Photo : Elaine Thompson ( AP )

Some people are fans of the Seattle Seahawks. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Seattle Seahawks. This 2019 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.



Your team: Seattle Seahawks.


Your 2018 record: 10-6, with a 6-1 finish. It was supposed to be a rebuilding year for this dilapidated shitpile, but it turned out that the Seahawks were still good enough to go the playoffs and get curb-stomped by Zeke Elliott. That’s gonna be your best-case scenario for every season well into the next decade.


Prior to that wild card loss, beloved safety Earl Thomas held out and then returned just in time to break his leg and give his own coach the finger during his ride off the field. He will never play in a Seahawk uniform again. Seabass was too old and fat and lazy to prevent a 97-yard kickoff return for a touchdown. Their only loss during that late hot streak came when they committed 14 penalties, including one hilarious phantom PI call in overtime, and lost to a crippled Niners team that by December was just playing football to pass the time. The owner died. Oh, and we learned just how much the championship Seahawks all despised their own quarterback.

Many who lamented how Wilson was treated differently now believed, truly believed, that Carroll had called a pass play to give Wilson a better chance to win the Super Bowl MVP award and decrease Marshawn Lynch’s chances… Lynch, fully dressed, downing a bottle of cognac, saying “These motherfuckers robbed me,” and “fuck this,” over and over. “If we gave the ball to the soul of our team and we lose, fuck it, we lose,” one Seahawk says. “Point-blank, period. You lost doing what you do best. But he gave it to Russ. I didn’t believe the MVP thing at first. But now I wonder. It’s at least plausible.”

Turns out that jet fuel can’t melt steel beams but it CAN melt team chemistry.

Your coach: Pete Carroll, who will always gift the opposing team a favor whenever they’re in dire need of one. You sure you wanna punt here, Sean McVay? I mean, that’s what I would do, but do you REALLY wanna do what I would do? Also still here is OC Brian Schottenheimer, who will establish the run even if it destroys everything else around him to do so. Zeke rushed for 5.3 yards per carry in that playoff game. The Seahawks, as a team, rushed for three. And yet, Schottenheimer called run after run after run. Martyball is alive and well in Seattle, and now you get another year of it! I’d rather be intubated while awake than see this offense.


As a palate cleanser, let’s all watch Coach Carroll take his shirt off in front of D.K. Metcalf!


Honestly, Carroll is in fine shape for a gum-brained 67-year-old. He’s probably a better PED supplier for this team than a coach for it.

Your quarterback: Salt QBae…


Russell Wilson is now the highest paid player in NFL history. I guess winning Coach Carroll’s Competitor Of The Month Award every month in Seattle pays off eventually. Good thing they somehow pissed off pretty much every other veteran player who was present for what were easily the greatest seasons in franchise history! Wilson now occupies 492 percent of this team’s cap space and yet his coaches will still concoct elaborate, torturous ways to misuse him. He was more interesting when he wasn’t fucking.



Behind Russ is Geno Smith. At this point, Geno Smith is like a human smoke alarm. Once you’re alerted, either something is broken or you gotta jump out of a third-floor window.


What’s new that sucks: Paul Allen died in the middle of last season, and I was all set to write a post about how he was fairly chill for an NFL owner. He didn’t meddle. He didn’t have any idiot children to put in charge of things. He liked music a lot but wasn’t all James Dolan about it. He was a philanthropist. He was, I thought at the time, all right as far as billionaires go.

And then I remembered that Allen only bought the Seahawks on the condition that the public chip in $425 million for a new stadium, and that he still receive 80 percent of the revenue from that stadium. He was the eighth- richest man on Earth at the time. The public approved the plan thanks to an election that Allen paid for entirely out of his pocket. Turns out that buying elections is much cheaper and much more efficient that buying stadiums. Who’d have guessed?


For now, control of the Seahawks rests in the hands of Jody Allen, Paul’s sister, who is also in charge of giving away at least half the man’s estate to charity as part of a pledge her brother signed prior to his death. I guess Allen needed all the public money BEFORE dying, even if he was just gonna give most if it away anyway, because he wanted to buy an old Eric Clapton Stratocaster or something. And I assume the Seahawks tipping off all their play calls will be included in that act of mass philanthropy.

On the field, the team traded miserable asshole Frank Clark to the Chiefs, who are apparently eager to stock up on such villains. Even with Clark gone, the Seahawks still probably have the highest quotient of star players with whom you’d absolutely never want to hang out with under any circumstances. They drafted wideout D.K. Metcalf based entirely on his jacked frame and eye-popping 40 time. In terms of technique, Metcalf runs routes like the starship from Galaga. He’s wideout Mamula waiting to happen. Tyler Lockett remains their only good wideout. They signed Mike Iupati at left guard to shore up Wilson’s blind side. Iupati is 75 years old and only has one kneecap. Paxton Lynch, who was out of football a year ago, is also here now, because why not? It’s not like this team passes the ball anyway.


Doug Baldwin retired. Earl Thomas signed with the Ravens and told Pete Carroll to kiss his ass for good.

“I gave Pete the middle finger because I felt like he wasn’t being honest with me.”


You did it, Russell. You vanquished all your foes at the office. Congratulations. You’re never winning another Super Bowl.

What has always sucked: We’re now into the period where Russell Wilson stands as the undisputed centerpiece of a team that will never again have the money nor the personnel acumen to build a championship roster around him. This is an outfit that consciously made the decision to win nine games every year instead of 11.


And honestly, that suits these fans just fine. You’d be forgiven if you didn’t realize that the Seahawks actually won a Super Bowl once, given the bullshit chip on their shoulder that these fans carry with them everywhere they go. Even Bills fans don’t ruminate on Super Bowl losses as much as these aspiring serial killers do. They STILL bitch about the refs from Super Bowl 40, they’re so bored with themselves. And, of course, they’ll never get over the end of Super Bowl 49. It’s one thing when I make fun of you guys for not running the ball at the end of that game. It’s charming when I do it. But when you fuckers are still begging the world for pity years after the fact, it makes me GLAD Russell Wilson threw a quick slant on the money to Malcolm Butler.

I have no sympathy for you. Every week, the Clink fills up with dudes in jean vests trucking in from the red parts of the state to break noise meters, to boo their own players when they get too showboat-y, and to demand Jordan Peterson be installed as head coach. I’d rather spend all day hanging out at a Russell/Ciara Instagram shoot than meet ANY of these mulleted simpletons. The racist parts of Washington state and the racist parts of Oregon and the racist parts of Idaho are all one collective mishmash of sour-brained assholes driving around looking for people to yell FUCK YOU WE’RE FULL at. Seahawks fans are useful because it’s a reminder that Seattle, for all its supposed style and cool, is surrounded by miles of basic Goatee And Oakley suburbs. That stadium might as well be in Alabama on game days.


As for Seattle itself, you already know that Jeff Bezos and the like turned that city into an overpriced hotel lobby. It’s fitting that failed vanity candidate Howard Schultz, The Nice Guy mogul who gave all his employees healthcare, turned out to be an absolute piece of shit who is terminally incapable of saying anything of consequence. That’s a quality metaphor for the city of Seattle as a whole. Anything left here that’s cutting edge is only branded that way.

Your uniforms look like Nickelodeon slime made with polluted river water.

What might not suck: Hey, the new punter is good. Unless he’s emergency kicking.

HEAR IT FROM SEAHAWKS FANS!

Bryan:

Fuck Blue Friday.

Willis:

Seattleites regularly commute down to Portland for the weekend to indulge in the quirky weirdness they themselves displaced from their own city.


Patrick:

Russell Wilson and Tyler Lockett have been brilliant together all season and the Cowboys defensive line has been stonewalling the running game all night? Clearly this calls for another run up the middle!


Devin:

During Super Bowl 48, a friend of mine said: “I wish this game was a little bit competitive.” My response was: “Fuck that, I’ll take the win now and wish for a competitive Super Bowl next year.” Next year, when I saw the Seahawks at the goal line in a passing formation, I knew I had tempted fate and lost.


Matthew:

Having to try and convince myself Brian Schottenheimer is cool and exciting is why it’s stupid to devote yourself to one team forever.


Matt:

I am a Seahawks fan who lives in New England, so I get to relive the worst sports moment of my life just about every week. That’s my fault. I’m dumb. But that goal-line interception isn’t just the nut-punch that short-sheeted a potential dynasty and wasted a legendary defense; it is also the last time the Seahawks offense was reliably watchable. After Super Bowl 49, I spent the next three years yelling at Tom Cable as a rotating cast of not-Marshawn-Lynches got tackled for losses on first and second down behind a line of converted basketball players, D-linemen, and bags of compost that Cable insisted were better suited to the job than, y’know, actual offensive linemen who know how to play the position. Meanwhile, the MVP-caliber QB in a passing league gets his first throw of the possession on 3rd-and-12. Stand down, Mr. Ciara! Christine Michael’s gotta eat! Before last season, Cable and Darrell Bevell finally got the ax ... and the Seahawks promptly made Brian Schottenheimer their new OC. They proceeded to run the ball more than any team in the league (Russell Wilson: 3rd in the NFL in touchdown passes, 20th in pass attempts), which was mostly fine because the O-line blossomed into not-sucking with the absence of Cable. But in the playoffs, they faced a Cowboys team that had the league’s 5th-best rushing defense by DVOA and a middling pass defense (16th by the same metric). What was Schottenheimer’s game plan? Did he craft a team-specific game plan that used his team’s best player to target Dallas’s weakness? Hell no! He ran the ball because there was an IDENTITY to uphold! Pete Carroll got outcoached by Jason Garrett. I wouldn’t let Garrett coach my eating club. Doug Baldwin retired. Earl Thomas is going to be awesome on the Ravens. John Schneider trades down in the draft every year to get more young players, the best of whom take 3 years to blossom into starters before leaving in free agency. He’s so smart! I love the way he never gets an impact player at a position of need! When the Seahawks win, the best possible feeling is three hours of misery that end in relief. When they lose, it’s the same three hours of misery, except 7 more days of unhappiness. It sucks! I’m raising my children to be NBA fans.


Jeremy:

Pete Carroll’s seventy thousandth pack of gum on the sidelines isn’t going to change the fact that passing the damn ball more than twice a game with literally one of the best quarterbacks in the league actually makes more sense than “establishing the run” on every three-and-out Schottenheimer draws up.


Jay Willis:

I can’t decide who or what is more deranged: Seahawks scouts, for apparently suggesting to Ole Miss wideout and future Seahawks draftee D.K. Metcalf that he walk into his NFL Combine meeting without a shirt; Carroll, for responding with such a brazen display of overenthusiastic camp counselor energy; or just the general packaging of this episode as a charming encapsulation of Pete’s ZANY PERSONALITY, and not as incontrovertible evidence that Malcolm Butler and Bill Belichick broke his brain five years ago. This feels like the season they finally go 4-12, and everyone here rededicates their wintertime sports energy to watching grainy Edgar Martinez clips on YouTube and performatively complaining about the Sonics. (They are never coming back.)


Roddy:

I’m from Scotland, where the NFL is more popular than you’d think, but still regarded mainly with a mixture of confusion (“wait, so ALL he does is kick the ball down the field a few times a game? He’s paid for that??”) and impatience (you might not realise how jarring it is for UK viewers to endure that many advert breaks in a notionally hour-long match). Over the years, the myriad Seahawks ups and downs have been accompanied by a stream of excited all-caps messages to my friend (of the “MATE DID YOU SEE THAT PASS!!” or “THEY MUST BE GOING RADGE WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW!!” variety), most of which got either no reply or a response changing the subject. It’s only on a recent trip home that he confessed he’s at best ambivalent about the NFL/Seahawks and has only watched a handful of games. “It...it’s the fans,” he explained over a few pints, “you have no idea how annoying those noisy bastards can get.” Given that some of Scottish football’s defining fan characteristics are loud sectarian division and calling each other pedophiles via the medium of song, this is pretty impressive. Turns out that endless monotonous chants of “SEA.......HAWKS” outside one’s flat at three in the morning get even more wearing.


Dylan:

Pete Carroll very likely voted for Trump and deep down we all know that.

Tobias:

Our QB is a cornball that peddles some low level conspiracy theory shit about nanobubbles and waters and honestly it’s refreshing compared to the actual murderers, low level MAGA bros, and run of the mill domestic abusers that other team fans have to look past in this disgusting league I am ashamed to pay attention to at all. Our fucking coach invited JORDAN PETERSON to talk to our team for reasons possibly related to motivation but more likely related to him being a nutjob.


JC:

The Seahawks are now Packers West, with Ciara’s husband filling the cap hole suck part of Aaron Rodgers, but not quite as capably. Last year, when we were all supposed to atone for the sins of being obnoxious and wasting a possible dynasty with the continued employment of Tom Cable by losing lots of games, the team overachieved just enough to keep the bandwagon intact, but not win anything meaningful, which is probably our deserved fate for being so proud for being loud and counting to twelve. We’ll be in above average sports purgatory for the next decade. Aside, extra fuck Howard Schultz.


Dylan:

Because these fans.


Adam:

Seattle has gone from being an affordable, burgeoning center of computing and telecom when I was born in ‘92 to a haughty, traffic-plagued technocracy lorded over by The Supreme Leader Bezos and strewn with feces and homelessness. It’s an I-shaped city that could be completely decimated in the next 100 years by an earthquake along the Cascadia Fault, and our greatest collective football memory besides SB 48 is literally a touchdown that induced seismic activity. Suffice to say, we deserve for this team to make like the Kingdome and fall apart. I’m grateful that I left Seattle in ‘03, so that all my memories of the Seahawks are televised and untainted by the presence of jackasses from Federal Way and Tukwila getting trashed on Pyramid Ale and shouting racist epithets during games. Retiring a jersey devoted to this fanbase is pathetic. Seattleites are Minnesotans without the good sense to even pretend to like other people. Just like Portland (both of them), the sticks outside Seattle are inhabited by the type of “libertarian”, irreligious assholes who are two hits of meth away from the second coming of Ruby Ridge. It’s clear in retrospect that it was Scot McCloughan, not Schneider, who made those draft calls for us in 2012. Our best pick since he left was a girlfriend abuser who drew blood before the draft and now joins the team that last season had Tyreek and Kareem. Our 9/11 denying head coach’s greatest blunder is only fading from the popular conscience due to the even greater series of blunders committed by his former DC against the same fucking team two years later. The receiver on the losing end of The Interception almost became the second player to die during a game in NFL history during the following season. Our deceased former owner was a taciturn lifelong bachelor who built a shitty museum in honor of the greatest guitarist ever, and only became a billionaire because Yung Gates lowballed him with a thirty thousand dollar offer for his shares when he left Microsoft. I still derive schadenfreude from Walsh missing the kick, even if like everything else good for the Seahawks, it eventually bites us in the ass. Fuck Matt Bryant. Fuck Percy Harvin. Double Fuck Tom Cable. Fuck the nano bubbles. And forever and always, fuck the Mariners’ front office of the past two decades, fuck Howard Schultz, triple fuck David Stern, fuck Clay Bennett, and fuck that abusive molesting jackass Kevin Johnson.


Michael:

Seattle is an amazing place that has the nation’s best food, coffee and beer, and literally invented all the shit that the rest of the country thinks makes their places cool. The Pacific Northwest is one of the world’s finest natural environments, and an hour or two outside the city looks like you’ve been transported to another planet that consists solely of rugged saltwater coastline and ancient forests. We convinced people to not move to this wonderland for decades because it’s a little far from places and rains sometimes in the winter. Fucking Amazon came in and ruined everything in a few years, and will have completely destroyed the city by 2020. An apartment within walking distance of a bus stop costs $1500 and large areas of the city are completely uninhabitable because they’ve been transformed into company housing for 22 year old dickbags who think getting paged to fix a bug in Amazon’s dildo recommendation algorithm at 2 AM is a status symbol. Seattle sports teams exist solely to be dicked over by other teams on their way to emotional triumphs. The 2005 Seahawks were a speedbump for Jerome Bettis in the least notable Super Bowl ever played if it weren’t for the refs, and the 2001 Mariners loss in the ALCS was a feel good story for the fucking Yankees. In the 90s the city was home to Ken Griffey Jr., Alex Rodriguez, Gary Payton, Randy Johnson, Shawn Kemp, Edgar Martinez and Jay Buhner, and the peak was the Sonics getting smashed by the best team in NBA history in the 1996 Finals. Replay review in the NFL was instituted because the Seahawks got screwed out of the playoffs on a shit call against the fucking Jets. Century Link Field is filled with racist idiots from pawn-shop-parking-lots-turned-cities like Everett and Auburn, and Bellevue soccer moms who have been holding back regional transportation since the 80s because they want lower cost of ownership on their Lexus. The traffic is so terrible that it’s not even worth it, and the one train line that runs near the stadium is packed with UW frat guys and suburban dipshits who have the collective intelligence of Terry Bradshaw. The region is going to be wiped off the face of the Earth by the worst earthquake in recorded history and the state has done literally nothing to prepare for it. Fuck us and we deserve it. The mountains sure are pretty though.

Submissions for the NFL previews are closed. Next up: Baltimore Ravens.