🔥 Fanning the flames of discontent 🔥

So Russell Wilson’s good again, Yankees fans remain the worst and the 12th Man is being investigated for the evaporation of Seattle’s home-field advantage.

Wait. What?!?!

Yes. If you haven’t heard, the word is out around the country that the Seahawks’ home-field advantage isn’t what it used to be and not just because ESPN’s Pat McAfee said so.

We’re getting close to 10 years now that I’ve been hearing people talk about the decline of Seattle’s home-field advantage. In fact, the last four years that I worked at 710, the No. 1 guaranteed way to generate phone calls was to ask if the 12th Man had lost a step.

Yes, the callers would inevitably say. It was because of all the bandwagon fans, who’d come on board from 2012 to 2014 and while there might be a little bit of truth in that, here’s the other thing: The single biggest factor that affects the volume and the intensity of the crowd during the game is the success of the team in two regards:

1. How has it performed recently?

2. How is it performing in that game?

I’m not going to blame the crowd for what happened to the Seahawks on Sunday against Buffalo. The fans sounded plenty loud to me when that game started. How they sounded by the end? Well, that’s a reflection of how the team played.

Geno Smith acknowledged that the Bills fans were really loud during Sunday’s game and coach Mike Macdonald was asked about it on Monday.

“We’ve got to win, period,” he said, “so opposing fans don’t show up if we’re consistently kicking butt.”

Hear that? It’s the voice of reason.

Besides, it could be worse … keep reading …

🏙️ That’s so New York 🏙️ 

In the first inning of Tuesday’s World Series game, the Yankees’ Gleyber Torres hit a foul ball down the first base line, which Mookie Betts tracked over to the right-field stands, leaping to make the catch.

A man in a grey Yankees jersey grabbed Betts’s glove with both hands so he could (eventually) pried the ball out. When Betts attempted to reach into the glove with his right hand, a second Yankees fan pushed Betts’s hand away.

Even that description fails to capture the intent of these two fans.

Let’s zoom in:

Now the Dodgers were awarded the out on the play because of fan interference. While fans are allowed to leap and catch a ball once it leaves the playing field, they can not reach over the fence or boundary to grab a ball.

These fans not only reached over the fence, they tried — quite forcefully — to break up the catch.

It was thoroughly terrible that combined two of my least favorite parts of sports:

1. Entitled fans;

2. Lack of respect and regard for the actual athletes we’re all watching.

You’re a fan, you’re not the show. You’re watching the show just like the rest of us, and if you’re lucky enough to be in that stadium during a World Series game, well, I believe there’s at a bare minimum a level of respect you owe the participants.

Now there are people who will say that this epitomizes both the city of New York in general and Yankee fans specifically. As someone who has lived here for 5 years, I don’t think that’s entirely true. Most New Yorkers — even Yankee fans — would say that this was gross behavior on the part of the fans.

However …

If you gave me one guess as to where an incident like this one would have occurred, I would have absolutely picked Yankee Stadium.

Finally, I want to acknowledge a wild pitch by Jesse Rogers, who covers baseball for ESPN.com and tracked down the fan in a bar after he was ejected.

Now in the story that Rogers wrote, he was much more circumspect in describing what happened and the reaction. When he Tweeted a link to the article, he even made a point of saying this sort of thing should never happen again.

The picture and his initial Tweet characterize this as some zany thing that happened during a high-stakes game. It was not that. At all. There was a player whose arm was grabbed by a rabid fan, and while Betts was not hurt, I don’t think that was entirely outside the realm of possibilty. Austin Capobianco was not a “beaut,” he was a fan behaving like an angry troll and should be treated as such.On Monday morning I came across a story on Yahoo! sports that caused me to smile.

🏭️ Russ-t Belt Renaissance 🏭️ 

On Monday morning, before the Steelers hosted the Giants, I came across a story that made me smile.

Suddenly it felt like 2012 all over again, diving into the robot mind of this undersized quarterback with huge ambitions. I was ready to crack a bottle of nanobubbles and eat some football-shaped bread to celebrate.

I’m not being sarcastic in any way. I am genuinely excited to go on this journey again, and there is a significant part of me that is genuinely happy for Wilson.

He was a great quarterback for Seattle. I would have been sad if his career didn’t experience some sort of renaissance after the past two years in Denver. I truly believe that he is in the absolute best spot he could be in, playing in Pittsburgh, which has just a pinch of humor.

You see, he’s playing for a team that is committed to running the football and offense and knocking the hell out of people when it’s on defense. Philosophically, it’s very similar to how Pete Carroll wanted the Seahawks to play with Wilson given the chance to make an occasional bit of magic.

Wilson became convinced that not only was he capable of shouldering more of the burden, but Carroll’s reluctance to give him that responsibility was holding not just the quarterback but the franchise back.

You know what happened next. Wilson wound up traded and fell off a cliff while the Seahawks have remained a good but definitely not great team.

After Wilson’s two starts in Pittsburgh, I’ve already seen people who’ve started to proclaim that Wilson is good “again.” I’ve also seen people pointing to his success as proof of Sean Payton’s ineptitude as a head coach.

I don’t believe either of those things is true.

I don’t believe that Wilson has changed all that much over the past 10 years. I believe that when you put Wilson at the helm of a good team with a strong running game he can absolutely make that team great. I think if you put him at the helm of an offense run by Payton or Kyle Shanahan or Sean McVay you’re going to have serious problems because Wilson relies more on his intuition than running the offense as it’s structured.

He is also streaky. Usually, when people say that, they’re talking about accuracy. Wilson’s streakiness relates to how he’s seeing the defense, though. If he’s not reading things, then he’s holding onto the ball and taking sacks and the team is punting and receivers are getting frustrated.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though. He’s played in two games for the Steelers so we’re still in the honeymoon phase and I’m enjoying the chance to remember what that was like when it happened in Seattle.