One thing that I want to say before we move further through this piece. Good God, do I ever hate watching the Seattle Seahawks losing in action green uniforms. If you are going to go bold with the looks on national television, then you better bring it and win that fucking game, or you are going to look like a massive boob. Last night the Seattle Seahawks were boobs worthy of a their our Russ Meyer picture. Big Lime Green Boobs.

It was boob ball. They were out coached, and out played. I could list individual positive efforts, but I am not really in the mood for it. My eyes still hurt from all the action green stupidity from bad play calling to bad cornerback play to bad red zone quarterbacking (again).

So, that said, if any of us got overly caught up in the after glow of that win in Arizona last week, we can now certainly wipe anyway any fanciful notions that the Seattle Seahawks being a true contender this year. With a healthy Geno Smith, they are probably a solid B lister in the NFC, with a decent chance of the playoffs (if they don’t puke all over themselves), but with Sam Howell, I think they will be lucky to win one more game out of these remaining three and finish out 9-8. Hopefully, we will get Geno back at least by the time this team suits up in Chicago in tens days because what I saw from Howell having to sub in for an injured Geno made me miss Drew Lock tremendously in the second half of this game.

So, it is what it is after the Packers and their hoards of fans spilled into Lumen Field last night. We were sounded beaten on all phases. Asses in action green handed to us by a bunch of marauding, laughing cheeseheads.

Our defense was a slight bright spot in the second half after it adjusted to its bad play of the first half, but it was not enough. In the end, they gave up a bunch of yards through penalties downfield, they didn’t sack the quarterback once, and they didn’t stop the run enough. Conversely, the Green Bay defense sacked our quarterbacks seven times, held Seattle to 128 yards passing, 80 yards rushing, and it collected two interceptions. For me, the Green Bay defense was the big story of this game, and it exposed Seattle for what it is on offense.

Ryan Grubb continues to coach a drop back shotgun heavy offense that doesn’t seem to know how to be creative with its run game even though it has a talented collection of running backs. I don’t want to hear or read comments about the state of the offensive line. Plenty of teams in the league this year suffer from subpar offensive line play, and yet they find ways to overcome. It is a league epidemic, so please don’t @ me with comments about the offensive line.

Good offensive coordinators figure out ways to mitigate the issues with subpar lines. They get the quarterback under center more, they use motions for window dressing, they use a flipping fullback, and they get their starting five finding rhythms with run blocking together, they use play action, they run out of spread instead of predominantly drop back passing out of it as Grubb chooses to do.

I would love for Ryan Grubb to work out in Seattle. It would be huge for the team to maintain stability with the offense, and have this side of the ball taken care of as Macdonald focuses on his defense, and I don’t love the idea of bringing in another OC for young players to learn yet another scheme, but sometimes, you just have to cut your losses. After this game, I just do not feel certain that Grubb’s offensive philosophy can be a match for what Mike Macdonald wants his team to be in the stated goal of being a physical team.

The best offensive play of the game was a beautifully executed gap pulling play to the right that broke Zach Charbonnet for a long explosive touchdown run. This was the type of run blocking that soundly beat Arizona on the road last week. Why did we not see more of this?????

Was Grubb caught up in wanting to continue to get JSN more involved and DK? Was he trying to reward long time Seahawk receiver Tyler Lockett more Scooby snacks catching the ball downfield? Does he just get bored dialing up run plays????

The whole approach that worked wonderfully against the Cardinals felt like it was thrown out the window against the Packers perhaps because of some injuries in the Green Bay secondary, and this is why I feel like Grubb maybe just isn’t going to provide a good marriage for Mike Macdonald. I just don’t sense that the ground game matters enough to Grubb, and this is why we have such an uneven offense. He wants to play call as if he is gifted the best offensive line in the league, and he has Tom Brady. Perhaps he would be well served going back to college where he can be a bit of a rockstar again because in Seattle, he feels more like a liability that is going to waste good defensive efforts.

In the second half of this game, Seattle’s defense gave Grubb and his offense chances by making stops, and after Geno Smith was knocked out of the game, Grubb squandered them trying to make short Sam Howell be a drop back passer. With the way the Packers defensive line was pass rushing, it was like watching Emperor Nero throwing Christians into a pit of starving lions with what Howell was tasked to do.

If Geno hadn’t gotten injured, he might have, indeed, made it a game in the end. His fourth quarter comeback charms are legit in this league. Yet, at the same time, I feel like Geno’s pension for throwing red zone interceptions could have just as easily crept up in the late moments of the fourth quarter, as it did in the first half. In short, I am not sure even Geno would have had it in him to pull this one off.

So, what does this all mean for Seattle moving forward through these next three games, at 8-6?

I think the answer to that question will be revealed once we know more about Geno’s knee injury. I have a hard time believing this team will win a couple of these games (much less one game) with Sam Howell quarterbacking, but maybe I am wrong. Maybe having Sam out there forces Grubb to dial further into the running attack, and Sam does some decent game managing over this next stretch of games.

Something tells me that when Geno went out of this game, so did a lot of our chances of winning this division and making the playoffs. I don’t particularly believe that Geno Smith has been that great this year, not like others have been claiming he has anyways, but I certainly do believe that he gives Seattle the best chance to win this year. If the goal is the playoffs, he is our best bet at quarterback to get us there.

So, we will see on the state of Geno. Fingers crossed that we get him back soon.

Despite the terrible way they showed up at home against Green Bay, I still want to see this team win the division and make the playoffs. I need this young roster and coaches to feel playoff football to build off of into next year.

In the meantime, I now want to see how this team will rally through these final three games. If they have to hide the Howell Train, I want to see how player rally around him. I want to see the fight. I don’t necessarily need to see all the wins, but I gotta see the fight. If we get the wins, it will be icing.

As I have said many times before on this blog, I see this thing with Macdonald most likely taking a few seasons before we really start seeing the big returns. This year, in many ways, is a trial to see how all these new coaches work with each other and the players, to see which players are the real big time pieces moving forward, and to determine what needs to be addressed next offseason. That is what 2024 is really about for these Seahawks, whether or not that is what they openly state that or not.

So, in that, I don’t think this ass whooping from the Packers is that much of a big deal as ugly as it was. Sure, it sucks that it ended the fun four game win streak, and yes, it does suck that the stadium was yet again filled with a bunch of away fans, but the best way to prevent ticket holders from selling to out of town fans is to put a product out that makes them want to attend in person more often. That product should include a better offensive line, more competent offensive play calling, and maybe it needs to involve having someone at quarterback who isn’t a 34 year old second tier passer with a pension of throwing a lot of red zone interceptions.

I know this sounds harsh, but I think it is worth stepping back and looking at this Seattle Seahawk product for a moment. The Green Bay Packers feel like a well oiled machine. They have a talented young quarterback that they invested a late first round pick into acquiring him with (and developing), they have a stable offensive line, a smart play caller as their head coach, and they have a talented defense. They are a true contender because of all this, and they have now beaten every single team in the NFC West after this game. Conversely, Seattle can kinda say that they got a decent defense, and that is about it. Their offense teases but cannot be trusted to leave the house without a proper babysitter looking after it, and they don’t have one.

Seattle has a lot of work to do in order to keep ticket holders from selling off their tickets to out of town fans pouring in. It is that simple. They need to improve the offense line, get an offensive scheme that has an identity to match its defense, and they probably need to figure out the longer termed solution to the quarterback position, one way or the other.

That doesn’t mean that they can’t find a couple more wins to finish this year out right. It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if they managed to do that. It just means that they need really start attacking this thing strong after their football playing raps up for the year. However these final three games play out, next offseason will be critical for John Schneider and Mike Macdonald to make the right calls on how to best take this team forward towards being an A List contending team again, finally.

After watching them lose to the Packers like this, it is clear that there is a lot more work to be done. I am excited to see what this offseason brings to Seattle. It will be a huge one for this team.

But for now, I just need to see Ryan Grubb mandated run the ball, and I need to see this team fight and claw through these next three games. Something tells me that they will give it a good fight, win or lose, and that is worth something in this league.

Go Hawks.

I will be honest with you. I did not watch any of this game at Met Life Stadium in New Jersey between the Seattle Seahawks and The New York Jets.

It is not because I didn’t want to watch. I really did, especially after their surprising two game win streak against divisional opponents Arizona and San Francisco.

Three weeks ago, this team felt on the ropes and heading towards the dumpster. Now, they are in first place in the NFC West and they control their own path towards winning a very tight division. Each game moving forward should be a must watch, and it pained me not to see this one.

But I had greater things going on.

I did not watch this game because I was duty bound to drive my family safely home from beautiful scenic Kamloops, British Columbia back down to Seattle, Washington, and the best time to head across the mountain highways was right around kickoff. So, I made a call, and it was the right call. I love the Seattle Seahawks but I love my Canadian Family, and my immediate family more, and I knew that by stretching out our stay up there, I was probably not even going to catch this thing on the radio driving through potential high mountain slush and low visibility conditions.

But I tried. I really did try to listen to this batshit crazy game on the radio, but I just could not decipher most of it under the loud static noise that was driving my wife towards very outward frustration, if not total insanity. She wanted to talk about bathroom fans and jujitsu classes for our son, and I just wanted to decipher if what Steve Rable was yelling about under the demonic static was a good thing or bad thing for Seattle.

As, we inched closer to Hope BC, I heard something about JSN catching a sweet 28 yard pass from Geno Smith in the third quarter that got Seattle down towards the red zone, or so I thought. Then sometime later, as we started driving through Hope, the static cleared enough that I caught Zach Charbonnet rambling in for a touchdown that put the Seahawks on top. I did fist pumps of joy, but I had not known any of the chaos that transpired up to that point.

Then a few minutes after that, we finally got finally good radio reception heading towards the Sumas Border, and I was able to hear all the dreaded passing Aaron Rodgers was able to do against the Seahawk defense that sure as shit made me wonder if I even wanted to listen any further, and then it happened. Leonard Big Cat Williams brought Rodgers down with an F You Aaron Rodgers sack, a few moments later, Rodgers missed a guy in the end zone on fourth down, and the game was over.

I missed Big Cat’s stunning history making pick six, his other sack, and all his other splash plays that kept Seattle in this one, but I heard it all talked about post game. All I got to say moving forward is to let Big Cat cook.

Leonard Big Cat Williams, in back to back weeks, has indeed cooked the Seattle Seahawks to victories, and he has been doing it in a multitude of ways as a defensive tackle collapsing pockets, a stand up end overpowering left tackles, and as a Nose Tackle who can drop into coverage to snag an interception for a record breaking 92 yard pick six return for an NFL defensive lineman. In this two game stretch, Big Cat feels like Mike Macdonald’s cheat code to gutting out stellar defensive ball, and victories.

If Leonard Williams does not receive Defensive Player Of The Week honors this Wednesday, then there is simply no justice left in this world, and we should just all walk into the Pacific Ocean to never to return to land again. Demons and Elon Musk cyborgs would control everything, mayonnaise would be our primary government controlled nutrient supplement, and all social media algorithms would involve muscle bound AI images of Kermit the Frog. It is imperative that Big Cat wins this honor this week.

Let Big Cat cook, indeed.

Yeah, I think Mike Macdonald is feeling exactly that, and is going to keep letting this big fella loose through these final five games. I sense that Macdonald knows the unicorn player he has on the defensive line. Like what he had in Baltimore last year with Justin Madubuike, I sense Macdonald finding ways within his versatile multi front scheme to make this Big Cat purr loudly atop of terrified NFL quarterbacks.

He isn’t the only one on defense primed to feast through this final stretch of the season. Linebacker Ernest Jones is enjoying newfound success since being traded to Seattle. Safety Coby Bryant is coming on, and the other safety Julian Love playing like the second best defender behind the Big Cat. There are others who, each week, you can sense coming on. I don’t need to list them because you can sense them.

As it stands right now, however bonkers this game was in New Jersey, Seattle is 7-5, and is holding onto first place in a tight division. After a rough patch of games in October and early November, things have suddenly gotten fun, and it will only be more intriguing in a tightly contested division where the bottom of the division team in San Francisco is only two games below first place.

If Seattle can find another win against Arizona next Sunday, and if they can get a win in Los Angeles against the Rams at the end of the season, those to wins alone might be enough to become division champs in Mike Macdonald’s first year coaching this team. Bitter rival San Francisco can ironically help out by battling hard against the Cardinals and Rams as they seek to salvage their season in these last remaining games.

I think that it would be really awesome if Seattle won this division this year despite the clear need to shore up their offensive line next offseason, and to build upon their overall depth. If they can steal a home win against Green Bay or Minnesota, and take care of business in Chicago against a struggling Bears team, that could be enough to put them into the double digit win column this year, too. That would be really sweet considering how rough things felt in October.

Personally, at this point, I care less about draft position next Spring, and I care more about Macdonald building a winning culture with this team he has inherited from Pete Carroll. In short, I think the best way to properly build a team up is to coach up young talent now over relying on highly drafted college players being franchise saviors. If Seattle guts out a division title, and is one and done in the playoffs, I could care less. It is more import for me to see young players finding ways to win together, and improve as players together.

I make no pretenses that Seattle is any sort of powerhouse club this year. I wouldn’t even place a bet for them to win this division even though they hold a lead.

In this game, their special teams were all but pissing away any sort of potential road win. I also don’t think Ryan Grubb calling a bunch of pass plays at the goal line, abandoning any sort of attempt to punch it in on the ground, ending the fourth quarter drive with Geno taking a fourth down sack is a great winning formula on the road, either. Most teams playing like this lose these sort of games, even against bad teams.

But Seattle still stayed resolved enough to find a win mostly thanks to Big Cat and a few other key vets. Objectively speaking, that is pretty interesting, is it not?

I find it interesting in terms of the personality that this team feels to be forming in this second halve of the season. They have an interesting mix of young talented players finding reasons to believe in themselves, and they are led by a few savvy veterans like Geno Smith and Big Cat Williams who are smart enough and talented enough to find ways to win ball games.

I am not saying that they will be a dangerous team in January. I am just saying that if they find ways to continue to stack wins while maybe not playing wholly ideal football, win perhaps three out of these last five games (or more), they might be sneaky dangerous to contend with come playoffs, if they do get in.

I am genuinely very interested in seeing what comes out of these final five games. I am neither getting my hopes up too high, nor am I bracing for disappointment. I am just interested to see what comes out of this last month of ball.

I have a broader outlook for this club now with these new coaches, schemes, whatnots. I see the blemishes, can sense the roster needs, but holy smokes am I ever excited about the trends on defense. I am also jazzed up about the fact that there seems to be enough gritty fight on both sides of the ball for me to think that maybe we aren’t too far off from seeing something special being built up here again right around the corner.

So, I am just really pretty damn excited about all of that. There is good stuff emerging with this team. They can now hang their hat on being a scrappy defensive team, and that is something.

I am no longer looking at this team from the prism of a fan of Pete Carroll, desperately hoping during the past couple years this organization back on track after trading away Russell Wilson, and feeling the anxiety of watching defensive collapses. I am now looking at this team from the lens of a fan of Seattle Seahawks who increasingly believes that John Schneider made the right call on hiring Mike Macdonald.

One thing that I enjoyed after this game was finally catching Macdonald’s press conference and seeing the rawness of a new coach who knew his overall squad had not played ideal ball, but still gutted out a win. He looked like a dude who just watched his eight year old kid walk across the street while some crazed douche bag in a Honda Civic floored it a block away and narrowly missed the child as he was trying to make an amber light. It was a look of both abject horror and elation.

He addressed the wild nature of this game with all the special team screw ups right away. It is safe to assume that he fully intends to have these issues cleaned up before kickoff happens in the desert lands of Arizona next Sunday.

I like how Mike quickly addresses the issues on everyone’s mind in these pressers. I see this as important in his coaching style that he is outward about all the warts.

Not to be constantly comparing him to Carroll, but it is hard for me not to notice the differences in their personalities and style. Too often, I would sense from Carroll a need to push back on close victories, saying that he didn’t mind winning close down to the wire games. I think he did that to maintain positive confidence in his locker room, but sometimes, I just wanted him to say “wow, that was fucking crazy but I am really glad we got this W anyways.” With Macdonald, I get the sense that he is more annoyed with screw ups, and will be more outward in saying that they gotta clean up a bunch of stuff, but that it is good to get a win regardless.

Outside of these overall thoughts, I can’t remark on many things about this game because I did not catch most of it, but I will say that it was cool seeing in the highlights rookie tight AJ Barner making another nice touchdown play for himself. It was even more enjoyable seeing rookie guard Sataoa Laumea (who was making his first start) springing Zach Charbonnet on a block that created the touchdown run that got the team its go ahead points to pull out the come from behind win.

For as much crap as John Schneider has been getting from fans a month ago (me included), it is vindicating and encouraging to see rookies from this draft class contributing down this stretch of games. If Laumea can grow enough to settle down the right guard position in December, that could be critically huge for this team in the future. If Barner proves a quality tight end, and Tyrice Knight continues trending towards being a plus starting linebacker, and Byron Murphy continues to make splashes as a defensive tackle, this will have been another really solid draft for Schneider. I am rooting for all of this to happen.

As much as I am currently living to see Big Cat play, Julian Love, Ernest Jones, JSN, and DK, and others, seeing rookies contribute positively is the most exciting thing for me about this club right now. Again, my gaze upon this team is much further out than these five remaining games, and it is critically important that we see rookies stepping in and playing well, if not perfectly well, and I think we are getting enough of it now.

Hopefully the injuries to Michael Dickson and DK Metcalf are not serious. Hopefully this team continues to stack wins, and find more gritty ways to win together.

There is not a game in this final stretch run that is a gimme, not even that game in Chicago against the struggling Bears. If Seattle proved anything yesterday, they showed us that even against a bad team, we can expect it to be a tough out, especially if one phase of their team doesn’t show up ready to compete. None of us should feel absolute certain they can hold this lead in this division after this one. Yet, at the same time, I think it is okay to dream a bit more about playoff football for them this year.

In a way, I find that liberating as a fan. Sometimes you just want to see a loved one jump on a board, paddle out beyond the reef, and get up onto it surfing back to shore before a twenty foot great white takes off their leg. I know this sounds dark, but football is not for the queazy.

But I am just happy to continue to take whatever this wild and wacky season brings. Football is fun, and Seattle is finding fun ways to win lately.

They aren’t perfect. They aren’t a powerhouse. This offense still does things that make me want to throw sand into my eyes so that I don’t see all the drop back passing that Ryan Grubb continues to be obsessed about.

But I like their resolve.

I dig it.

I can live with it while feeling like Mike Macdonald does not want to live this way as the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, and they will continue growing towards being the complete team that he envisions. Right now, I am just enjoying their fight led by Big Cat and others. It’s fun.

Lastly, let me leave you with this fun fact of joy I saw after the game on the internet. Observe this bit of history made yesterday, and enjoy it.

Suck it, Aaron Rodgers.

Go Hawks!

All week long, I heard the doubters doubting. I heard it on podcasts, and I read it online.

Seattle only beat San Francisco because Nick Bosa came out of the game. The Arizona Cardinals have the best running offense in the league, Kyler Murray is playing his best ball as a pro, and it is nearly impossible to stop James Connor as a runner.

A week ago, people felt like Seattle was gifted luck in their win against the dreaded San Francisco 49ers, and they were ready to see their fortune all come crashing down against Arizona. It will be interesting to see where the skeptics land this week on the team, and they have now climbed into sole first place in the division after pummeling Kyler Murray and James Connors on a rainy afternoon in Seattle.

Now look, I get it if you read the title of this piece, and you shook your head. If you did, you are not a believer yet in Mike Macdonald’s incarnation of the Seattle Seahawks. I’m hopeful that someday you will.

You might be jaded, perhaps, and maybe also spoiled by the success of the Legion Of Boom era a decade ago. You need to see this Seahawk defense have more sustained success after holding the Rams offense to 13 points, the 49ers to 17 points, and what was an explosive Cardinal offense to now 6 points. The images of what Buffalo did to Seattle last month could be still too fresh, and that early season loss to the Giants still too annoying.

I get all of this. I also think that things within our culture like toxic masculinity prevent people from seeing the positive growths of a team searching for its identity with a brand new coaching staff. Feeling cynical can make a fragile soul feel stronger than it actually is. It’s an easy emotional retreat.

The Man wants you to exist in cynicism. In fact, he needs you to be there in order to consume enough beer and processed foods to develop a chronic decease that will prevent you from reaching your fullest potential. This is the way the Man stays in control and keeps us all divided and distracted.

But I digress.

I am feeling much more positively about the Seattle Seahawks these days. What a difference a couple of interdivisional wins makes in a row over the past week.

As I see it now, I feel like I do see an identity of this team emerging. They are a scrappy bunch of versatile defenders who exist in an increasingly exotic scheme playing confidently badass defense, and they are an explosive passing team who chooses to live and die with the arm of Geno Smith.

That is who and what they are, and what they shall remain as this year, for good or bad.

Now, I will be the first to admit that it is an odd sight seeing a team led by a defensive minded coach so willing to air it out, offensively, each game, but it is what it is. Mike Macdonald wanted Ryan Grubb as his play caller, and it appears as though drop back passing it too much in Grubb’s DNA to expect major changes for the remainder of this season.

I know this team is not perfect because of it, too.

I could stand to see way more cleaner play on offense, and more judicious passing from Geno Smith, if this is indeed to be a pass heavy offense through the rest of this year (it most likely will). Judging by Macdonald’s post game comments, I feel he is also growing tired of Geno’s routine INTs, as well, especially the ones that have occurred in the red zone negating scoring opportunities.

Three games ago, Geno threw two red zone interceptions that prevented the team from earning a home victory over the Rams. Last week, he forced a bad sideline throw over the head of his receiver that gave San Francisco a great opportunity to score. Yesterday, he forced a critical red zone interception when he had green grass in front of him to run for a potential first down.

His red zone interception in this game, and his interception against the 49ers last week are as bad of picks as I have seen. For as great as he looks in many moments during each of these games, he continues to throw far too many interceptions for me to fully get behind what Ryan Grubb is envisioning as the offensive coordinator.

It is what it is, though, and until he plays a fully clean game again, I feel this is what we are going to get out of this offense this year. We will get a lot of fun plays, and also a number of hair pulling ones, as well.

In Geno’s defense, he could be helped out by Grubb, if at least there were more bootleg rollout opportunities called to mitigate the subpar pass blocking issues at guard, and Grubb could also be way more creative with designed weeps and gadget ways move the ball on the ground. At this point, though, we can only hope that Grubb will search for more ways to get more creative through these remaining six games of the year, and Geno will be more protective with the football. They might.

It is baffling to me how uncreative Grubb has become as the OC of the Seahawks after being so creative for two years as a play caller for the University of Washington. Outside of some fun abilities to get JSN involved in brilliant run after catch opportunities, and to use K9 more as a receiver, I just don’t see enough from Grubb yet with motions, jet sweeps, or even moving pockets to help Geno out against athletic pass rushes.

I almost don’t care anymore, frankly. I am head over heels in love with this defense. So screw letting Geno cook. I say let Big Cat sizzle.

The way Macdonald deployed Leonard Big Cat Williams in this game against Kyler Murray was nothing short of inspiring. In throughout this matchup, Big Cat dominated by lining up at nose tackle, three technique, and stand up defensive end outside of the left tackle. This is the type of chess playing we should expect to see from Macdonald as his defenders continue to settle into this scheme that morphs from being a 3-4, 4-3, 4-2-5, 2-4-5, and what-have-you each and every series.

The biggest difference between what this defense is growing into, and what it was back in October is that now Macdonald has his guys getting it, and getting each other. They have taken the hero ball mentality out of their games, and they have replaced it with gritty, smart discipline. Together, they are truly one, and what a sight it is now becoming.

This team is playing great defense, and has for three games in a row. They played good enough to beat the Rams nearly a month ago (the offense screwed up that game), and they broke Brock Purdy last week in Santa Clara, and then just put a beating on Kyler Murray yesterday in Seattle.

The Seattle Seahawks are in first place again in the NFC West and it is because of this Mike Macdonald defense. A couple weeks ago, fans were losing their minds on twitter saying he should be fired, but I say that Seattle is damn lucky to have landed him as their new head coach even if some toxic fans can’t fully see that right now.

Will this team sustain and win out the NFC West division?

I dunno, but I will say that there is nothing about the Rams that impresses me right now, the 49ers feel like they are falling off of a cliff, and the Cardinals just got their asses kicked in Seattle. A few weeks ago, I was thinking of benching a bunch of starters, playing youngsters, and aiming to get into the offseason as quickly as possible to attack free agency and the draft again. After beating the 49ers and Cardinals, I am seeing reinvigorating new life in this team this year. I am excited to see how it shakes out, good or bad, or somewhere in between.

Of the six games remaining on the schedule for Seattle, with games against the Jets, Cardinals, Packers, Vikings, Bears, and Rams, they may just need to find three more wins to sow up this division. For example beating Cardinals again, and the Rams along with finding one more win might be enough to do it. With the way this defense is coming along, I wouldn’t be completely shocked if they muster out four wins in these remaining games.

I am not saying this should be the expectation of this team now, but I do feel like we can dare to dream a bit more these days. If Seattle keeps making these gains on defense (I think they can), and if they can just simply play a bit cleaner on offense, I like their chances of winning this division as much as any other team that play in it right now.

The biggest question is will they cleanup it up, offensively. This feels like this is where the success of this team will hinge on through these remaining six games.

Can Macdonald impress upon Geno Smith the high importance of being protective with the football, living to fight for another down instead of forcing a throw that maybe isn’t really there?

These six remaining games are as big for Geno Smith as anyone on this team. Ryan Grubb has chosen to lean into him, and with how electric JSN has become and DK Metcalf is capable of being, there is little reason to expect Grubb to pull back now. Therefore, it is incumbent upon Geno Smith to truly show this team and fanbase he is worthy of spearheading this attack by not just making big time throws, but also being really smart how to protect the ball at critical times.

It is not an easy thing to balance, but great quarterbacks find ways of doing exactly that, and if Geno wants to be paid as great quarterbacks are, he must be better about protecting the football. We are now eleven games into the season, and we cannot use the state of the offensive line as a constant excuse as to why Geno Smith has had the amount of interceptions as he has had this season through these games. With six games left, the onus is on him to be smart with the football each and every game here on out.

Oddly, I have some degree of optimism brewing that he will be better moving forward. The stakes are real again now. This is where he needs to show his fourth quarter magic through all quarters.

I am also willing to run counter to what I have felt about this offense lately. Weirdly, as much as I have been frustrated in Ryan Grubb’s scheme, I am honestly seeing a potential light at the end of the tunnel with it, as well.

Having Olu Oluwatimi now at center feels, well, kinda centering. The shotgun efficiency feels significantly better, and the way Grubb is getting JSN and K9 involved in screen passes is a really interesting watch.

No, this offense is not running the ball with the physicality that I would like to see, but, at this point in the season, I see the merits of leaning into what its strengths are. JSN and K9 are upper echelon playmakers with the ball in their hands in space. Grubb is trying to get them into those situations, and you can see why.

I would also add that Seattle is currently playing without its starting tight end in Noah Fant who is also pretty special catching the ball in space. Rookie tight end AJ Barner is doing fine with what he can do, but Fant with the ball in his hands in space is kind next level if you think back to some of his more explosive plays when he has had those opportunities. I have optimism of this offense clicking more when he gets back.

Until then, they just need to clean it up. Limit the false starts like JSN had in this one early on. Protect the ball better (Geno). Find more creative ways to run the ball (Grubb). This all feels doable.

But this defense, my God.

My God, do I ever love how it is now gelling.

Tyrice Knight and Earnest Jones are fun to watch at linebacker. Fun. To. Watch.

Big Cat Williams, Jarran Reed, and Byron Murphy are making me giddy with their defensive tackle play. Devon Witherspoon, Coby F’ing Bryant, and Julian Love are making me truly enjoy this secondary, and Boye Mafe and Derick Hall make me love these edges.

There is talent and depth at all layers of this defense now, and you can feel them building confidence inside this scheme. For three games in a row, they have notched it up more.

They are making me really excited. Like, I am glued in just to watch this defense play, and I have not felt that way about a Seattle defense in well over six or seven years now.

Two weeks ago, knee jerk reactors were ready to fire Macdonald, and fire John Schneider. No trust that Macdonald would be able to turn it around, and people were bemoaning what Schneider did in the offseason. Most of us were almost ready to put a fork into them, and call them all cooked, even the most glass half full sorts such as myself.

Well, two years ago, it took Macdonald half a season to get the Baltimore Raven defense turned around within his new scheme, and now it is looking like same is happening here in Seattle. I appreciate that casual fans set expectations high for their team, and get frustrated when they go through a bumpy patch, but realistically speaking, we should have all probably assumed that this first year under Macdonald would be patchy, and it still might. That said, I feel like we have gone through three games now where this trend on defense feels very sustainable.

That is what has me so damn excited. More than any other aspect of football, teams that win with top notch defenses get me significantly more excited than any sorta offensive juggernaut teams.

Football, at its purest core, is not a contact sport. It is a game built on violence. That is what all the protective armor is about. It is about being in proper positions, holding your ground, trusting your brothers to do theirs, and beating the ass of the dude in front of you. Great defenses do this, and I feel like a great one is brewing in Seattle, finally again.

The offense might require another full offseason to catch up, and that is okay for me. Use the draft and free agency to further address the offensive line. Make trades, if you need to do it. This all feels doable, and I feel much better as a Seahawk fan this morning feeling like one side of the ball is taken care of as opposed to what I felt last month seeing both sides of the ball needing tons of work.

I trust Mike Macdonald as a defensive guru now. I am fully bought into that. I am more comfortable waiting on the offense to get there.

At the end of the day, I would much rather feel like the team I root for has a defense that fans from other teams simply do not what to see their team face. I feel like we are inching towards that again in Seattle, and that is a very exciting thought, indeed.

So let’s have Big Cat cook, and whatever else happens will happen.

Go Hawks.

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.