Seahawks get left out

What was fairly apparent on Saturday night became official 24 hours later: The Seahawks will not be participating in the NFL playoffs for a second consecutive season.

The official cause of death was Washington’s overtime victory over Atlanta on Sunday, which made it impossible for the cumulative record of the teams Seattle has beaten to surpass the cumulative record of teams the Rams have beaten. So even if Seattle were to beat the Rams in the final regular-season game, and both teams were to finish with identical records of 10-7 overall, 4-2 within the division, L.A. will get the playoff berth and the division title by virtue of the fourth element of NFL tiebreaking procedures: strength-of-victory. 

In practical terms, the Seahawks did not make the playoffs because they are – for the third consecutive season – a fairly average team. And in the NFL, a fairly average team can be good enough to make the playoffs as it was two years ago when the Seahawks squeaked in because the Detroit Lions absolutely whupped the Green Bay Packers in the final game of the regular season.

Usually, fairly average teams find themselves on the outside looking in, which has been the case for Seattle the past two years.

And now, there are some questions that the Seahawks will need to answer about their quarterback’s future, and I suspect, their offensive coordinator. They don’t have to start wrestling with those until next week, though. In the meantime, I want to use the fact of Seattle’s playoff elimination to look at the different camps that fans tend to fall into when reacting to a season such as this one.

But first, a bit of news:

Pete Carroll is interested in Bears gig, according to ESPN’s Adam Schefter. 

Now, I do not know if the Bears would be willing to hire a 74-year-old coach.

If they were willing to hire a 74-year-old head coach, I do not know if the Bears will offer Carroll the amount of authority he would probably insist on. Remember, he turned down multiple NFL jobs while he was at USC because he wasn’t going to go to a team where he didn’t have final say on personnel.

What I do know is that there is not another coach who would be a better fit for Caleb Williams. He’s the quarterback, the No. 1 overall pick from last year who is very talented but holds onto the ball an awful long time because he likes to improvise and ad-lib. He also doesn’t throw very many interceptions. Carroll would insist the coordinator coach to Williams’s strengths as opposed to trying to force him into any specific system.

Warning: Non-sports

When I moved to New York five years ago, several people told me about the hard, protective shell that I would probably develop from living here. This is, in fact, true. However, turns out my shell also has sharp and pointy spikes protruding from it should anyone get too close.

I noticed this quite specifically back at the beginning of December when I was returning from a trip to California. I had a layover in Denver, and I dutifully queued into the line designated for “Boarding Group 2,” waiting to board my flight to Newark. A woman asked the man standing in front of me if he was in Boarding Group 2, which he affirmed. She then dropped down her bag, standing parallel to me along with her male companion. When the line started to move, she stepped in front of me without acknowledging me at all.

I audibly puffed, an exhale of indignation, which her husband noticed. He then uttered her first name, she turned, and he gestured toward me.

“Oh, go ahead,” she said, “I wasn’t trying to cut.”

“Nope, go ahead,” I said, making a sweeping gesture with my hand but refusing to make eye contact.

“I wasn’t trying to cut,” she repeated.

“Go ahead,” I said, repeating the gesture and still not looking at her.

I am generally not all that territorial about my place in line. I am especially not territorial in a line to get on an airplane.

In the many years I’ve traveled for work, I’ve always found it comical just how insistent people are about boarding a plane that’s not going to leave until we’re all aboard. Now, obviously, if you’re in first class, you want the drink service that comes when you sit down. And I realize that overhead storage is a commodity and if you were to wait until the end of boarding to get on there isn’t going to space for your bag.

But there’s absolutely no reason, in my opinion, to worry about whether you’re the 14^th or the 15^th person to board as part of Group 2 except in this case I was, and I believe that part of the reason is that I become much more defensive about my space when I’m in New York (or in this case, heading there).

More specifically, I feel – if left unchecked – people will infringe upon your space or pretend that you’re not even there, and while I might not be wrong, I hate the idea of becoming someone who swings sharp elbows to make sure know one thinks they’re going to push past me.

While it is generally irritating to have someone cut in front of you because they have opted not to acknowledge your existence, I found it fairly telling that I chose to decline the solution she offered to my irritation (letting me go first) so I could try and make her look and perhaps feel a little bad. 

And what’s particularly funny about this incident is that after insisting that woman go first, when I handed my boarding pass to the gate agent, he said I needed to go to the desk first before I got on the plane. I laughed. Served me right.

I have spent more than half of my life writing and/or talking about sports in a professional capacity, and over the course of time, I’ve come to notice some general patterns when it comes to the reactions that fans tend to have to a season such as the one the Seahawks are currently engaged in.

I’m going to have a little bit of fun today, and draw upon the military-themed nicknames I came up with way back when I was hosting a weekly live chat while working at The Seattle Times. I’ll have a poll at the bottom where you can say which — if any — fits your assessment or offer a description of your own. 

Major Disappointment

This fellow – and it is usually a dude – tends to be angry not so much at the team, but other fans. He’s angry that they aren’t more angry that the team is just OK. He will have a point. After all, the Seahawks have made the playoffs just once in the past four seasons, and they have won exactly one playoff game over the past eight.

What’s missing, in my opinion, is perspective. Seattle is in the first year under Mike Macdonald. They also rank sixth in the NFL in winning percentage over the past six years.

Now, I suppose it is possible that fan indignation would add a sense of urgency to the team’s decision making, and maybe throwing a public fit about how unacceptable it is to miss the playoffs for a second consecutive season will light a fire and initiate massive change.

I tend to believe that these sort of fits are mostly for show, though. And what people really want is to perform like they think a hard-nosed fan would.

General Optimism

Do you think the nose on the plane is pointed up when it comes to Seattle’s future? Do you also acknowledge that this franchise’s difficulties along the offensive line are chronic at this point, requiring a change in everything from the evaluation of those positions to the compensation that is allotted?

If you answered, “Yes,” to both of those questions, you very well might be alongside me in this group that is generally optimistic about the future though not blind to the warts and concerns.

There was important groundwork that was laid down this season. The defense got better. The offensive line got stabilized if nothing else the second half of the season. The offense needs to become more consistent. 

Of course, every one of those things has been said over the past six or seven years. Multiple times. I personally have said them, too, including the discussion about the offensive line finally having a nucleus of young players that can grow together only to come back next training camp with everything in flux. Why should we think that next year is going to be any different?

Conscientious Objector

This fan is distinguished by two things:

1. The depth of their knowledge about the sport in general and the team in particular;

2. The vehemence with which they believe in a specific player, usually the quarterback.

Five years ago, these folks not only wanted to let Russ cook, they were convinced that Pete Carroll’s reluctance to give his quarterback this freedom amounted to mismanagement.

They had a point: Carroll’s insistence on running the ball required an unyielding defense that Seattle no longer had. However, what has happened over the past three years demonstrates that Wilson was not well-suited to running one of those high-volume passing games because he holds the ball too long. 

Today, it’s a different group of Seahawks fans who now compose a constituency, feeling that Geno Smith is the only reason Seattle had a shot at the playoffs and the team would be stupid to think they’re going to find someone better than him this offseason.

They have a point: Smith’s ability to operate under pressure has kept Seattle’s (generally poor) pass protection from sinking the season. However, Smith’s tendency to put the ball at risk in the red zone makes me believe that Seattle needs to be looking for a long-term upgrade if it’s going to win in the playoffs.

Private Conviction

Currently, this is an especially rare specimen in the Seahawks fan base, but should the Seahawks become truly good any time in the near future, you’re going to see a lot more of them. These folks possess a messianic zeal, and not only are they fully on board with the present coaching staff and administration, they believe them to be vastly superior to what is found on the other 31 teams in the league.

These are your true believers, the kind of employee every boss wants to have and the kind of fan I have a really hard time being around.

It’s not them, per se, it’s me. It’s possible that I’m too cynical to be around true believers, but I think it’s that I’m too much of a realist. There are no perfect regimes. Not in politics, not in sports, and if you’re convinced that your team is run by the guys who are not only the smartest in the room, but also the most ethical and the most humane, well, I tend to think that you’ve stopped cheering for a team and turned into a cult.

Is Mike Macdonald a good coach? Yeah, I think he is. I especially like his game management. But he’s going to have blind spots like every coach does, and for as much as we tend to fixate on the way coaches manage everything from the clock to the roster, this is still a sport with a ball that bounces funny and where the ultimate authority on down and distance is two poles and a chain. There’s a fair amount of luck involved in everything from which team recovers a fumble to which draft pick blossoms into an All-Pro and who becomes a bust.

OK. Now it’s your chance to tell me if you fit into one of these categories or perhaps propose your own. As always, thanks for reading, and I wish you a very happy New Year.