I have a confession to make.
You'd never know it, but prior to this season I was on occasion critical of Pete Carroll as a coach, a manager of the Seattle Seahawks' franchise, and a strategist. I thought his conservative decisions cost us games, I thought his offensive philosophy was outdated (by about 40 years), and I thought the drafting decisions made by him and GM John Schneider were outright atrocious. I may have occasionally gone so far as to call for his head. But as the Seahawks' new starting quarterback, Comeback Player of the Year lock (is there a Comeback Player of the Career?), and sleeper MVP candidate Eugene Cyril Smith III might say, Pete ain't call me back.
Carroll's Seahawks currently sit at 4-3, alone atop the NFC West, featuring a shockingly good offense led by former perennial backup Smith and preseason second-string running back Kenneth Walker III, both operating behind an unprecedently-good (in Carrollian terms) offensive line which is starting rookies at both tackle spots. Because oh, did I mention, the Seahawks also just had their best draft (arguably their only good draft) since 2012?
Aside from starting tackles Charles Cross and Abraham Lucas, the Seahawks also selected Boye Mafe (who I have no idea how he's playing), Walker, cornerbacks Coby Bryant (who's playing quite well) and Tariq Woolen (who's playing like one of the best CBs in football), and three other players. They also hold two first-round picks and two seconds in next year's draft, two of which (along with the Cross and Mafe picks) were among the spoils from the Seahawks' trade of Russell Wilson to the Denver Broncos.
The Denver Broncos now sit at 2-5 and are currently 6th in the NFL's draft order for next year. Meaning the Seahawks, who are currently in pole position to win the NFC West and earn a playoff berth, also hold a potential top-10 (hell, potential top-5) draft pick in next year's NFL draft. And all because they made the shocking, horrifying, atrocious, brilliant decision to trade 10-year veteran Russell Wilson to the Denver Broncos.
Let's talk about it.
We Need to Talk About Russell Wilson...
Why was I so critical of Carroll for the last (checks calendar) six years?
Carroll came to the Seahawks in 2010 and led the team to two consecutive 7-9 seasons. In the first, the Seahawks won an unlikely NFC West title and upset the defending Super Bowl champ New Orleans Saints 35-24 in a game that featured one of the greatest running plays in NFL history and a crowd so hype that it registered on a seismograph as an earthquake, in what was possibly the second-biggest playoff upset that I have seen in my 18 years of watching this sport.
(Sidenote, I notice that people who weren't there tend to act as though this game wasn't the upset that it was. At that point in my life I followed football religiously and even read the sports sections of actual physical newspapers, and I remember what the coverage of that game was like. People were acting as though the Seahawks were guaranteed to lose -- remember, this was a Saints team that was 11-5, that had just gone 13-3 the year before and convincingly won a Super Bowl against PEYTON MANNING'S Colts, playing against a 7-9 Seahawks team that some people argued shouldn't have even made the playoffs. Indeed, the 7-9 Seahawks took a playoff spot from two 10-6 teams, the Giants and the Buccaneers. It was only the Seahawks' resounding victory over the Saints that put to bed arguments that a 7-9 team shouldn't have had home-field advantage over an 11-5 team. Well, that and a basic understanding of the NFL's divisional structure.)
Anyway. In 2011 the Seahawks had another 7-9 season that was better but that also didn't earn a playoff berth. But in those early years the Seahawks were drafting well. I'm not going to remake Rain City Redemption, but suffice it to say that in the three drafts from 2010-12, the Seahawks drafted 19 major contributors, including franchise QB Russell Wilson, a couple decent offensive contributors (and a bunch of worse ones) including Golden Tate and Russell Okung, and the entire core of the Seahawks' legendary secondary (and defense), the Legion of Boom. In 2010 the Seahawks drafted free safety and future Hall of Famer Earl Thomas, CB Walter Thurmond, and key strong safety Kam Chancellor. In 2011 they added linebacker K.J. Wright, and CB Byron Maxwell, and future HoF CB Richard Sherman, one of the finest cornerbacks of his generation. And in 2012 they added DE Bruce Irvin, future HoF MLB Bobby Wagner, and CB Jeremy Lane, among others. These players formed the core of a team that would make two Super Bowls and win one in the following three years.
Those years were magical. My first season watching football was the year the Seahawks made and lost the Super Bowl in 2005, a tragedy (fixed by the refs) that still provides the basis for my lifelong hatred of Pittsburgh sports. But 2012 was still the most magical year I'd ever seen. Wilson won the starting job in preseason and the Seahawks scored a series of unforgettable moments, from a wildly controversial but correctly called touchdown catch against the Packers in week three (and yes, I've been linking people that article for 11 years now) to a tone-setting victory against the Patriots in week 6 to a record-breaking 58-0 win over the Arizona Cardinals in week 14.
In 2013 the Seahawks won 13 games en route to a 43-8 victory over the Broncos in the Super Bowl (as well as a number of incredible wins along the way, none greater than their NFC Championship victory over the San Francisco 49ers, but I really don't want this to be a full retrospective of Seattle sports... Again, I'm really not trying to follow Rain City Redemption). In 2014, they made the Super Bowl again (once more winning a legendary NFC Championship, this time against the Packers), but lost it on their final play of the game.
I'm not here to complain about that. I actually have very few complaints from that stretch of seasons. 2012 to 2014 (and arguably a little ways beyond) were a golden age for Seahawks football. But little by little, the cracks started to show. Draft classes started to bring in less and less talent (I have a paragraph about why that is in my first calling-for-Carroll's-head blog post), the Seahawks' incompetent offensive lines were starting to drag, and the offense was getting less and less consistent, and all the while the defense was steadily drained of talent.
Players got injured, players retired, schism after schism erupted between former stars and Carroll... Carroll's conservative playcalling lost us games, lost us seasons. Wilson seemed to be the lone bright spot on a team that dragged out the same tired playbook year after year, and combined it with the same offensive lines who couldn't pass-block to save their lives.
This post is primarily a mea culpa, but I will not shy to come to my own defense here. In the Carroll era, from 2010-2021, the Seahawks' offensive lines (per Pro Football Focus) ranked 22nd, 29th, 20th, 27th, 19th, 30th, 32nd, 27th, 17th, 27th, 14th, and 25th. They only had one season with a line ranked in the top half of the NFL, and in six out of twelve years were ranked as one of the bottom six teams in the league. Year after year the team trotted out atrocious offensive lines, and at no point did they show any consistent signs of being able to solve this problem.
Some fans blamed the offensive line's struggles on Wilson, and that's... a little true. It's true that Wilson often took more time to throw than he should have, and sometimes his inability to stay in a pocket (pockets which admittedly for most of his career were nonexistent) caused him to take sacks he shouldn't have. But it's not as though his time-in-pocket numbers were vastly worse than anyone else's. In 2016, the year the Seahawks' line ranked dead last among all teams, Wilson averaged 2.3 seconds to throw, coming in tied with Tom Brady and faster than Philip Rivers, Matt Ryan, Dak Prescott, Kirk Cousins, Andrew Luck, Aaron Rodgers, and Geno Smith himself. (Indeed, Geno this year is averaging 2.5 seconds to throw, a pretty typical number tied with Patrick Mahomes and Wilson himself, among others.)
In other words, all indicators at the time seemed to suggest that Wilson, far from being the problem, was a victim of a consistently terrible offensive line (blame for which was split between Carroll and Schneider, as the Seahawks' upper management, and Tom Cable, the Seahawks' offensive line coach through 2017), a bad offensive scheme, and the diminution of the talent around him.
So when the Seahawks traded Wilson, understandably a sizeable chunk of the fanbase, myself included, were irate.
The Wilson Trade... Or, Oops
The Denver Broncos receive:
- QB Russell Wilson
- 2022 fourth-round pick
- QB Drew Lock
- DT Shelby Harris
- TE Noah Fant
- 2022 first-round pick
- 2022 second-round pick
- 2022 fifth-round pick
- 2023 first-round pick
- 2023 second-round pick
It was a good haul, certainly. Not what the Seahawks could have gotten for Wilson a couple years earlier, but good. (Reportedly, Schneider was interested in drafting Patrick Mahomes, and nearly traded for a first overall pick he would've used to draft Josh Allen... which is a little heartbreaking in retrospect. Allegedly, Carroll vetoed the trade.)
Those 2022 picks turned into starting LT Charles Cross, one of Boye Mafe and the Seahawks's new superstar running back Kenneth Walker III, and a couple late-round selections via another trade. The Seahawks also still hold Denver's 2023 first- and second-round picks, currently projected to be 6th in each round.
But, of course, the trade also left Seattle with a big hole at the starting QB position, and Denver with their presumed QB of the future... The Broncos immediately signed Wilson to a massive five-year, $245 million contract extension that's set to keep him in Denver through his age-40 season. So, uh...
We Need to Talk About Russell Wilson Again
Russell Wilson is having a bad year.
Sorry, let me rephrase. Russell Wilson is having the worst year of his career.
Wilson ranks 25th in the NFL in passer rating (out of 34 qualified quarterbacks), 18th in ANY/A, 30th in completion percentage, 31st in touchdown percentage, and his team is 2-4 with him at QB. Admittedly he's also suffering from a few nagging injuries, but still. He's also on pace to get sacked the most times in his career (with 20 sacks through 6 games, and presuming he starts next week, he's on pace to finish with 53 sacks, two ahead of his career high).
Wilson also seems to have lost the locker room and the fans. His "catchy" new catchphrase "Broncos country, let's ride" didn't just fail to catch on, but indeed spawned an entire generation of memes, and some of the videos that have come from his time in Denver are honestly just depressing.
Now, my second confession of the post (I GUESS) is that I still like Russell Wilson. He's cringe and dumb and he forced his way out of Seattle but I've liked the guy for 10 years and I can't just stop now. I hope he gets his act together and puts together a couple good years in Denver (after the Hawks cash in a top-five pick in '23), and maybe he can even lose a few Super Bowls to the Genohawks. But I can't deny that there is a little bit of satisfaction to watching this trade get better and better for my team and worse and worse for his, week by week...
GENOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Let's talk about Geno Smith.
Geno(ooooooooo) was drafted 39th overall out of West Virginia in 2013 by the New York Jets. Smith started his rookie year but finished with a passer rating of 66.5, atrocious even in 2013, and meekly followed the Jets' then-good defense to a comparatively decent 8-8 record. The following year his rating rose to a still-abysmal 77.5 but the team went 3-10 in games he started. He lost his job to Ryan Fitzpatrick and spent the next few years backing up Fitzpatrick, Bryce Petty, Eli Manning, Philip Rivers, and Russell Wilson, which (apart from Petty) is actually a pretty impressive list.
As of the 2022 preseason, expectations for Geno were basically nonexistent. He hadn't started more than 3 games in a season since 2014, and he was competing for a spot with Drew Lock, a guy who'd been terrible starting for Denver in 2020 but still somehow seemed a more plausible option. Lock was a relative unknown (to the extent a guy who's started 21 games can ever really be unknown), but Geno seemed to be a known mediocre-to-bad starter that no team wanted to take snaps for them.
And then, uhh... this happened. Closeup on this placement. Here's another one. He just keeps doing things like this. Like, I can keep going. It's not a fluke. It's not luck. Geno is good now. These are not easy throws he's making to wide-open receivers; these are perfect throws he's making to heavily-covered receivers. These are DIMES. This is Geno at his most Geno. This is the MVPeno. This is the GenOAT.
This Geno Smith has his Seahawks (and make no mistake, they are his) in first place atop the NFC West through seven weeks, but his individual performance is more impressive still. He sits atop the NFL (yea, the NFL entire) in completion percentage, with a 73.5% mark which is on pace to finish as the third-best of all time, just behind Drew Brees and Drew Brees, respectively.
Were that not enough (it weren't!), he's also sitting pretty at 3rd in the league in passer rating, behind Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen (yes, the two guys Schneider had his eyes on). His ANY/A (a stat I've thrown around a few times but which basically means "yards per attempt but better") is fifth in the league, behind those guys, Tua Tagovailoa, and Jalen "Truth" Hurts. In TD% he's 8th, in interception % 7th, in Y/A 5th. By all accounts, and by any metric, Geno is somewhere between the best and 8th best passer in the NFL. All this from a 32-year-old who hasn't been a full-time starter in 8 years.
Is his renaissance unprecedented? I mean, maybe. It's not yet clear how much he's going to do. There have been some genuinely out-of-nowhere QBs over the years. Steve Young didn't become, well, Steve Young, until his 7th year in the league, when he was 30. Following that, he won two MVPs in three years and honestly should have won at least two or three more. Prior to his emergence as the heir apparent to Montana's 49ers dynasty, Young started 29 games and averaged a rating of 78.4, not too far off Geno's pre-2022 average of 75.7 in 34 starts. (Of course, passer rating's increased in general since then, but still, Geno's current rating of 107.7 eclipses all but one of Young's seasons, the legendary 1994 campaign. Relative to his peers, Geno's a little worse than Young was in most of his starting years, but like... it's Steve Young. He's the best passing quarterback of all time.)
(Don't believe me? Okay, quick aside. Pro-Football-Reference's "Advanced Passing" stats measure player performance in a variety of statistics (most relevantly Rate+, corresponding to passer rating) relative to the mean and standard deviation of the league when they played. A Rate+ of 140 (2.67 standard deviations above the mean) corresponds with the best passing seasons of all time: '84 Marino, '89 Montana, '04 Manning, '07 Brady, and '11 Rodgers, to name a few. All those guys broke 140 Rate+ exactly once each. (Probably.) Young did it twice, in '92 and '94. Since 1953, Steve Young remains the ONLY player to do it more than once, and holds 2 of the 12 seasons of 140 Rate+ in that span. He also led the NFL in passer rating six separate times, the all-time record, which he accomplished in only seven years. Young is the best passing quarterback of all time.)
Who else? I mean, Kurt Warner kind of comes to mind, in that he started his career very late, and didn't start a game until he was 28. But then he immediately won MVP and won the Super Bowl, so it's not a great comparison. Nick Foles (who's one of the eleven 140 Rate+ guys, by the way) is a less optimistic comparison, but he was more of a dark horse than a completely-written-off sleeper like Geno. Alex Smith had a remarkable resurgence a couple of times but he was never as good as Geno is right now (yes, even in 2017 when he led the NFL in passer rating and made the Pro Bowl). Geno's just... built different.
There are only really two questions remaining to the Seahawks.
#1: Is Geno going to keep doing this? Best guess: yes. Nothing he's doing is unsustainable, and while I've seen a few bad plays a game from him (bad looks mostly, and a few bad throws), he's consistently made pretty incredible throws every game of this season. Maybe defenses will figure him out eventually, but I wouldn't bet on it.
#2: If he does... what do they do with him? Best answer: 3 years, $45-60 million. It's worth it for a guy this good, even in his 30s, and hopefully he'll take a presumable paycut to stay with the system that's made him so successful. (And yes, the system the Seahawks have put in place for Geno has been mostly great.) Plus it gives him some financial stability while he tries to prove this wasn't a fluke. But there's always a decent chance someone will come in and offer him $30 mil or more, in which case the Seahawks are going to have to either spend an early pick on a QB or Rock with Lock.
Seahawks, Ascendant
Initially the Seahawks' defense was, uh, bad. But in the past two weeks (two impressive victories, vs the Cardinals and Chargers respectively) the defense has grown some teeth. While the Seahawks offense has been consistently great and is, by points and DVOA, the best in the NFC (Geno's sitting pretty as the #4 QB, by the way), their defense has only just pulled to a little below league-average overall on the season (they're 18th overall if you don't want to count past the stupid paywall). Per ProFootballFocus (another paywall), the Seahawks' defense went from, uh, grades in the 40s-50s (presumably bad) at the beginning of the season to grades of 64.5, 73.2 and 80.2 (the latter two of which are DEFINITELY good) in the last three games. And per FootballOutsiders, the Seahawks went from the 31st-rated defense through the first five weeks to the #1 defense in the last two. Which is a good sign.
As I've said, I believe that this offense with a league-average defense is a playoff team, and here we are, in line for a 3-seed. If the defense keeps improving (as it looks like they might), the Seahawks might even be a legitimate contender to win the Super Bowl, or at least a relatively weak NFC. And for a year that almost everyone expected to be a major rebuild for the Seahawks (cough, cough. Cough. Cough. Cough), a strong shot at a playoff berth and a decent chance for all kinds of awards (OROY? DROY? CBPOY? EOY? COY? MVP??? SBMVP?????? HOF?????????????) has to be a pretty good result.
And did I mention that we own a potential top-5 overall pick in next year's draft?
It remains to be seen whether Pete Carroll and John Schneider's Seahawks are really as good as they look. The same goes for the defense, the rookie running back ironically named Walker (who, along with injured Seahawks RB Rashaad Penny, is tied for 2nd in the NFL in yards per carry for a running back with a stunning 6.1 -- possibly a function of an improving line, although last year Penny put up an even more eye-watering 6.3 YPC, leading the league), and yes, even Geno Smith. If they keep drafting like they have been, and keep cultivating talent at this rate, the Seahawks will probably never lose another game. But even if not, with any luck, at least we won't see the kind of regression of the last 10 years that led us to last offseason's crisis.
And if there was any question remaining as to whether trading Russell Wilson was a good decision... there probably isn't anymore.
That makes me a little sad, because Wilson was a truly great quarterback for a lot of years there, and now his career has become a joke. But it also makes me sad because for the first time in a decade-plus as a sportswriter, I was wrong about something.
