🕛️ We've got time to sort this out 🕛️

I was going to write about Geno Smith in this week’s column for The News Tribune.

More specifically, I was going to explain how Sunday’s comeback erased any reservations I had about keeping him as Seattle’s starting quarterback beyond this season.

And that is how I currently feel, but I had two reservations that caused me to change directions:

1. Debating the status of a team’s starting quarterback is a tactic that sports journalists turn to when they’re desperate for either attention or content.

2. There are (at least) seven regular-season games left to play before the Seahawks render any decision on Smith’s future, meaning that any opinion I offer now will be obsolete by this time next week.

So instead of writing about the most divisive topic among Seahawks fans, I wrote about something we all should be able to agree upon: Devon Witherspoon is super fun to watch.

He is physical, he is fearless and his default setting is to run as fast as he can to the spot that will allow him to hit someone.

After I’d submitted the column to my editor at The News Tribune, he steered me toward a column from Rob Staton that made me feel even better about my decision to pass on opining about Smith’s future.

📗 Quick read 📗

For some of you, Rob Staton needs no introduction. He’s a sports journalist who lives in London, works for BBC Sheffield and is a card-carrying member of Seahawks Twitter. I’ve read his blog for getting close to 15 years at this point. The draft has always been a central part of Staton’s coverage, but I love his perspective on the team.

He wrote this week that the online arguments over Smith are affecting his enjoyment of this Seahawks season. This passage really resonated with me:

I get where he’s coming from. It’s not that the subject isn’t important.

The question of Smith’s future is going to be the biggest one facing the franchise after this season. Smith will have one year left on his contract at a salary of $38.5 million. He will (understandably) be seeking an extension i.e. a raise.

Should he get it?

Well, I think anyone who even casually follows the Seahawks probably has an opinion on this subject. I’m just not sure how valuable any of our opinions actually are at this moment because the Seahawks won’t be making a decision on this subject for (at least) another seven regular-season games.

In fact, it’s not just possible but likely that this decision will be influenced by what happens over these final seven regular-season games, which means we have to do something that is increasingly difficult for us: wait.

Our collective lack of patience reminded me of the very best column I’ve ever read on contemporary sports journalism. It was written by Chuck Klosterman and published in Esquire magazine 17 years ago.

He made four very specific recommendations on how sports journalism could be “saved.”

• Stop reporting on TV ratings

• Kill the argument model of sports television

• De-emphasize the fan’s perspective

• Slow down the news cycle

In retrospect, Klosterman’s irritation at the inclusion of fan perspectives is the only one of Klosterman’s four objections that I think was overblown. The other three are spot-on in my opinion, and I want to focus in on the last one.

Klosterman argued that the speed and the amount of information that was available to fans was having a negative impact on our collective understanding of what was happening.

This is what some people who are smarter than me would refer to as “counter-intuitive” meaning that you would expect receiving more information at a faster pace would clarify our understanding. That’s not what has happened, though, and as evidence, Klosterman cited the series of reports spurred by Kobe Bryant’s unhappiness following the Los Angeles Lakers’ elimination from the playoffs in 2007.

Were any of those stories wrong?

Not necessarily. Bryant was very mad at the team. He did want things to change. He may have asked for a trade. The stories and TV segments spawned by this series of events accurately reflected the opinions people held about his future at the time.

It’s just that those opinions didn’t reveal anything about how the situation ultimately resolved itself. Those opinions certainly didn’t have as much to do with Bryant’s future as the fact that the following season the Lakers went and traded for Pau Gasol.

Now the situation with Smith is a little bit different. No one is trying to tell you what the Seahawks will do at quarterback. But everyone – including me – is more than willing to offer firm instructions on what they should do while also inferring that anyone who disagrees with their perspective is somehow obtuse.

It’s one way to create engagement. I’m just not sure how much it ultimately will do to determine where he’s headed.

There is room for disagreement on this subject. In my opinion, Smith belongs to the same category of quarterback as Kirk Cousins and (previously) Alex Smith.

They’re at the very least average starting quarterbacks in the NFL. They might even be good. It’s uncertain whether they’re good enough to lead a team to be the starting quarterback on a team that wins multiple games in the playoffs, though.

I think there’s value in holding onto that kind of quarterback even if it means paying him the going rate for a “franchise” quarterback. I just think you should keep looking for someone who might be better. Not everyone will agree, and that’s OK. It is very much debatable how much they’re “worth” in a salary-capped league.

I’ll put my own shameless appeal to engagement here with a poll. Feel free to leave a comment and feel free to sign your name/handle if you’d like it to be attributed to you.

🐀 Interesting choice of names, sir 🐀 

I once interviewed to a man who insisted I call him ‘Rat.’

This was at the X Games, which were being held in San Diego in 1998, and I was assigned to cover the street luge while working for ESPN.com. I asked one of the participants if he was, in fact, Evan Sult, whom I wanted to interview.

“Dude, my name’s Rat,” the fellow responded.

I just checked, and 26 years later, he’s still going by Rat Sult.

I thought of that this morning when I heard San Francisco cornerback Deommodore Lenoir refer to himself as “the hyena.”

Hmmmm. At the risk of being hyper-literal, I do not find this to be a flattering nickname. They are the laugh track of the animal kingdom and while I thought they were scavengers who ate the scraps left behind, it turns out this is not entirely correct.

Anyway, I think it’s a lame nickname, and I was amused at this clip that showed various Seahawks messing with “the hyena” on Sunday.