There was a time when the Arizona Cardinals were believed to be a franchise on the rise. They had drafted a dynamic playmaker to play quarterback with the #1 overall pick. They swindled the Houston Texans to trade for arguably the best wide receiver in football. They had one of the top pass rushers in the league, and had made some savvy draft picks at safety, corner, and linebacker. One might have held them up as the model of what the Seahawks were hoping to become if the right young QB was selected in the 2023 draft. Just a year after starting 7-0, the Cardinals have been returned to the depths of the NFL. Worse, they just signed their awful head coach and clearly limited QB to long-term contracts. Your Seahawks have thankfully charted a different course.
There is a belief among many fans that losing a ton of games for one or two seasons is the best way to build a future contender. A team like the 49ers would be a decent example of success there. They turned multiple bad years into top ten picks like Nick Bosa, Arik Armstead, and DeForest Buckner. The problem with that route is there is a gravitational pull associated with either winning or losing. A franchise must walk a precarious route on a narrow ledge to cross over without being pulled under. For every San Francisco (who, by the way, still never won a Super Bowl), there are many more Jacksonville’s, Arizona’s, Jets, Giants, Dolphins, and Raiders. Sure, some of those teams are now looking up, but they spent years or decades wandering the land of losers.
Don’t get me wrong. I love a top ten pick. I remember Walter Jones, Cortez Kennedy, and Shawn Springs. But I also remember Aaron Curry, Rick Mirer, and the myriad of busts across the league that cripple a franchise for years after.
A team that is so bad as to earn a top pick typically has so many holes in the roster that it is 2-3 years away, at minimum, from contending. Sometimes, you can get “lucky” and have a talented roster that experienced a slew of injuries to allow for an artificially deflated season and a turbo-charged bounce back year. The less perilous route is to be good enough to be in every game, stay close to .500, and hit on some top talent to help you climb a level or two into contention.
It is not too dissimilar to the league levels in English soccer. Teams literally are relegated to a lower level league if they are one of the worst in their current league, and can be promoted if they are one of the best. Being bad enough to have a top five pick in the NFL often means you are equivalent to one of the lower levels, and will not just need to climb over the losers around you, but many other teams above, just to get back to being in the same league as the real contenders.
Seattle is charting a unique course. They had their bad season last year, which didn’t turn out to be that bad as they finished with a flourish to get to 7-10. They then traded away what was considered their best player, and have managed to get considerably better, while still having the draft capital and salary cap space of a rebuilding team.
I cannot recall a similar recipe in all my years watching the NFL.
It must absolutely galling to the likes of Arizona fans to see this unfold. They have spent decades being trash, with glimpses of goodness, before being sent back down to doom. It cannot feel fair that Seattle just reloads.
The best comparisons might be teams that much more deliberately planned quarterback transitions. The Green Bay Packers going from Brett Favre to Aaron Rodgers. The Kansas City Chiefs going from Alex Smith to Patrick Mahomes. The 49ers going from Joe Montana to Steve Young. The Dallas Cowboys going from Tony Romo to Dak Prescott.
As much as I would love to give full credit to John Schneider and Pete Carroll, they had absolutely no idea Geno Smith was going to become the player he has this year. You do not sign a player to a one year contract for $3.5M if you think he is your next franchise quarterback.
That’s not to say Schneider and Carroll do not deserve heaps of recognition for what they have done.
It will be criminal if Schneider does not win Executive of the Year. That award is stupid, and people may choose to give it to Howie Roseman for the success of the Eagles, but Schneider has run circles around Roseman in every possible way.
What are the ways a team can add talent to their roster? Draft. Free agency. Trades.
Schneider made the best trade in the NFL this season, and one of the best ever when he moved Russell Wilson. Schneider made easily the best free agent pickup of the offseason in Smith, and you might be able to argue Uchenna Nwosu is the second best as he now has 7.0 sacks and was signed for only $10M guaranteed. Those are also two of the most important and valuable positions on the roster. He had clearly the best draft of any team in the NFL, with six starters and now seven players contributing with Dareke Young making plays on special teams.
No GM in football added more talent to his roster than Schneider did to his this year. Nobody can convince me that a very good trade for AJ Brown, a good free agent signing in Haason Reddick, and a good-not-great draft comes anywhere close to touching what Schneider did.
Carroll deserves praise for returning to his core philosophy after drifting for years in an effort to appease Mark Rodgers and Wilson. He hired great coaches on the defensive side of the ball and gave them freedom. He then inserted himself when things were going haywire and helped turned one of the worst defenses in football to one of the best, on a dime. He has given Shane Waldron freedom to run the offense as he sees fit. He wisely let Mike Solari go and invested in Andy Dickerson, who may be one of the best young offensive line coaches in the NFL. He believed in Smith when even Schneider was pulling for Drew Lock.
Beyond that, he has allowed rookies to take the field as many NFL coaches are reticent to do. Schneider could have drafted all this talent and not seen their value this season with other coaches at the helm. Few coaches would have gone with Tariq Woolen and Coby Bryant and Mike Jackson when Artie Burns and Sidney Jones and Justin Coleman were available (yes, there were injuries, but the youngsters were already running with the first string in training camp).
Carroll has also been masterful in knowing what to say to which player and when, pulling Smith back from rage against the Chargers, and Tyler Lockett back from despair against the Giants.
Even going out and getting Bruce Irvin back in the fold seemed like a pretty low percentage move that has turned into a valuable starting player.
Fans often misunderstand both how valuable a head coach is and where they can have their greatest impact. We debate their fourth down decisions or emphasis on run versus pass, but those are microscopic compared to how they lead the organization, how they hire their assistants and given them autonomy, how they develop young players, and how clear they are on their philosophy.
Carroll struggled in some of those areas the past few years, but has found himself, and the team is benefitting.
This Seahawks team just owned the Cardinals in their own stadium in a must-win situation for Arizona. They took the best receiver in football, who was also the hottest receiver in football, and limited him to a paltry 36 yards on 4 catches. They sacked their Smurfish quarterback five times, after getting him six times in Seattle.
Most impressively, they responded to adversity like champions. This team is starting to take the personality of its quarterback.
When Smith threw the pick-six in the fourth quarter to cost the Seahawks the lead, part of my reaction was normal and part of it was noticeably different. I was, of course, furious and bummed. But not more than a moment after the Cardinals defender crossed into the end zone, my mind wandered to Smith.
I thought about how he responded against the Chargers when everything seemed to go wrong on that third down play. I remembered how he responded when the Giants tied the game last week. I remembered how many times I have talked about the love I have for the dog in him and the leader he has become. I remembered all that and thought: “I bet we are going to see the best of Geno right now.”
Did we ever.
Smith would lead three straight touchdown drives, all 75 yards or longer, to first take back the lead and then ice the game. He was decisive, accurate, and smart. He got the team in the right plays, made the right throws, and even ran himself when the play warranted.
The 3rd down and 8 play when the Cardinals blitzed and the offensive line did a terrific job of pushing them to the outside and creating creases for Smith to step into, which he then did and immediately recognized the Cardinals were in man coverage and there was nobody to tackle him if he ran, was emblematic of who we have at quarterback.
He is so damn smart and savvy and poised and talented.
If not that play, how about the 3rd down throw to Lockett in the end zone to put the team back in front. Or the 3rd down throw earlier in the game to D.K. Metcalf in the back of the end zone. Or the trick play double pass where he came off the deep read to make a laser throw to Noah Fant for a big gain instead of forcing it downfield. Or maybe you liked the earlier third down throw where he stepped up in the pocket and got hit as he threw but still directed a missile into Fant’s hands for a first down.
Time after time, game after game, Smith is showing the world who he is. He’s playing the position better than anyone the Seahawks have had here for a long time. That is not to say he is better than Wilson (which is not out of the question). He is simply playing the position like a maestro in all aspects, which Wilson never did, and Hasselbeck did not have the arm talent that Smith does.
I could spend this whole column talking about Smith, but I could do the same about Kenneth Walker III, or this defense, or Woolen, or the offensive line, or Nwosu, or even the tight ends.
This team has gone from talk of tanking to talk of contending faster than any team maybe in league history. It is the most fun I have had cheering for a Seahawks team since maybe 2012. Every week feels like opening a present and finding keys to a new car. The box was so small, but the gift is so large.
I started this blog, in part, because I would get so anxious about Seahawks games that I wanted to do research to try and anticipate what might happen so I could brace myself and protect my fragile heart. I got pretty good at it. The games started to make a lot of sense to me, and while I could not always predict the outcome, I usually knew which aspects of the matchup would determine the result. This team is such an outlier that prognostication is almost a waste of time.
Vegas certainly does not know what to do with them. Arizona was favored in this one. Tampa is a pick’em with Seattle for next week.
Part of that is the full season numbers are not indicative of who this team is now. They went from worst defense in the NFL to best four weeks ago, but their full season numbers are still near the bottom of the league since they dug such a hole. Part of it is because the quarterback is doing something almost nobody has ever done, and won’t truly be trusted by the league until he does it a full second season. Part of it is the sheer volume of rookie snaps, and not knowing how a young guy like Woolen will do against an elite player like Hopkins or the rookie tackles will do in future matchups.
That unpredictability has made this season an absolute joy. The party moves to Munich this week, with a chance to be 7-3 heading into the bye. I encouraged folks to savor the 2013 season as we went through it as it was clear to me from the very beginning that it was going to be a season and team we would not ever see the likes of again. I feel the same way about this season. Not that it is a Super Bowl winning team or an era-defining defense, but that it is a collection of surprises and stories that we will never see again. It is a handful of winning lottery tickets. So grab your favorite blanket, your favorite hot drink, and curl up on the couch at 6:30AM next Sunday to watch the next chapter in this fairy tale unfold. Remember the details. You will need to retell this story to future generations.