defense has been a mess since they played Denver in the opener, and they haven’t gotten home enough on the quarterback lately. If this dude improves both of these areas, then this trade is going to be a hit. Personally, I welcome his addition to their rotation.

There is another reason for optimism that this defense will improve as we head into this tougher stretch of games. Rookie DT Byron Murphy II is expected back soon (perhaps against Atlanta), and his unique explosion and athleticism inside proved productive against the run and pass during the first two and a half games of the season before he injured his hammy.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that middle linebacker Tyrel Dodson played much better when Murphy was in front of him. Dodson may not be a long term answer at linebacker, but he is who Seattle has now (unless they shift to rookie Tyrice Knight), and having a rare talent like Murphy in front of him is a pretty good recipe for staying cleaner off the blockers and making a play. I don’t think there will be anyone more happy to see Murphy back in this lineup than the middle linebackers who will play behind him.

We can expect the Macdonald will have his defenders back to the drawing boards this week on honing the fundamentals with their run fits, and technique. This is his week to prove his worth as a first time head coach who’s coaching mantra is “make it right.”

This is the time where Macdonald, who is known to be a great communicator, must get his fellas to rally together, trust each other, and trust the process. He must make it right, and I have faith he will, even if there is a contingent of Seahawk fans who now seem ready to move on from him.

As for the whole DK and Geno situation that transpired last Thursday against San Fran?

On one hand, I think it is something to monitor moving forward. I think there could be some dysfunction brewing between the receiver and quarterback. There definitely felt like dysfunction between the receiver and offensive play caller in the heated moment DK decided to yell at him through a head set.

More likely, though, I think this was just a case of two hyper competitive professionals who were sick and tired of losing to the 49ers, and as mistakes unfolded, things came to a boil over. I am willing to trust both players will put these less than ideal moments behind them to move forward to win ball games together. I actually like them to come out showing better this week against the Falcons. Just a vibe I get. I think both will be incentivized to play strong next Sunday.

For all the second thoughts that filled my mind about DK Metcalf after the 49er debacle, the ideas of trading him instead of extending him, I have to admit that I was pretty impressed watching his midweek press conference yesterday. He took ownership of his mistakes in the game, he was transparent about his headset exchange with Grubb, he said that the key for the offense moving forward is running the ball, which is something I fully agree with.

I don’t think DK Metcalf is the selfish player that some make him out to be. I think he gets caught up in the moments too often against the opposition, and I think he has been prone to lapses in fundamentals in recent games. Both of these things are correctable, and it will be curious to see if this new coaching staff can massage those out of him moving forward.

I also feel like Mike Macdonald isn’t the type who is going to allow dysfunction to exist in his locker rooms. If by chance, DK decides to continue to act out when things get tough this season, and they will get tough, I don’t think he sticks around. That’s not going to be what Macdonald is going to want. I would also say that if Geno struggles to keep composure and poise as Macdonald wants it, you can kiss goodbye notion of him signing an extension here.

I am not predicting that Seattle trades DK and cuts Geno around the corner in the coming offseason, but I am saying that, at the end of the day, Macdonald is going to build this thing with his guys, not Carroll’s. It is up to the Carroll holdovers to prove that they are worth keeping around, and being paid handsomely to be part of this process of building a contender.

When Pete Carroll and John Schneider built up their Super Bowl team together, there were sweeping changes after year one. They let Mike Holmgren’s quarterback in Matthew Hasselbeck go. They let Lofa Tatupu, and Marcus Trufant go, as well.

They also held onto a few of the Holmgren holdovers who proved a big part of their championship run. Center Max Unger, DT Brandon Mebane, and DT Red Bryant were huge pieces of the puzzle.

This year is about Mike Macdonald establishing his culture, building his schemes, and figuring out who his pieces are on this roster moving forward. It is going to take time.

This team, right now, sitting at 3-3, tied for first place in the division, just traded for another defensive lineman, is taking positive steps forward. I know it doesn’t look great over these past few games, but they are.

Trust the process.

What other choice do you have, anyways? Yelling on the internet, demanding players to be traded, and coaches to be fired isn’t going to change the coarse of anything that they are about to do. It just makes you look like you need something else in your life to preoccupy your time while this process takes the proper, necessary time.

So, if you are going to boil over in this process of properly building a contender, I suggest to take nice hikes, and maybe naked dips in nature’s hot springs in order to find the earthy holistic sensation of sand and slimy rocks rubbing against your pent up private parts. That’s what my native ancestors use to do, anyways, when they lost canoe races.

Trust in Mike. Trust the process. Chillax.

Go Hawks.

Well, it’s official. The Seattle Seahawks losing to the 49ers, losing three games in a row, losing by turning the ball over, and not getting turnovers is officially going to create a lot of doubt in the minds of fans, media, and maybe even some of the players, themselves.

Injuries are most certainly a major issue with this team. Stone Forysthe is most clearly not a starting caliber right tackle in this league, and is a full on liability. Seattle is also a banged up in its secondary, defensive line, and their linebackers haven’t been great, lately.

I think the schemes, and the play callers on both sides of the ball for this team are sound, but the execution within these schemes is proving subpar. It’s a combination of not having enough talent on the offensive line, not having players on defense playing fundamentally sound against the run and pass, and then not having their best players play their best ball. I call it like I see it, and this is what I see.

Ryan Grubb has been a recent target of ridicule with fans, myself included after the loss to the Giants, but I’m not hanging this loss on him against the 49ers. I think his play calling got drives going, and he found creative ways to get hyper talented running back Ken Walker involved in screen passes and runs. After six games, I feel like Grubb is largely handicapped as a play caller because of the state of the right side of his offensive line, and he’s trying his damnedest.

I actually wouldn’t mind if they gave 42 year old Jason Peters a go in Atlanta after this ten day break just to see the line settle in better, and give valuable experience on the field. Maybe that helps the right guard situation settle down a bit more, and maybe that makes Geno Smith settle down, as well.

In my opinion, and this is just my view, the biggest reason why we lost this game against the 49ers was the two interceptions Geno Smith threw that took potential points off the board, and gave points to the pain in the ass divisional enemy. Those two picks happened while they were moving the ball against a not so intimidating 49er defense that I don’t think is nearly as good as it has been in seasons past. The numerous other off target and late throws from Geno also proved damning.

I have been as big of a Geno supporter as any out there, but that was not the play of a quality NFL quarterback. That was the play of someone who feels like he is starting to struggle. I wish I could see this differently, but this is what I see.

It could be all the hits he has taken, and maybe he’s injured after that rough outing against the Giants four days ago. It would explain why he was inaccurate at times against San Francisco, and appeared extra jittery.

It could also be something deeper, however, and maybe more concerning. It could be the pressure he feels from essentially being in another prove it year situation with the team, being 34 years old, and pressing to impress for another big contract. I don’t really want to speculate, but one this is clear. Injuries aside, this team will only be as good as he can be, and if he wants to be a $50 million a year quarterback around the corner, he has to quarterback them into being a lot better than this right now.

He has to not throw picks, throw more touchdowns, throw on time, and throw accurately. If he cannot do this, this team will not have a winning record this year, and he will not become a top paid quarterback in this league. It is that plain and simple.

Geno is not the only Seahawk player that I have outwardly defended who had a rough night against San Francisco, and I do not know what this means for this team moving forward. I am now concerned that Seattle may have a DK problem.

I don’t love the sideline antics and body language of DK Metcalf in this one. Being on the phone, yelling at Ryan Grubb was not a good look on my television set. Having a dejected look while sitting on the bench midway through the first half of the game wasn’t great, either. There was another moment where Geno had some bad body language on the sidelines.

I know a lot of fans are going to cut these two slack, and point to the state of the offensive line, but they still have to lead. Call me old school, but bad body language doesn’t display great leadership skills to me, and these two are supposed to be the leaders of the offense. Maybe I am reading too much into these things, but I feel like I saw enough to sound some alarm bells, and I think their body language in tough games is something to monitor moving forward.

Can we say that Geno Smith and DK Metcalf are going to be ride and die Mike Macdonald/Ryan Grubb guys?

This is the question I am presently asking. Their body language has me doubting a little bit. Both guys are known to be hot heads, and it has been commonly reported this year that this new coaching staff especially wants to see how Geno Smith is able to lead, and maintain poise. He did not seem poised enough last night, and DK seemed to resort to DK’ing in ways that will give his critics plenty of ammo.

Defensively? What can I say?

Bad angles to the football are continuing to haunt this side of the ball. Julian Love is a good safety, but he made a horrific safety play trying to go for a knockout blow against Deebo Samuel on a blown touchdown catch and run, instead of making a simple routine tackle after the catch. Replays also showed Seattle defensive tackles getting their shoulders turned sideways on big run plays, and guys not stepping into proper gaps. This is not good enough.

The lack for football fundamentals is killing this defense right now. Mike Macdonald and his staff have got to fix this moving forward. I think they can, but they have to show it. These next ten days before traveling to Atlanta is going to prove critic for the coaches and players to get this defense back on the course it showed against Denver in the season opener.

Maybe the team looks at available free agents. Maybe they pull a trade, or make a surprising shakeup to the starting eleven, but thing is clear. The players they have on the field right now don’t seem to be cutting it the way they need to be. They have got to get this fixed right now, and how this defense comes out against the Falcons will be something I will closely scrutinize in a week and a half.

Despite all of this, this three game losing stretch is not leading me to any sort of doom and gloom thoughts and feels of this team moving forward. I think despite the mistakes against the 49ers, they showed a bunch of fight, and that was encouraging. I am believing more in Ryan Grubb as an offensive play caller. I believe in Mike Macdonald as a young head coach, and I feel like he should be granted time to have his system evolve, and gather all the talent he needs to properly run it.

I do think that, as we approach the trade deadline in the few weeks, this game in ten days against the Atlanta Falcons on the road might be a bit of a crossroads match. Next week will feel do or die in many ways.

If Seattle wins, do they look to make a trade to help them continue to scrap for the division? What do they do if they lose and fall 3-4 with a strong Buffalo Bills team on the horizon? Do they consider being sellers if they lose to the Bills as well, and fall 3-5?

These next two games around the corner could very likely determine the direction this team takes the rest of the way this year. John Schneider isn’t known as a big seller as a general manager, but with a new coaching staff for the first time in 14 years, dropping to 3-5 in a couple weeks might force his hand. What if the Kansas City Chiefs come offering a first round pick for DK Metcalf?

This all sounds sensational, but let us remember what this season is. This is a season where these new coaches are determining who the building block players are of this team, and who is going to be their core guys moving forward in their systems.

Obviously, I prefer seeing this team win now, but for me, this season has never been about stealing the division from the 49ers in year one of the Macdonald regime. It is about the gradual build into becoming something truly special as a team.

When Kyle Shanahan was hired by San Fransicso in 2017, it was with a goal to beat Pete Carroll in Seattle, and become the divisional bully. It was a gradual build for them to become the top dog they have been in recent years. They went 6-10 in Kyle’s first season, and 4-12 the following year. It took time for players to pickup his complex system, and it took time for him to acquire the right players to fit it. Losing seasons meant better draft picks to build off of in the process. Eventually, he and John Lynch built up a very exciting ball club.

This should be, more of less, the model, and the expectation for Mike Macdonald and his staff in Seattle. Year one should be figuring out who your guys are moving forward, and what you need to add next offseason to take the next big step towards becoming special.

If they turn this losing streak around, win in Atlanta, and stay competitive in other games down the road, and end up with a winning record, and a wildcard playoff birth, then that will be a lot of fun. If they don’t because of various reasons, but still are competitive in losses, then I think that is also fine.

I just need to see marked improvements in the fundamentals within these schemes. I need to see guys playing well together. That’s how I will ultimately judge this team this year.

This game losing this way against San Francisco, yet again?

Yeah, it sucks, but it doesn’t sting, and it doesn’t feel hopeless. I don’t think the 49ers are making it back to the Super Bowl this year, and that is going to put more pressure on them as an organization staring at making a very cheap quarterback a $60 million dollar a year player around the corner in very short time.

Seattle, in the meanwhile, just needs to continue working out the fundamentals with the team they have this year, they need to properly evaluate what they have on this roster that are keepers and what they need moving forward. That is what year one of Mike Macdonald truly is.

I can be patient for that. Can you?

Go Hawks.

It is important to me to maintain a fair perspective as a diehard Seahawks fan, especially after a disappointing loss. There have been a few times, in recent years, where I have allowed my writing to enter into toxic realms after a loss to a team like the New York Giants at Lumen Field, and after publishing, I would sometimes feel some sense of regret that I didn’t use a more tempered approach. Therefore, in this piece, I am going to try to be behaved while being honest with you as readers.

The Giants aren’t a very good team. They most likely will not make the playoffs this year. Their quarterback isn’t very good, outside of one concussed receiver, their skill players aren’t special. They will need to rely on defense to win games, and any team with a decent offensive line, and capable quarterback is probably going to beat them on most Sundays. Giant fans, like some of the more obnoxious ones that walked out of Lumen Field Sunday afternoon, can feel great about this win, but they still play in a division with the Eagles, Commanders, and Cowboys. Good luck with that moving forward.

So, on that level, it really sucks that Seattle fell behind to these Giants, and made a bad quarterback look pretty good, right?

Yeah, it does. It most certainly does.

It sucks because we replaced legendary Seahawk head coach Pete Carroll with this Mike Macdonald cat from Baltimore who is supposed to be this defensive mastermind in the league, and we lost this game just like a Pete Carroll coached team lost over the past couple years. We played undisciplined, soft, and disorganized on defense, unable to stop the run or pass, and then we passed the fuck out of the ball on offensive instead of leaning into the run to help sustain drives. We could have just kept with Carroll, Clint Hurtt, and Shane Waldron, and we could had this same annoying result.

This is the sting of this game for me. It wasn’t just playing (and coaching) down to an inferior opponent, it was doing it and looking like the exact, same, hair pulling out, frustrating team as we were last year against Pittsburgh with backup Mason Rudolph quarterbacking them to an easy win here.

Seahawk fans who remain staunchly big Pete Carroll fans are going to use this loss against the Giants in defense of the former head coach, and they are going to rub Mike Macdonald’s nose in it like a poodle puppy dog to just poo poo’d all over the carpet of Lumen Field. You can be certain of this.

Mike Macdonald might still end up being a really good coach for the Seattle Seahawks, coach here for a long time, going to the playoffs, winning division titles, and maybe getting a Super Bowl ring. This could happen, and I believe in him, but he has a lot of work to do. Tons of it.

After a promising start to the season, going against teams with bad quarterback situations, Macdonald’s defense has now had back to back games looking pretty bad. The excuse in Detroit was valid. They were down four starters on the defensive line, going against an offense with a great offensive line, good quarterback, and lots of weapons to move the ball. Against the Giants, however, the excuses feel nonexistent. There is no excuse for an effort this bad against a bad team.

Seattle’s front seven too often got out of their gaps, giving up easy long runs. Their defensive backs were getting beaten way too often, and Daniel Jones had way too much time to pass down field, and way too often caught defenders off guard with his ability to run.

Macdonald, to his credit, said everyone needs to do a better job, himself, included as the caller of the defense. From my vantage point up high in the nose bleeders, it looked like New York used Seattle’s aggressive scheme against them to their advantage. Whenever a linebacker would blitz, Jones found the easy hot read. When a linebacker would attack a specific gap, the running back found a huge hole in the other gap.

The lack of fundamentals, proper tackling, gap control, coverage all had the same look of what we have seen for the last two years when Carroll shifted this team out of his standard 4-3 into a 3-4 hybrid scheme. Then, it was felt like too much was put on the plate of the players and they were in a constant state of confusion as to who does what when, and whatnot. After this game against the Giants, one is free to wonder if Macdonald’s scheme is no different in its heavy demands on players to understand it, and play it properly.

It could simply be that the Seattle players need more time with each other communicating, and building the proper chemistry to do all the tasks this scheme demands. It could also be that Seattle just doesn’t have as much talent needed to play within this scheme as we were thinking a few weeks ago. It could be a little of both, or again, it could just simply be that this unit needs to play more games together in order to properly gel. I am hoping for the latter.

Time will tell, as we get further through this season, whether or not this defense is going to be some special this year, or a problem, but one thing is clear. If they don’t show signs of improvement, and building towards something special, the pressure will be on big time next offseason to get it fixed.

You don’t replace a legendary defensive minded head coach with a young defensive minded head coach, and not have an outstanding defense in result. If Mike Macdonald is to be the guy here in the PNW, the defense in Seattle must be one of the absolute tops in the league. This is a nonnegotiable, in my view.

That all said, however, in my opinion, the defense wasn’t even the most frustrating side of the ball in this game. Color me absolutely done with Ryan Grubb’s almost obscene pass happy attack with Geno Smith. I get it that this aggressive passing attack won him tons of accolades as a play caller in college, and I know that Seattle has a lot of nice receivers that fit what he did at UW, but this is the NFL. Things are not going to be nearly so easy for him at this level to chuck it around the place every Sunday, and none of this feels sustainable right now.

For a while, I have been allowing myself to blindly buy into this Grubb hype. Diehard Husky fans, arrogantly blinded by their own purple and gold eye glasses, have promised us great results from Grubb, and I have gotten sucked into it, myself, like an ancient mariner looking at bright red hair and big boobs on a fish woman sitting on treacherous rocks in the middle of the sea.

I have been swept up in the idea that between Grubb, Geno and all these pass catchers in Seattle, we would see some fancy version of the eighties run and shoot offense with Warren Moon in Houston, or the K Gun offense of Buffalo with Jim Kelly in the nineties. Here is the reality pill, though, both of those legendary offenses had really good offensive lines, and neither of those teams won a Super Bowl playing that way.

If you want to be a really great defensive team, you must have a balanced offense that controls clock while it scores, and gives the defense time to rest. This is how you play connected football. This is what Pete Carroll always preached while he won national championships in college and a Super Bowl in the pros. This is what Mike Macdonald must get Grubb to now see.

With a unique player at running back such as Seattle has with Ken Walker, it is absolutely bad coaching to not have him become a fixture of this offense. With the leaky state of the pass blocking portion of this offensive, it’s not even bad coaching that Grubb has 34 year old Geno Smith drop back passing at this rate, it’s borderline criminal to the point of possibly charging Grubb for assault and battery with his intentions of having Geno pass so much.

Let us be very real about what the Seattle Seahawks are with their offensive line. They have a decent young player at left tackle, they have an old journeyman at left guard on a cheap one year contract, a decent center new to the team, an unsettled situation (still after five games) at right guard, and their starting right tackle is a third string player.

With this offensive line, they should be running Ken Walker (and Zach Charbonnet) way more often than they are. They should be playing more with two tight ends, they should be using a fullback more on occasion, and they should be allowing Geno Smith to play to his truest strengths as a play action passer.

Grubb might want to use almost exclusively three receiver sets out of shotgun, but he does not have the offensive line to hold up playing that way, and I feel now it is catching up to this club. What he has been asking Geno to do with all of this high volume drop back stuff, now feels unsustainable to a dangerous level. It puts more pressure on sub average pass blockers, more pressure on receivers to catch against contested coverage (like JSN’s crucial third down drop in crunch time), and it puts tons of pressure on Geno to deliver tight passes under a barrage of pressure.

Ryan Grubb must adjust this attack to better fit what his situation is with the offensive line, and the unique underused talents he has at running back. Offensive linemen play better when they are finding rhythm in the run game. It’s easy to move forward on the attack of defenders than moving backwards being attacked by them in pass pro. Grubb needs to allow these guys the ability to find their confidence by running the rock. This is a must.

So, sure, we can talk about DK’s fumble for the second time in two weeks that killed a scoring opportunity, and we can talk dump attempt to go for it on fourth down late in the game in their own territory on a play action play with bad execution. We can even talk further about how bad this defense played. We can point fingers at all of this stuff, but Geno passed forty times in this year, and was sacked seven times, and Ken Walker only carried the ball five times for nineteen yards. That is inexcusable.

Good luck calling an offense like that against San Francisco on Thursday night. Good luck playing against the Bills like that, the Vikings, Jets, and Packers.

In this game, when the defense felt out of sorts, Grubb needed to get K9 and Charbonnet going with a run game for which Geno Smith could have play action passed off of. They needed to sustain long drives, shrink the clock, and give their defense a rest to sort themselves out. Total failure on the offensive coaching staff that this was not more in the game plan. Now it is time to fix that.

So, I think the holistic reality of this season is now very different than the visions of grandeur we all felt after going 3-0 to start the season. While we all got caught up in the dreams of winning the division, and going on a playoff run, the more realistic goal for this team with new coaches, a first time NFL head coach, first time NFL offensive coordinator, first time NFL defensive coordinator, is probably to lay forth the foundations of what the identity of this team is, and build positively off of it.

If they make the playoffs, great. If they do win the division, even better. If they fail to do either, that’s fine, as long as they are building towards a clear identity that can be a winning sustainable formula moving forward. This is the goal for 2024, in my mind.

As I watch these twelve remaining games, I am going to now temper expectations each week. I am going to try to exude patience with the offense and defense. I’m going to look for signs of who the building blocks are moving forward. I am going to look for signs of a winning philosophy within this coaching staff.

Is Geno Smith the guy who can be here longer termed as QB1? Does Macdonald ultimately want a pass happy attack that Grubb seems to continue to fancy, or does he want more balance? Is DK a guy this offense should center around or should it be more K9? Who are going to be the real building blocks of this defense?

If the season was over today, and we were heading into the offseason, I would make the offensive line the high priority in free agency and the draft, but I would also acknowledge that maybe we do not have the building block linebackers to green dot this defense and make it special. There is lots of work to do in these two areas.

I see lots of reasons why they should extend Geno Smith a few more years, and also extend DK Metcalf. They can drop both of their 2025 salaries down, and create more cap space to be active in free agency. I can also see the argument some make that maybe perhaps Seattle has used too much of their resources in their offensive skill positions, and maybe making a tough choice (or two) to move on from the more expensive pieces opens up more money to use at the offensive line.

Seattle has the cheapest offensive line in the league right now, and you know what?

It painfully shows.

Time to change that up.

At the very least, I think that starts with running it more with K9, but bigger picture? I really need to see John Schneider go on a big time mission next offseason to improve that offensive line.

For now, just run that f’ing ball.

Go Hawks.