Today is a very good day to be a Seattle sports fan. The Seattle Mariners have swept the Angels to gain full leadership of the AL West, and the Seattle Seahawks traveled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and pounded the dreaded Steelers significantly enough to show football pundits that perhaps their offense isn’t as anemic as the narrative was built up to be after a tough home loss to San Francisco last weekend.

A few days ago, I wrote a piece about Ken Walker and Riq Woolen that was possibly the single most critical article I have ever taken to write about individual players on this blog. While my intention wasn’t to make it a total hit job, I wanted to illustrate a number of reasons why I felt perhaps they weren’t working out in the new schemes Seattle has adopted under Mike Macdonald. I questioned K9’s ability to fit inside a primarily zone blocking scheme, and I questioned whether Woolen had the discipline needed to operate consistently in Macdonald’s complex defense.

Towards the final moments of the game yesterday against the Pittsburgh Steelers, I joked with friends that K9 must had read my blog. Of course, he did not, but I am sure he heard the criticism that was all over radio waves last week, on podcasts, and written by much bigger fish out there than what this little blog is.

Walker had himself a critically important game on Sunday in Pittsburgh. He played with purpose, and with such a decisiveness that I cannot even recall the last time I saw this out of him. Maybe his rookie year?

He didn’t dance behind blockers waiting for a big whole to open up so he could run to daylight. He didn’t look hesitant or unsure. He hit creases, violently, and for most of the day, carried Seattle’s offense on his back. A total reversal of what he showed last week against San Francisco, and in many stretches last year.

This is the type of running Seattle needs to fully see their offense open up. This is an offensive scheme that is entirely built on the run, and K9 has the type of talent at running back that he could be one of the brightest ones in this league, if he plays pissed off for greatness on a regular basis. When you have a back doing that, it opens everything on the offense up for a reliable veteran quarterback such as Sam Darnold.

Football is not a game for the hesitant. It is a sport dependent on the willingness to stare violent intentions in the face, and throw it back on the opponent. It is a blood sport with helmets and shoulder pads, and with strategy that resembles conventional warfare.

It is a game that scares soccer moms, and speaks to the inner barbarianism inside us that compels us to take muay thai classes. It is the yin to our yang.

If Ken Walker has now understood that his mission to a big free agent pay day is to trust his offensive line enough to play decisive with bad intentions on second level tacklers with regularity, he will undoubtedly seize the RB1 role in this offense over Zach Charbonnet. If both guys can bring it like this, then I think we could be looking at something special brewing in Seattle this year.

When linebackers and DBs are thinking about K9, it gives Cooper Kupp catch and run opportunities as was on display through much of the game. It also opens up tight ends, and it allows JSN to get downfield on one on one situations for deep shots such as the one that Darnold brilliantly hit him with late in the game to set up K9’s backbreaking outside toss run to the end zone that stunned Steeler Nation.

All of this happened on Sunday, in a tough road environment for Sam Darnold, who, save for a couple bad interceptions, had himself a quality day guiding the Seattle offense. It was important for him to have this type of outing, as well.

Darnold was, without a doubt, the better quarterback in Pittsburgh yesterday. He looked more poised than Aaron Rodgers did, and as the game wore on, he looked like the passer who would prove better down the stretch. He was decisive, gritty when he needed to be, and I think this is a quality game for him to further build chemistry with Kupp, and company.

As mentioned in a piece I wrote after the loss last week, this offense will likely take time to find itself this season, and in that, it will take a number of games for Darnold to find his chemistry with his receivers. In this game, he looked like he was taking encouraging steps forward with that. Now let’s build off of it, and get those two INTs out of our game.

Rodgers, however, to my eyes, from the get go, appeared old and flustered, and typically salty enough for Steeler fans to now be a bit concerned. This was from the opening series that the Steelers had the ball and he led them to a field goal score, as well.

He doesn’t move like he used to, his efforts to get outside the pocket feel more labored, and it felt like he knew he was going to be in for it all game long against Seattle’s dominating defensive tackles and quick edge rushers. He was, and by the end of the game, he looked like he wanted to retreat into a hippie yurt somewhere in central Oregon to meditate about his next appearance on the Joe Rogan Podcast.

Seattle didn’t blitz him much probably because they were without their do everything corner Devon Witherspoon, but they really didn’t need to blitz him, either. Their front four rushers did enough. You know you have something when you can dependably rush four to affect the passer. We will touch more on that in just a minute, so hold this thought in your mind a bit.

As for Riq Woolen, I thought he had himself a good bounce back game, as well. Like K9, he needed this to be a quality outing.

On the whole, I thought all the defensive backs shined in coverage, and it appears that perhaps Seattle’s depth at cornerback is better than folks were anticipating with Spoon being out. This, in my mind, might be one of the more sneakier encouragements to come out of this game.

Josh Jobe continues to be one of the best kept secrets in the league at cornerback, and Shaq Griffin held in admirably, as well, as did newcomer Derion Kendrick (who was a late addition waiver claim from the Rams). Kendrick, in particular, seems to have picked the complexities of the Macdonald defense up fast, and if this is so, he gives Seattle a depth at corner to where Seattle see an opportunity for decent mid season trade, potentially.

Could the Raiders come sniffing around Riq Woolen with Jakobi Meyers on the table who has requested a trade out of Sin City? Would Miami come calling about Riq offering Jaylen Waddle in exchange?

Even though Cooper Kupp had himself a quality bounce back game in Pittsburgh, demonstrating his intended role in this offense, do we trust him to hold up for an entire season, or does Seattle look for opportunities to add a veteran receiver from another team who fits what Seattle wants to do, offensively?

I think these are interesting questions to keep in mind as we get further into games and it is better revealed to us what these Seattle Seahawks are this year. Right now, even though I loved what Kupp did in this game, what JSN continues to do, and what rookie Tory Horton showed, I still wonder if this offense is one receiver away from really getting to where I think Kubiak and Macdonald want it to go this year.

I know this is just two games into the season, and we still don’t totally know what we have in the Seahawks right now, but here is the Big Positive Thought that I have brewing.

I believe the Mike Macdonald defense is getting pretty legitimate in Seattle, right now, this season. Not legitimate in the “yeah, pretty good” sorta way, but in the legitimate “holy shit, I do not want to see my quarterback play against that” sorta way.

Last week against the 49ers, Brock Purdy was hurried and flustered much like Aaron Rodgers just was. Had Woolen not made a couple critical mistakes in coverage late in the fourth quarter, I think Seattle would have walked away with a win despite their offense not doing much. In fact, part of the problem against the 49ers was that Klint Kubiak kept a pretty safe dialed back approach to the offense with Darnold, and it wasn’t until points were needed late, that we really saw the passing opening up more downfield with Darnold delivering.

Sam Darnold, even with the Jets, has always been a good downfield passer, and this week, on the road in a very tough environment in Pittsburgh, Kubiak opened up the offense more, and allowed Darnold to push it downfield against a pretty good Steelers defense. It wasn’t perfect with that one bad INT intended for Cooper Kupp, in particular, but got multiple players involved, and it made the offense more of a scoring threat, and generally, Sam delivered.

There will be a host of games on this schedule where Seattle will not be playing defenses that are nearly as good as they have played in back to back weeks, and there will be offenses who won’t be as good, either. As Kubiak’s offense starts to settle in more, I think there are likely going to be games this season where Seattle could look pretty dominant as a young football team, barring significant injuries.

Will that be enough to win the division?

Maybe, the season is long, and I think there are still question marks as to how healthy Matt Stafford can stay with the Rams, how healthy the 49ers can be, and how real the Cardinals are.

I do not want to get ahead of my skis with the Seahawks right now, but I will say that I feel much better about them winning ball games when I know that they have a defense that can consistently pressure the quarterback by playing a two shell defense, and also stop the run with those backend looks. Seattle has a lot more talent up front than I think they are being recognized as having, and their backend looks like they are being coached at a very high level.

Coaching matters in the NFL, and it matters more than any other team sport, in my view. I think Mike Macdonald is a really, really good football coach, and people are eventually going to start seeing that more and more the further we get into games this year.

In this game, in Pittsburgh, Aaron Rodgers saw it. You could tell, from the get go, that he could see it, and he wasn’t feeling easy about it, either.

And DK Metcalf couldn’t do jack shit it with it, as well. He was largely shut down, and from a fan perspective, for a guy who wanted out of Seattle for supposed greener pastures, that was quite a delightful watch. Have fun being expensive and mid in Pittsburgh where fans won’t likely be as forgiving as they are out here.

I had a feeling heading into this game that Seattle would play Pittsburgh pretty tough, and maybe sneak out a quality win on the road. I didn’t necessarily see this level of ass kicking, though.

I dig it, and while I am sure some will say that this final 31-17 score on the road is deceiving with that botched kickoff return by the Steelers that gave Seattle seven extra points, Seattle’s offense still managed to score 24 points in this one, and might have managed more if not for a missed field goal and a dump fourth and one play in the red zone that led to Darnold’s second INT. Things to clean up, for sure, but damn..

Gimme more K9, and for the love of everything good in the world, please keep Robbie Ouzts on the field in front of him. We can do good things with that, I think.

Go Hawks.

Over the past few days, it has been quite a news cycle for Seattle Seahawk fans. On Sunday afternoon, it was reported that the Mike Macdonald and the Seattle Seahawks finally settled upon their new offensive coordinator who will replace Ryan Grubb. Two days prior to that, it was announced to the world that 73 year old Pete Carroll would take over the Las Vegas Raiders head coaching gig. I think both news events are worth touching on here, and I also think there’s a chance that both fronts could have impact on each other in the coming months, and I will explain later.

Firstly, here are my collected thoughts on Mike Macdonald choosing former New Orleans Saints coordinator Klint Kubiak for the gig here. On the surface, I like the move a lot, and I believe it felt inevitable for a while that he would be the guy chosen here to replace Ryan Grubb.

Kubiak is an experienced play caller who has been a coach in the league for sometime now. He’s also got strong NFL bloodlines with his dad Gary being a former NFL quarterback, coordinator, and Super Bowl winning head coach, and his philosophy is strongly tied to the Mike Shanahan system that has retaken the league in recent years. It is clear that based on most of the candidates that Seattle was interviewing, they had particular interest in the Shanahan system, and by extension of it, the Sean McVay system. Arguably, they got the top available person on the market to agree to come here to incorporate it. Bravo. Of the list of known candidates who interviewed with this team, I preferred Kubiak.

Personally, I wasn’t super stoked about the prospects of Seattle hiring the Detroit Lions offensive line coach to come out here to OC. I loved what the Lions offense has turned into over the past couple years, but for this gig out here, I needed an experienced NFL play caller. Maybe Hank Fraley will blossom into a sharp offensive play caller someday, but after one year with Ryan Grubb, and two years of Shane Waldron, I kinda needed Mike Macdonald’s choice to be someone who has been around the league for a while and has experience play calling against NFL defenses. Of the persons they interviewed, I kinda needed it to be Klint Kubiak.

And I totally get it if this selection does not wow you. Seattle has toiled with being good enough to compete for the playoffs but not good enough to win in them for nearly a decade now since their back to back Super Bowls. They aren’t a bad NFL team, but they aren’t an A Lister organization currently, either. So, I get it that when any move they make, it is likely to be met with a bit of a toxic skepticism from some fans, and I anticipate that there will be sorts who will look at Kubiak and his stints in Minnesota and Nola, and not be fully embracing of the hire.

My feelings on this front, is that if there is push back on this hire from fans, it likely is reflective of folks who are tired of Seattle being middling more than anything else. At this time last year, Seattle had just hired Mike Macdonald who many thought was the brightest young head coaching candidate out there, and then it was seen that they pulled off a coup by luring popular UW offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb to pair with him. Diehard Husky fans poured over promises to Seahawk fans just how special and dynamic Grubb would make this offense become with its power trio of receivers and Geno Smith, but the reality was that he was not ready to match wits against NFL defenses on a consistent basis, and he had to be babysat by coaches working under him at times, per reports.

So, I think this is very much an important hire for Seattle, and it is perhaps their biggest move of the offseason, if they do not make major changes to their personnel. They have to get this hire right by Kubiak, or fan discontent will only grow. That is the risk they made when they decided to move on from the legend of Pete Carroll for the young upside of Mike Macdonald.

But many fans are growing more tired of Seattle being in the middle of the pack. I get that. It has been four years since they last won their division, and it has been five years since they last won a playoff game. I feel your frustrations.

You want them to be more than what they are, and you might even be a bit more frustrated that they simply don’t tear it all down to struggle at the bottom for a while in order to built themselves up with a bunch of lottery picks from the NFL Draft. I get it.

The trouble is that the teams that tend to often pick in the top five or ten of the draft, usually routinely suck as clubs. These are the Jets, the Giants, Jaguars, Browns, Titans, and Cardinals. They tend to give up on quarterbacks too early, and coaches too fast, and it is a rinse and repeat vicious cycle for them.

Seattle is not that sort of organization. They strive to be competitive every year much like the Pittsburgh Steelers. They moved on from Pete Carroll last year when everyone assumed that they would replace him with a bright young offensive minded head coach, and they took another defensive minded head coach simply because he was the guy they believed was the best overall coach out there. The result was ten wins. This feels very much like Seattle.

Now they have paired Macdonald with a coordinator who, while maybe not the flashiest, comes from a balanced run married with play action system that will be more aligned at what Macdonald wants to do. For all those who will be likely to doubt his success here, he had a fair degree of success coaching this system in Minnesota getting a bright play out of Kirk Cousins, and his first two games of 2024 down in Nola proved spectacular before the swarm of injuries hit his offensive personnel. While there is no guarantee that Kubiak is going to be a big hit here, I think it is also true that the book is not fully out on him yet as a coach. This is where I think his pedigree matters.

He is the son of Gary Kubiak who has coached highly productive offenses throughout the league in Houston, Denver, Baltimore, and Minnesota. In fact, Mike Macdonald was in Baltimore when Gary coached Joe Flacco in 2014, and the Ravens had the most explosive attack in the league, and Flacco had his best statistical year as a passer. I am positive that when Grubb was fired, Macdonald likely thought of Klint Kubiak probably right off the bat by witness to what his father had accomplished.

Klint Kubiak also comes to this staff with Super Bowl experience being Brock Purdy’s QB coach in San Fransisco the year before last when they went to the Super Bowl and Purdy looked like the second coming of Joe Montana. Personally, I think it matters that our new OC has a deep background in coaching QBs and it appears that Klint it pretty good at it.

For the sake of throwing a little spicy speculation into this hire, I think it is worth pointing out that should Seattle choose to be a surprise team in the offseason pursuing Sam Darnold, well, Darnold was QB2 for San Francisco two years ago, and thus he probably knows very well what Kubiak plans to run here, and Kubiak knows him well. If Seattle’s front office has a desire to get younger at quarterback than Geno Smith, and Kubiak has a desire to bring in a quarterback who knows his system pretty well, I wouldn’t totally brush off this idea of Darnold coming in. I have been outwardly speculating about Seattle perhaps being interested in him for a while, and this hire of Kudiak only adds to the fuel behind those thoughts I hold.

I am not suggesting that Sam Darnold to Seattle is anything close to a given, nor am I actively trying to push Geno Smith out the door on my humble blog. I am just saying that certain aspects of Darnold sorta align with what Seattle could realistically do at quarterback given the likelihood that they will not be picking in the top five of the draft annually where bright young college quarterbacks typically now get selected. Do they want to pay 34 year old Geno Smith a big three year extension this offseason, or will they be more willing to take an educated guess on the upside of 27 year old Sam Darnold instead, and pivot towards his availability?

Many would see this as a lateral move at quarterback, and I get that. Personally, I think Darnold falls into a similar category of quarterback as Geno Smith. With Darnold, however, Seattle could conceivably have about a seven year window of steady play with a definite possibility that his ceiling of a player has not been met, yet. With Geno, however, I think even his strongest supporters would say that his window of playing quality QB1 ball is probably about two more years.

So, I am just going to leave my thoughts on the potential of Darnold to Seattle at that. On the surface, I think it is interesting, and with this new hire, I think it only adds fuel to the notion.

I will say that whomever Seattle does have quarterbacking here over the next few years, this hire feels more promising for that player whether it is Geno Smith or someone else. When the Mike Shanahan system clicks, it is incredibly quarterback friendly. Many quarterbacks have found success running it, and often times, they have not been premiere physical talents, either. Kirk Cousins, Matt Schaub, Joe Flacco, Jimmy Garoppolo, and Brock Purdy are not who you think about when you think of big rocket armed quarterbacks who have tilted the fields on Sundays like a Josh Allen or Patrick Mahomes, or even a Joe Burrow.

You don’t need a freak of nature to run the Shanahan machine. You just need a dude who has good enough accuracy and athleticism to handle bootleg roll outs, smarts to know the playbook and where to go with the ball, and probably enough size to see where to go with the ball over the middle of the field. If he’s got a big arm, great, but really, this is a system tailor made for a dude willing to be a good game manager.

There are a lot of quarterbacks in this league who could find success in this scheme with the right parts in place. Sam Howell, as bad as he looked against Green Bay when he was forced into the game, could conceivably find success should Seattle turn to him down the road. I can imagine a middling guy like Mac Jones having some success, or even Spencer Rattler if Seattle wanted to now work out a trade for him.

Or they could just as easily choose to hang onto Geno Smith a few more years, and he could most likely run it to pretty good effect. I feel like with this hire, many possibilities open up for Seattle at QB, and that includes taking a day two or mid round flyer on a quarterback in the draft this Spring.

At any rate, I am glad they settled for Kubiak. I got worried about some of the unknowns with Fraley, Adam Stenavich (never called plays in Green Bay despite his OC title), and Grant Udinski. I know there is some speculation out there that Fraley might have been their top choice, but Ian Rapoport’s tweet suggests that Kubiak was their guy all along. Either way, I am glad that it is settled, and we can move onto an offseason that will surely focus largely on fixing the offensive line.

When Seattle closed their season out almost a month ago now, I stated my desires to see a change at offensive coordinator, a major focus of improvement to the offensive line, and for them to keep an open mind at quarterback. They have now accomplished the first task.

Let us now see how they approach the offensive line, and I hope it is with aggression, and let us see how they handle what they have at quarterback. This feels like a pivotal offseason for John Schneider on both of these fronts. We shall soon enough see.

Onto thoughts about Pete Carroll with the Raiders

I was happy news brought Friday morning that Pete Carroll got back into the league by agreeing to coach the Vegas Raiders. I don’t particularly like the Raiders, but I am pretty long over the old AFC rivalry we used to have with them a quarter century ago.

I think that a lot of Raiders fans are pretty obnoxious people, and I was at Lumen Field last year when we blew that overtime game to them, and lost. I was followed, and heckled by a couple thuggish young Raiders fans as I was walking to my bus stop on Alaska. I am sure other Seahawk fans were being harassed, as well. Raider Nation walked out of Lumen Field as if they had just won a championship game, and they wanted Seattle fans to feel it.

The Raider faithful are not the only fans to behave this way. I suspect fans from many other markets come into Seattle sensing that Seatteites aren’t very aggressive people by nature, there is not a lot of edginess in the PNW, in general, and when their visiting team wins, they love to stir up shit with disappointed Seahawk fans. I have seen it amplified with New York fans, San Francisco fans, and Philly fans, especially.

But Raider fans are a whole different level of toxicity. For that reason, I have always particularly enjoyed their long suffering.

Therefore, I will say that because I am still very staunchly a Pete Carroll fan, I will be perfectly willing to pause my Raider schadenfreude for the next however many years Carroll coaches down there. When they aren’t playing against, Seattle, I will root for them.

And they need Pete Carroll desperately there. They need a total culture reset, and Pete Carroll is a hall of fame culture builder. I suspect he will get them going the right direction straight out of the gates.

I also anticipate we will see former Seahawks down there fairly soon. Bobby Wagner and Russell Wilson will be free agents, and Wagner in particular I can see heading down there. Jarran Reed could be on his way, as well, and should Seattle sever ties with Tyler Lockett, or Geno Smith, I think Vegas would be the prime landing spot for both.

It wouldn’t shock me if Vegas calls Seattle about DK Metcalf’s availability via trade, or even Riq Woolen. With Kubiak bringing in his Shanahan offense, I don’t know how much DK is a fit for that, and Woolen seems maybe more of a Carroll style outside corner than maybe perhaps Macdonald’s, but I am projecting here on both accounts.

I see a lot of speculation out there that the Raiders could show interest in Geno Smith given how much Pete Carroll favored him, and that there remains a lot of mutual respect between the QB and coach. In that, I have seen it suggested that perhaps John Schneider has never been as warm about Geno as Pete was, and would be fine to move on if negotiations proved too difficult.

I would just say to that, if Pete Carroll knows how John truly feels about Geno, instead of calling him and asking what it would take to deal him to Vegas, Pete Carroll could simply tell the Vegas GM to hold tight and not do anything, and see if Seattle just cuts Geno outright if a team friendly extension cannot be had. If Pete can sorta detect that scenario, why would he encourage his GM to hand Seattle a valuable draft pick?

So, I would just encourage that maybe breaks be pumped a bit on the idea that suddenly Vegas will trade one of their third round picks to Seattle for an older quarterback that Seattle might be reluctant to sign to a big extension. I am very skeptical of that probability when there will be other quarterbacks on the market they could just as easily pursue.

Here is what I would say about what Pete likely wants to do in Vegas. I think he sees about a three or four year window to finally right their ship and have them contending. I don’t think he will likely want to babysit a rookie quarterback in that stretch of time. He will want to be paired with a veteran, and certainly Geno Smith or Russell Wilson could be prime candidates. I could also see them wanting to aggressively pursue Sam Darnold and perhaps pay him top market value. It could be a situation as to whether that is where Darnold wants to be, though, or does he want to go to a team that is, in his mind, a closer contender in a division that does not feature Patrick Mahomes and Justin Herbert.

Oddly, I could see scenarios where Vegas trades for Geno (or signs him in free agency if he is cut), brings in Russell Wilson to reunite with the guy who drafted him, and perhaps even battles against Seattle for the likes of Darnold. In any of these scenarios, it is likely going to have a pull on Seahawk fans, but at any rate, I think it if for almost certain that Pete will want to pair with a veteran quarterback who he really likes and trusts a lot.

It is going to be really interesting down there with how they handle the QB spot. If I had to guess anything, I am now starting to think that a Russ and Pete reunion in Sin City now maybe has greater legs than I would have thought a couple days ago. There is a lot buzz building around that. The two personalities are wired very similarly on the holistic positively thinking stuff, and I think it is now possible that Russ has been humbled enough to now see that for him to exist as a starting NFL quarterback, it is probably best to not be cooking to the extent that he felt he needed to a few years back. I think it is also still very possible that Russ holds enough positive belief in himself that he would not shy away from signing with a team that has to play against Mahomes twice a year.

At any rate, I am happy for Pete, and I will be rooting for his success with the Silver and Black. With what he built up in Seattle with the Legion of Boom defense, I have always thought that Carroll had an affinity for the Raider way. Now he gets to close out his coaching career building it back up. I am interested in seeing where it now goes.

I am also very excited to see what Seattle can do this year with Kubiak paired with Macdonald. I feel like they are close to upper tier contention, and they have personnel who will fit what Kubiak will want to do at running back, receiver, and tight end, and quarterback even with all of my Geno speculations. They just need to fix that offensive line.

So, just bloody well fix the thing.

Go Hawks.

In his first year with the Seattle Seahawks, Mike Macdonald coached his team to a 10-7 finish, just missing out on the playoffs. That is a best first season win total for a new head coach in franchise history, better than Chuck Knox’s 9-7 finish in 1983, and better than Mike Holmgren’s 9-7 season in 1999. I suspect any long time Seahawk fan over the age of 40 would probably agree that joining the ranks of Holmgren and Knox is pretty good company. Therefore, I think this is pretty cool.

On the flip side, the Seattle Seahawks also achieved being the first team in NFL history to go 7-1 on the road, and not make the playoffs. That kinda sucks and home losses to the Giants, Rams, and Vikings sting more now knowing that each of these matches were very winnable for Seattle. Thus we have the highs and lows of this season pretty much summed up.

These 2024-25 Seattle Seahawks officially concluded their season by winning a game played in Los Angeles against the division winning Rams who started a backup quarterback nicknamed Pornstar Jimmy by Stephen A Smith, and a bunch of other backups because Sean McVay was too chicken shit to play Matt Stafford and other key starters. Even if this win wasn’t a decisive as I would have preferred, it felt nice that Seattle was able to get the W, and thus finish their season tied with the Rams at 10-7. I will take that.

It is good to see Seattle finish first year head coach Mike Macdonald on a positive two game win streak, and to feel momentum heading into the offseason where change will be inevitable. I am a big believer positive momentum carrying forth into a new offseason. The taste of narrowly missing out on the playoffs should sting, but the idea that they are building up towards something special should also be sensed. 10-7 is the best regular season finish that this team has had since 2020. That should mean something.

On a personable level, it also felt good to watch Geno Smith end his season on a high note, playing a statistically great game, and making a bunch of key incentives that has made him $6 million richer. Geno wasn’t perfect this season, but watching him getting beaten to a pulp on Sundays while playing behind a subpar offensive line and extremely suspect play calling made me more empathic to his cause.

Instead of recapping this game, I am more inclined to kick things forward into the new year focusing on what I feel this team needs to do in 2025 in order to get closer towards being a true contender. It is a very simple list of three things I would like to see happen.

I am not really interested in rehashing all of what transpired in 2024, as I think their season can be summed up in two easy sentences. They started off hot in September, but chilled very quickly by October. As the season wore on, their defense improved dramatically, but their offense fell off in a lackluster manner.

Heading into the 2025 Season, I think the Seattle Seahawks have a roster with enough talent to compete for the playoffs. Some will debate that, but I am actually very bullish on the talent that John Schneider has built up over the past three years. I think they are one more productive offseason away from taking the next step, but if you want to disagree with that, you are welcome to it.

I also firmly believe that this team has a head coach in Mike Macdonald who is, indeed, a pretty sharp defensive mind fully capable of out-scheming opponents. In that, however, I also firmly believe he needs to be paired with a sharp offensive coordinator who will better carry out a scheme that compliments his defense. For this organization to truly take it to the next level, finding this offensive coach is an absolute must this offseason.

I do not believe that Ryan Grubb proved to be a good match for Mike Macdonald, at all, and it would be in the best interest of this team (and probably Grubb himself) for them to move in a different direction. I actually put this as a higher matter of importance above the state of the offensive line, but more on that in a minute.

For now, I think that any talk of Macdonald being a questionable hire and John Schneider perhaps needing to be on the hot seat is impulsive noise from factions of the fanbase and media that are perhaps a bit too spoiled in the PNW with a decade and a half of Seattle football being meaningful in December. John Schneider is one of the most respected general managers in the league who routinely hits in the draft and finds value through trades and waiver wires. As already mentioned, Mike Macdonald is just the third head coach in Seahawks history to start his career here with a winning record in year one.

Bad organizations make bad decisions by listening to overreacting fans. Good organizations do a good job at seeing the bigger picture clearly, know when to be patient caring forth, and when to move on when something clearly is not working. I don’t suspect that Jody Allen is ready to move on from John Schneider when it appears that he got the head coaching hire right, and this coming draft looks like a good one to address the issues with the offensive line.

Could I be wrong on this? Sure, but I am pretty confident that I won’t be. We shall see.

What I do see, however, is three very simple aspects of the offense that I feel this team should address in order of importance. If this organization can nail these the right way, I think Seattle can be well positioned to win the NFC West in 2025. They are as follows.

Pair Mike Macdonald With A Bright Offensive Coach Who Fits His Vision

After getting hired in the Winter of 2024, Mike Macdonald stated that his vision for the Seattle Seahawks was to be a tough, physical team that played great defense, ran the ball well, and was a team that nobody wanted to play. His words made me think of the Baltimore Ravens, and the Michigan Wolverines, two football programs where his roots stem from. It was an exciting thought in my mind to envision something similar being built in Seattle, and it still is.

The biggest problem of the 2024 season was that Ryan Grubb really could not bring that offensive part of Macdonald’s vision together. Try as he might have, I think his instincts as a play caller was to abandon the run too easily whenever the defense showed faint signs of struggle, and then when he did lean into the run, and it would start working, his impulse was to often abandon it for his favored passing attack. The result of this often felt very disjointed as a product.

Honestly speaking, his play calling might have the worst that I have seen out of a Seahawk offense since the 1990’s. It teased with the passing attack, at times, but it never found consistency. He play called as if he had peak Payton Manning and the best offensive line in football, and he had neither of that.

I don’t really want to get down into the muck of the offensive line, either. Run blocking is much easier for offensive linemen to do together than pass blocking and Seattle had, for the most part, guys in the interiors of their offensive line who were more apt to be better run blockers in this league than pass protectors. Grubb just failed to device a scheme to suit them as an offensive line. It is that simple.

Grubb was more inclined to lean into a veteran quarterback, and that was what he put his trust into. The result was as big of a mixed bag from Geno Smith as you could find in a quarterback. Sure, his passing yardage went up, and so did his completion percentage, but his interceptions went dramatically up, as well.

Geno’s red zone interceptions lost us games this year that were winnable. That said, I am significantly more willing to place greater blame on Grubb for riding with this impulsive pass happy approach than I will for Geno throwing the amount of picks that he did, even these critical ones (although Geno isn’t totally absolved, more on that later).

Had Grubb adopted a more committed approach to running the ball, the offensive line could have stabilized better and we could have seem more games like they had in Arizona than what we got against the Bills, Packers, and 49ers at home. I truly believe this.

Even worse, as the season wore on, Grubb’s offense displayed tells to defenses that he simply did not do a good enough of a job altering and adjusting. He would substitute running backs where it became obvious that it was a pass play. Eventually, defenses stopped playing single high safeties because they knew Grubb would stay passing out of two high looks instead of challenging with the run. There were times in games where cameras caught Mike Macdonald looking dumbfounded when Seattle was on offense, and there were times where key offensive players displayed meltdowns on the sidelines.

Grubb also never committed enough to a play action approach to help keep defenders honest, and his compulsion to primarily play call out of shotgun made it harder to run the ball effectively. Simply put, he made life harder for his cheaply put together offensive line instead of easier, and he put undo pressure on Geno Smith to play perfect football practically all of the time. This is not good coaching.

So, I do not want to hear bringing up the state of the offensive line being a prime excuse for Ryan Grubb who was hired late in the hiring process of coaches last Winter because Seattle waited out Macdonald’s hire until after the AFC Championship game. Seattle took a shot on a college coordinator from the PNW who fans would recognize the name, and they gave it a shot. It did not work out, and it is that simple.

But do not use the offensive line as a reason to defend what Grubb was in Seattle this year.

This league is filled with subpar offensive lines. Minnesota does not have a great line, but they found ways to be wonderfully balanced with Sam Darnold at the helm. Seattle failed to find this was Grubb leading the offense. There is nothing in this season with Grubb that warrants his return. For me, it would be a stunner if he is given another go at it in 2025.

Instead, it is my biggest hope that Seattle goes a very different direction, and they bring in a guy who actually understands NFL defenses really well, and will know how to attack them on every level with the talent this team has on its roster. Who that person is, I don’t know. I am open to options, but I just need him to partner well with Macdonald and be in sync with the head coach’s vision of seeing this team being a tough, hard-nosed team that nobody wants to play.

The guy could even come in house with passing coordinator Jake Peetz, who the Seahawks pried away from Sean McVay with the Rams, and is said to be a bit of a hot commodity. Peetz has bounced around the league and has a track record out of getting career years out of Dereck Carr with the Raiders as QB coach, and Christian McCaffrey as a running back coach with the Panthers. He was a guy that McVay valued in Los Angeles, and was sorta sore to see leave for Seattle. He might be the top choice here to replace Grubb, should they move on, if his relationship is good with Macdonald.

But perhaps what Macdonald most needs is a proven coordinator with pelts on his wall who will truly act as a second head coach on the team. The guy who really runs the offense much like Steve Spagnuolo runs the defense for Andy Reid in Kansas City. Spagnuolo was a failed head coach but his defenses have always been stellar whenever he’s been a coordinator.

Perhaps Seattle reaches out to Frank Reich who didn’t really cut it as a head coach in Carolina or Indianapolis, but was a good offensive coordinator for the Super Bowl winning Eagles in 2018. During that year, the Eagles were an exciting dynamic running team that offered an explosive passing attack downfield. Reich was the one that Eagles fans most gave credit towards, and were bemoaning his departure to Indy, afterwards. Their offense fell off quickly in the seasons to follow, and there was regime change sorta after winning the title.

Perhaps Reich is someone who could come in and be content with essentially being given full control of the offense, and partnering up with Macdonald long term in order to win titles together. He has a demeanor that is players like, and I can imagine meshing well with Macdonald.

Personality is also an important thing to consider. I have seen Josh McDaniels as a suggested name, and he has been a way better play caller than head coach, but I don’t know if he is a good culture guy. Seattle, under the ownership of Jody Allen, still feels like a destination that values positive culture in the building, and I don’t think there was much positives that ever came out of McDaniels as a culture guy.

There will be other names to consider. I won’t go through the list of potential candidates, although Doug Pederson just got let go in Jacksonville and grew up in Ferndale. Would he be enticed to return to the PNW as a high paid coordinator? My hunch is that he will take a year off and wait out an opportunity to be a head coach again. Winning a Super Bowl as a head coach probably equates to not wanting to suck it up and retreat towards a coordinator role, but we shall see.

The important thing to find the right guy who is smart enough to properly go after NFL defenses, and meshes well with the head coach and players. Ultimately, this has got to be the goal, and Seattle must nail this hire this offseason if they do not believe Grubb is up for it.

Invest Properly With Fixing The Offensive Line

I have said this a few times, but it bares repeating. The NFL has offensive line problems league wide. Building great offensive lines is increasingly more difficult to do. The talents in college are more apt to be on defensive lines than offensive lines, as sacks lead to more dollars than pancake blocks do.

Also, all you bleeding hearts who have complained about Seattle’s offensive line for years can thank the last collective bargaining agreement that the player’s union forged for fucking up the ability of teams to physically practice in ways they had in the past that better build cohesion with linemen playing together. Nowadays it is paddy cakes on the field in August, and the early portion of the regular NFL season is a routine clown show for offenses to figure out their units. It literally is what it is, so we all have to deal with it in degrees.

That said, in 2024, Seattle had the cheapest offensive line in football, and it showed. Personally, I don’t blame the front office for pulling most of their resources on the defensive side to fix what had truly became an awful defense in the last three years of Pete Carroll’s time here, but now they need to buck up and do the same for the offense with their offensive line.

If I were the general manager of this team, I would most likely spend big on one quality veteran guard or center on the free agent market, and I would be open to trading for a player should one be available by that means. I would then look to the draft for a couple more. The draft next Spring appears to be promising for guards and tackles who could convert to a guard. Getting two of them feels necessary.

This won’t be a wildly exciting take for many fans, but I would also be willing to leave open the possibility that there exists a young player (or players) already on this roster that by simply moving onto another offensive coach, could be developed into a decent starter in 2025. Perhaps Christian Haynes is better served converting to a center and becomes an upgrade there over Olu Oluwatimi. Perhaps Anthony Bradford or Sataoa Laumea takes a big step forward as a player with a new approach on offense towards being run heavier. While it is easy to look at the Seattle’s line and proclaim that they need at least three new starters there, perhaps there is more potential there now than most fans are seeing, but they just haven’t been coached properly enough, or the scheme hasn’t committed enough towards what they do best. Honestly, I think this could be as big of a case as any for why this line was this bad in 2024.

At any rate, if John Schneider goes into this offseason shopping cheap again in free agency and then waiting to the third or fourth round before taking another guard, the public outcry for his job will almost certainly be at the highest point it has ever been, and it was pretty high with some through the course of this last season. Therefore, for the sake of sanity throughout the fanbase, I think it is very important that he hit this offseason hard with ways to improve this offensive line. It is an absolute must.

Be Open Minded About The Quarterback Position In 2025 And Beyond

This is going to sound like I am ready to move off of Geno Smith. That isn’t necessarily the case, but I do feel like it is time for John Schneider to think more long term about this situation at quarterback in Seattle.

For my money, based on his 2024 play on the field, Geno Smith has not earned another big contract extension in Seattle. I know he wasn’t helped by Grubb’s play calling and the offensive line, but he still felt too reckless with the football for my tastes, and what I feel like a franchise quarterback should be. I was at four games at home in this last year, they lost all four, and in each game, Geno turned the ball over in ways that cost them.

Personally, I really dig Geno a lot, and I think he is a very easy guy to root for with him wearing swank KISS t-shirts post game, and routinely taking accountability, but I also feel like age is now working against him, and he has just never really built off of his surprising 2022 season enough.

My gut kinda tells me that he is what he is. He is a mid tier starting quarterback who can win a decent team 9 or 10 games if they have enough talent (which Seattle does), but he’s also going to do things on occasion that will cost you some games (two red zone interceptions at home against the Rams in early November will forever be burned into my mind).

Because of all of this, I don’t want that signed to another big-ish three year extension. If they want to do a shorter termed extension this offseason, I am fine with it, but I think if they sign him to a three year $120 million extension just because they are afraid of the unknown, it is going to alienate a growing portion of the fanbase, I am afraid. I sense this growing online, in the stands, and on the airwaves.

2024 brought us a storyline in Seattle of opposing fans filling out seats at Lumen Field. I am no longer into shaming season ticket holders from selling their seats online in a region where the cost of living is high. The Seattle Seahawks need to do better putting a product on the field that is better than being a mid tier team. They got off to a decent start in 2024 by hiring a coach that would ultimately fix their once vaunted defense. Now, they need to center 2025 on the offense, and for causal fans who do not spend every waking hour pouring over analytics, Geno Smith probably does not get them wildly excited. He just does not. So, I think something needs to give in 2025.

In my ideal scenario, I would be very okay with Seattle pursuing Sam Darnold should he be available on the free agent market or by a franchise tag and trade scenario by Minnesota. I don’t know how likely this is because if I were the GM of the Vikings, I would be more inclined to sign him to a sizable extension and slowly develop JJ McCarthy behind him, but I have always been a Darnold fan, and you can search this blog as far back as 2021 when all the Trade Russ noise started to happen. I was super into Seattle trading for Darnold four years ago.

Color me Colin Cowherd, but Sam Darnold was my favorite quarterback coming out of college in the 2018 draft, and in this season, when he finally had a chance to be in a good situation in the league to be a starter, look what he was able to do with it. I don’t think it was all because of Kevin O’Connell, either. Darnold showed glimpses of this style of play on the bad teams of Carolina and the Jets. Neither organization could commit enough to uncorking his potential and it is no surprise the both teams remain basement dwellers in their divisions, respectively.

So laugh this one up, if you like, but Darnold is seven years younger than Geno, has better arm talent, he’s athletic enough, and is just hitting now his prime years. For all the silly talk of the Vikings giving up on JJ McCarthy, if they really wanted to replenish their 2025 draft stock that they lost moving up to draft the Wolverine quarterback, they could just as easily tag Darnold and work out a trade to probably numerous teams who would likely be willing to offer packages of picks and maybe players for him. Seattle, in particular, could offer Geno as a hedge for McCarthy coming back from his knee injury, and another player from an area of depth on their team along with draft picks.

Be honest. If you knew you could get the 2024 version of Sam Darnold for the next six years of Seattle Seahawk football, and you got him by sending your 2025 first round pick to Minnesota along with Geno Smith and Ken Walker, would you do it? I would sign up for that, especially if paired with an offensive play caller who comes from the McVay coaching tree, or the Andy Reid one.

Six years of this level of quarterback play from a more youthful Sam Darnold would probably be the shot in the arm that this fanbase could use in order to fill up the stands again with Seahawk jerseys. Seattle would still hold their second and third round picks in 2025 to address their offensive line, and perhaps that could lean further in free agency to address the line, as well.

At the very least, it is an interesting thought. How realistic it truly is would be another matter to discuss, but this would probably be my ideal scenario for this team if the front office does actually rate Darnold highly (I think they might) and the coaches dig him enough.

But as it stands, ideal scenarios do not come along often. Therefore, in that event, I wouldn’t mind seeing Seattle either take another flyer on a young quarterback with talent that another team has moved away from, or somebody in this coming draft class.

Maybe Will Levis is a guy who will be available via trade if Tennessee wants to draft another quarterback high. If I had to pick one young quarterback out there who might be on the trade market that has anything close to Darnold-ish potential in terms or stature and arm, it would be probably be Levis.

Maybe they take a shot on Daniel Jones, Mac Jones, or Zach Wilson to come in and compete with Geno. None of these guys get me excited but Daniel Jones had a fairly decent year in 2022 playing in a run heavy offense for the G Men, Mac Jones showed some promise as a rookie, and Zach Wilson had crazy hype around his arm talent coming out of BYU.

Maybe they really like a guy in this draft like Ole Miss QB Jaxson Dart who has some fun moxie to his game, or maybe Shedeur Sanders slides in the draft like some think that he might. For my money, I am drawn to Dart with his maturity and play making skills. He gives off Bo Nix vibes with a smidgen of Jalen Hurts, and I would absolutely take that in Seattle.

Ohio State QB Will Howard is another guy who intrigues a lot. He is tall mature dude with good athleticism and arm traits that feel translatable to the NFL. He’s also played a lot of college football for Kansas State and the Buckeyes, and has his current team rolling in the college football playoffs. If he is there in the second round and the Seahawks select him, I think I would get behind that.

This coming draft class with quarterbacks is getting a bit of a bad rap, in my view. A lot of people are making blanket statements that it is a bad class, but I am not so sure. While I don’t think there are guys in this class who are going to comp to Andrew Luck or Josh Allen, I think there are guys who do comp closer towards Dak Prescott, Bo Nix, Geno Smith, Andy Dalton, Derick Carr, Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, and Brock Purdy. Those sorts on cheap rookie contracts are worth taking shots on, in my view.

Getting a guy who is talented enough to be a decent NFL starter on a cheap rookie contract is an absolute golden ticket in this league. Ask 49er fans over the past couple years before injuries finally caught up to their aging team. Think about Russell Wilson in 2012-2015.

At any rate, these are probably the most realistic scenarios that I think Seattle, at this point now, should consider exploring at quarterback. Pursuing Darnold over retaining Geno makes sense, if it is possible. Adding a young QB via trade or free agency makes sense. Drafting a guy in 2025 should now be a very real possibility, and perhaps the ultimate goal.

We can forget any wild pipe dreams that Mike Florio will dream up about trading for Jalen Hurts or Trevor Lawrence. None of this is happening, and I highly doubt that the Vikings will be willing to part with JJ McCarthy who they traded up for last Spring, and was generating all kinds of positive hype during the preseason in their system before his knee injury. If anything, they will try to sign Darnold to a short extension and see how things play out between the two quarterbacks over the next few years. If Darnold balks at that notion, and they decide to tag and trade him during the Spring, then perhaps Seattle will try to make themselves a trade partner. We shall see.

I also don’t think the team likely views Sam Howell as a potential future starter. Just my vibes on that. There was no competition between him and Geno in camp, and the gulf of talent between them felt vast at practices that I watched. If anything, they might be more inclined to bring Drew Lock back to compete with Geno than open things up for Howell, but that is just my hunch.

At any rate, I feel like now is the time to truly take bites at the quarterback apple in order to find their next long term starter. Personally, if it is not a big move for a guy like Darnold, I would prefer them to look towards the draft, and I don’t care if they draft a guy like Dart or Howard higher than Mel Kiper would have. Draft pundits weren’t wild when Schneider took Russell Wilson in round three in 2012, either, but it would be really good for this organization if they at least begun this process.

Dak Prescott was a fourth round pick, and so was Kirk Cousins. Jalen Hurts was taken late in round two, Russell Wilson in the mid third round pick, and Brock Purdy was famously the last player taken in 2022. I don’t need them to take a quarterback in round one, but I kinda need them to take a quarterback at some point this Spring, pretty please.

Start taking shots at this thing. It’s time.

In Summary

If you have made it this far through this piece, you can see that I am not really stressing about Seattle’s defense much at all these days, and almost all of my needs and wants are centered about the offense. This is what 2024 has shown me about this team.

In Mike Macdonald, I very much trust the direction of this defense. I wouldn’t even be wildly upset if during the draft this Spring that their first round pick went towards another defender, if that was truly the best player available. Adding one more dynamic player to this side of the ball is just going to make a good thing better, and I will not deny my excitement in that notion.

But I need more on offense. I need a better offensive coordinator first and foremost, and I need better results on the offensive line, however they can get it. These two things are musts, in my mind.

Closely behind those is my deepening desire for Seattle to further start the process of getting younger and perhaps more talented at quarterback. I get it that it is an easier said than done sorta request, but I need this process to start this offseason, earnestly.

I also don’t think that sticking longer termed with Geno Smith should be a decision based out of fear of the unknown. He is going to be 35 years old next October, and on a roster filled with decent talent, he has shown the ability to win 9 or 10 games a year and flirt with the playoffs. If we are being truthful, he has been pretty up and down as a starter over the past three years. He can make tight windowed gorgeous throws downfield, for certain, and he is generally pretty accurate with the football, but he can also make boneheaded turnover plays that frustrate. After three years of watching him, rooting for him, I kinda think this is who he is. He is decent, but not great, and he is only going to get older, and possibly more injury prone.

Is that worthy of a $40 million dollar a year deal, or is that money better spent keeping a young nucleus together, adding to it in free agency, and waiting it out for a truly top end quarterback to come around who merits those kind of dollars, or better, is found through the draft?

This is the ultimate question to ask about Seattle and what they have with Geno Smith. You don’t need to be labeled a hater to ask this question. I truly like Geno. If they continue to roll with him, I will continue to root for him, and hope that with a better coordinator, we see better results.

But this is an important question that they have to ask.

In terms of 2025 predictions, I don’t have a ton, but here are a few.

I predict that the Seattle Seahawks will move in a different direction at offensive coordinator and Jake Peetz will be the guy to assumes the position. It will not wow a lot of fans, but I think the organization clearly appreciates the Sean McVay system, and they will take a shot at another McVay guy hoping for much better results than what they got out of Shane Waldren.

I don’t believe we will see a DK Metcalf trade despite the speculation and hype for that to happen. I believe DK likes being a Seattle Seahawk enough, and the front office values his elite athletic traits enough that an extension gets done this offseason with the hope is that better offensive play calling will make the combination of him and Jaxson Smith Njigba even more potent in 2025, and beyond.

I believe they will sign a significant piece to their offseason line in free agency, and they will use this draft that is rich enough with offensive linemen to draft a couple more players. The result will yield at least two new starters on the offensive line in 2025, and my best guess is two new guards with Olu Oluwatimi and possibly Christian Haynes battling for the center spot.

I predict that inevitably some big named players on this team will be cut in order for John Schneider to be active in free agency to improve the offensive line. The most likely players getting cut will be Tyler Lockett, Dre’Mont Jones, George Fant, and probably Roy Robertson Harris. I think there is a chance they value Uchenna Nwosu’s leadership enough along with his pass rush to keep him around on an expensive cap hit for another season, but we will see. I could also see them move off of Noah Fant’s big contract, and possibly Rayshawn Jenkins.

I believe that they will get a big multi year deal done with linebacker Ernest Jones right before the start of free agency similar to the deal they got done at the time with Big Cat Williams last year. Both the player and the team want to see this deal get done, and it will get consummated.

I don’t believe the Vikings will be willing to trade Sam Darnold or JJ McCarthy, and therefore, I think Seattle re-signs Geno Smith to a short extension, and they will continue the process of going year to year with him until they find a younger solution ready to take over. This feels inevitable. Macdonald feels like he truly digs Geno, and I don’t think he is going to be interested in gambling that they can flip Zach Wilson into a serviceable starter.

That said, I also think it is more likely that this is the year they look to the draft to find a quarterback to groom behind Geno. Jaxson Dart could be a player that they like a lot more than maybe some realize. They had a long look at Bo Nix during his pro day in Eugene, and he was an invite to their facilities days before the draft transpired. It is possible that they had a desire to draft him at 16 had he been available there, but we will never know because of Denver. As mentioned, I kinda think Dart has some Nix traits.

Finally, I predict that with a new offensive play caller, we see the offense catch up closer to the defense and Seattle becomes a playoff team in 2025. I think we see better results from Geno, and I predict that Ken Walker will have a career year in his contract year with all the debate around the Seahawks as to whether they should sign him to a big fat juicy contract extension that will surely divide the fanbase.

What is the Seahawk fanbase if they are not sharply divided on something, anyways?

Isn’t the internet fun?

Go Hawks.

Let me guess.

The Seattle Seahawks beating the Chicago Bears on the road on Thursday Night Football by a final score of 6-3 probably doesn’t have you wildly excited as you sip your coffee and read this piece. Well, let me go through the box scores to see if you be aroused.

Geno Smith was 17/23 for 160 yards, 0 TDs, and 0 INTs.

Zach Charbonnet ran 15 times for 57 yards with a 3.8 per carry average.

Little used Kenny McIntosh ran 7 times for 46 yards with a 6.6 per carry average!

Norah Fant had 4 receptions for 43 yards.

DK Metcalf had 3 receptions for 42 yards.

Jaxson Smith Njigba had 3 catches for 32 yards.

Not a lot of offense in this game for the Seattle Seahawks. Turns out that they didn’t need it.

The Seahawk defenders took this game over and held onto it all throughout the game. They sacked Caleb Williams 7 times, stuffed the run, limited passes, and the game ended with a poetic Riq Woolen interception that killed off Chicago’s last chance to pull of the win. They played championship worthy ball even if the offense decided to not show up.

Many fans will look at this game and will probably not be wildly excited about Seattle’s chances against the Rams next week, much less their chances in the playoffs should they get there. I get it. This teams feels incomplete, in many ways, and I don’t need to rehash what I have already said about with the offensive coordinator, the offensive line, and, at times, the erratic quarterback play.

I will just say that I think it is important for Seattle to finish with a winning record in year one of Mike Macdonald’s regime, and with this win in Chicago, we now have that. Good. Finishing strong matters in this league no matter whether a team makes the post season or falls short.

I imagine there will be other Seahawk bloggers and writers who will be less glowing about this win in Chicago than I am. Some will bemoan being 9-7 yet and again and firmly kinda middle of the pack as an NFL franchise.

Personally, I think there are different sorts of middle of the pack teams. There are middle of the pack teams that slide by having a good quarterback and not much less (Chargers). There middle of the pack teams that aren’t bad enough on either side of the ball but nor are they good enough either.

Then there are middle of the pack teams that are good on one side of the ball but not enough on the other. This is where I think Seattle lays in the mid tier of the league. They have what seems to be a very promising defense, but they are a hot mess on offense. I will take being this type of mid level team right now with the hopes that the defense continues to carry into next season with improvement from the offense to follow.

Trends matter in football, and Seattle’s defense has trended very well over the coarse of the season half of the season. They were the sole reason why they managed to win this one.

In all honesty, this uneventful game against the lowly Chicago Bears might be as big of a signature win for Macondald and his team as any all year. This was a game that felt like the Bears could pull off a win, but Seattle’s bad ass defense said NOPE. This matters moving forward. Seattle needs to hang its hat on something, and I think they absolutely can with this defense more and more.

Let us remember that there was a time just two months ago where it felt like Seattle would be lucky to find six wins. Neither their offense nor defense were playing well, and fans began questioning replacing Pete Carroll with Macdonald. People all over the internet were calling Seattle a bad football team, devoid of enough talent to win, and the widespread projections of them were to be the basement dweller of the NFC West.

Then during the second half of the season, Macdonald turned their defense around from being bad to being solid and exciting. If you love good defensive football, you should feel excitement in the direction of this team as we head into 2025, no matter what happens against the Rams next week.

Yes, there will probably be many changes to this team this offseason. I would expect an aggressive upgrading of the offensive line. I think we could see a new offensive coordinator. We will pour over all these needs and wants after their season concludes. Right now, I think it is worth celebrating them getting to 9 wins this year with perhaps a chance to win the division next week.

Instead of lamenting the lackluster nature of Seattle’s offense against Chicago, I would rather celebrate the stellar offensive play of Seattle’s defensive line, linebackers, and secondary. Their best players on Defense took this game over. Devon Witherspoon, Big Cat Williams, Derick Hall, Riq Woolen, and Jarran Reed all played dominant against an inferior opponent.

In fact, the defenders played so elite in this game, that I have to imagine a scenario inside the VMAC earlier in the week where Mike Macdonald asked Ryan Grubb to call a more conservative game plan on offense. Like, he looked at the Chicago tape with Caleb Williams and he knew what his defense was going be dial up in this one.

This is why I am not personally all that stressed out about how Seattle’s offense played. It was a weird Thursday night game on a short week with the numbers down at running back, a gimpy quarterback, and banged up receivers. It was rare that Seattle pushed the ball down field in this one. It felt like they weren’t interested in it, and were hoping short gains would lead to favorable conversions.

While I am sure the team isn’t thrilled to win a boring 6-3 slug fest on Thursday Night Football, I wouldn’t be surprised if they would have looked at a 13-3 win scenario in more glowing terms. This game had that sort of conservative offensive vibe to it, and had Pharoah Brown not gotten the ball stripped out of his hands in the third quarter, it is possible that we would have had a final score more similar to that.

So, take that for what it is worth. It is fair to question if Macdonald has lost faith in Grubb with in this sort of dialed back approach as we witnessed. Maybe he was concerned about whether Geno would put the ball unnecessarily in harms way again.

Or maybe he just looked at the Chicago Bears and felt “yeah, I think we can win this one 9-3.. fuck it, let’s just do that.”

They won’t be able to play this way against the Rams. They will have to open up the offense again. I think they will and that this version of their offense is a mirage. They suddenly didn’t forget how to pass the football. They just chose to be close vested about it in this slop vest.

The good news is that they will have ten days of rest and the Rams will be less rested. If the Cardinals beat the Rams on Saturday night, this one in LA next week will be for all the NFC West marbles and the division title. This is exactly what football is all about.

So, while folks can point to Seattle having a losing record at home this year, their road record has been stellar thus far. While we can bemoan the inconsistencies of the Seahawk offense, it feels like their defense is building towards a style that can be championship worthy around the corner.

Generally speaking, I am happy with what is trending with this team. I know a lot of work needs to be done, but it feels mostly isolated with the offense. One aggressive offseason fixing this offense line could be enough to make this team a contender next year. I fully believe that.

Am I crazy?

Sure! I might be.

But this is what being a fan is all about. You have to be made of thick layers of fan fiber to watch your team play a good old fashioned slobberknocker like this on Thursday night and feel good about them afterwards, and I feel kinda great about them, honestly.

Now, I just need to be the biggest Kyler Murray fan on the planet on Saturday Night.

Go Cards!

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!