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Some people are fans of the Seattle Seahawks. But many, many more people are NOT fans of the Seattle Seahawks. This 2017 Deadspin NFL team preview is for those in the latter group. Read all the previews so far here.


Your team: Seattle Seahawks.


Your 2016 record: 10-5-1. And that one tie wiped out any goodwill you people got from beating the Patriots in Week 10.

Your coach: Serial gum torturer Pete Carroll, who nearly cost this team a draft pick because he violated offseason practice rules, all in the name of COMPETITION. Goddamn, if I have to hear one more story about how the Seahawks want everyone in practice to COMPETE, I will fly an airplane directly into Pete’s head. Maybe if your practices weren’t so competitive, you wouldn’t have players flipping off coaches and the team woman-beater attempting Mortal Kombat fatalities on his own teammates.

And they still keep throwing on the fucking goal line!

Your quarterback: He’s somewhere in there...


“Open your mind, Mister Quaid.” FUN FACT: I was watching TV with my kids this summer and the Kids’ Choice Sports Awards were on Nick. Russell Wilson was hosting that night, and let me tell you people something: I have NEVER seen Russell Wilson happier than he was hosting that show. He was RADIATING. Ebullient. Aglow. He was happier hosting that show than he was filming a post-coital Vine with his old lady. Stick Russell in the middle of the corniest, lamest, most generic, most brandified event ever, and he is in ecstasy. He is the Second Coming of Ahmad Rashad down to every last cell. Russell Wilson makes my flesh crawl, and I’m not alone. Ask his teammates!

According to witnesses, Sherman threw the ball back to Wilson and yelled, “You fucking suck!” Another fight broke out.


YES YES YES. GIVE IT TO ME. INJECT IT INTO MY SPINE.

A man who vowed to live in transparency — Wilson famously announced that he was refraining from premarital sex with his then-girlfriend, Ciara — required guests to sign nondisclosure agreements before entering his box at Mariners games.


What an asshat!

Every Christmas, Wilson gives each player two first-class tickets on Alaska Airlines, one of his endorsements. “It didn’t cost him anything,” one Seahawk told an assistant coach last year. “Big deal.”


YEAH WILSON YOU CHEAP FUCK.

Carroll hosts “Tell the Truth Monday” during the season, when he breaks down film. Some Seahawks joke that it should be renamed “Tell the Truth to Certain People,” because Wilson seems exempt from criticism.


You could strand me on a desert island and give me only this Seth Wickersham article to read about the Seahawks despising Russell Wilson, and I would be a contented man until death.

As for actual football, Wilson be running for his life behind what will again be one of the worst lines in football, and half his teammates will probably be cheering for him to break his clavicle. LT George Fant already had his knee explode. By midseason, Wilson’s gonna trot out there wearing a full exoskeleton body brace. To fortify this line, the Seahawks signed draft bust Luke Joeckel and then traded a fifth rounder for this dude:


You’re gonna see more Trevone Boykin this year that you ever thought you would.

What’s new that sucks: One of the most beloved players in franchise history decided to unretire and join the Raiders, who only had to swap low-end picks with Seattle to get them to agree to let him walk to their former division rival. Meanwhile, Eddie Lacy is here and has to weigh in more often than children at a fat camp. The team also signed Blair Walsh to replace Steven Stephen Hauschka, which is like trading cholera for dysentery. I know you cocky Seattle fans think your team has magically “cured” Blair’s yips just because he’s had a decent preseason. That’s gonna make it all the sweeter when he fucks you good. You hear me? HE WILL FUCK YOU GOOD. He better. So help me God he better be every bit as erratic as he was in Minnesota or I will eat broken glass.


Rookie Malik McDowell got hurt in an ATV accident. I’m stunned, usually because it’s white guys who get into ATV wrecks. Your average white baseball player spends all offseason joyriding ATVs around in abandoned copper mines and getting his arms torn off in the process.

What has always sucked: This team is broken down and shitty. You can already see the window of opportunity sealing shut. Beast Mode is playing elsewhere. Wilson will be permanently hobbled forever behind that line. Earl Thomas broke his leg and nearly retired. And Richard Sherman was a breath away from getting traded. Hell, both sides were acting like this was a inevitable, conscious uncoupling before the Seahawks had to suck it up and keep him. And there’s NOTHING to indicate that the enmity between Sherman and Wilson has subsided, mostly because Sherman is a moody penis. Is anyone buying his whole “iron sharpens iron” garbage? Of course not. Sherman is just as much of an attention whore as the QB he despises. Maybe they’ll clutch and grab their way to another division title, but this little run of theirs will end soon enough.


And thank God for that. These loser Seahawks fans always go to great lengths to present themselves as The Good Ones: real-deal diehards who manage to be completely unlike the standard brutish, uncultured, asshole fans of other teams. You’re supposed to be okay with Seattle fans because they, like, hike and shit. But you and I know better. You and I know THIS is the 12th Man:


When the Legion of Boom has dissolved and Wilson retires to host NBA Inside Stuff 2: Inside Stuffier!, all the casual fans will fuck off back to app development and THAT guy right there is who will be left at the Clink, getting smashed and acting like a deranged prick. Your future is your past, Seattle. Now give Cassius Marsh his Magic: The Gathering cards back.

And for real, FUCK Frank Clark.


Cortez Kennedy died.

Did you know? Doug Baldwin does fake news! Fake pooping > Fake news.

What might not suck: Oh, this Michael Bennett take. Oh, how I still hunger for real, old school, printed-in-ink takes from cranky sitcom dads:

Bennett’s outspoken advocacy for equality is laudable, and any reasonable person shares his loathing of segregation, riots and oppression.


BUT!

But there’s a problem about this “platform” he mentioned. It’s not entirely his and his alone. From the the moment he takes the field before kickoff, and the moment he returns to locker room after the final gun, Bennett belongs to a team.


I love a good BUT-ing. This John McGrath fella has a real future in serving takes up to terminally ill Mitch Albom fans.

HEAR IT FROM SEAHAWKS FANS!

Michael:

There we were, one fucking yard from rubbing it in Brady’s dumb pretty boy face and cementing ourselves as a dynasty with the greatest defense of all time when our QB, who couldn’t rub two brain cells together before he got concussed, tossed a gimme INT. I was hosting a party and some dude who was the only Pats fan there celebrated so hard he shotgunned a beer and body slammed my coffee table. All in all it was one of the better parties I’ve thrown but fuck that guy and fuck this team.


Bryan:

Fuck Blue Friday.

Devin:

The only reason Tom Cable is still the OLine coach must be that he has incriminating photographs of Pete Carroll melting steel beams.


Marquise:

The powers that be are hell bent on wasting what’s left of a great defense and trying to get the best quarterback we’ve ever had killed with a comically awful offensive line. If Russell Wilson dies on the field, Pete Carroll and John Schneider should be charged with manslaughter.


Cam:

If you think St. Louis Cardinals fans are bad (they are), then you’ve never seen Seahawks fans bust a collective nut when they raise the 12th Man flag. Pete Carroll still likes Macklemore.

Pat:

The other day I heard a man boast that he’s been a diehard fan since 2013.

Mark:

Fuck Paul Allen with a plutonium piledriver.

Brock:

Our starting quarterback is openly despised by 1/2 the team.

John:

Russell Wilson thinks he’s the market correction for Warren Moon’s edginess. Every day I see a 51 year-old white Seattlite climb out of their Infiniti and ask a young black man with long hair if they are Richard Sherman, through a full mouth of whipped cream from their Frappuccino.


Dave:

This team has become every bit as obnoxious and annoying as the Warriors, with less championships. Every year the offensive line is the worst in the league, but they insist on drafting some project that is two years away from being two years away and played offensive line in high school. Russell Wilson has yet to take the blame for anything that goes wrong.


Tim:

God bless the Falcons for valiantly taking the Epic Super Bowl Chokejob mantle away from us. Now we get to pretend like Super Bowl 49 never happened. Whatever humility Seahawk fans gained from that experience is now lost forever.... we’re going to be as obnoxious as ever.


Matthew:

This half-decade stretch of quality, competitive football has been marked with an underlying sadness that this is probably the best sports is ever going to make me feel in my lifetime. Like every year, fuck Jerramy Stevens.


Collin:

Experiencing the “Twelves” and/or “12th Man” in Seattle has turned me into a Sounders fan. Fuck the Sounders.


Nick:

Will someone please put Tom Cable out of our misery? We’re looking at another season with the worst offensive line in football. I can’t deal with this anymore.


Anthony:

I have a friend who is a die-hard Seahawks fan to the point of insanity. After they lost to Atlanta back in 2012 during the Divisionals he walked into his bathroom and punched his (Mom’s) glass shower door. Naturally he shattered it while cutting his hand to absolute shit. Pretty certain he ended up with stitches afterwards. 100% certain he didn’t pay for the door.


Nick:

The winning has brought with it the worst kind of soft-focus, snarky stories, the kind that I had only associated with horrible media markets like Boston or NYC. Player A doesn’t like Player B! Player C is disrupting the precious Chemistry! The offense and defense don’t get along! Gag me with a Gatorade towel already. When Mr. Miracle Water is finally broken in half by opposing pass rushes, because god forbid we field a competent O-line, we’ll revert back to also-rans and Seahawks journalism can go back to nominal, non-Shaughnessy levels.


Derek:

Come on. Fuck this shit. I hate my team.


Alan:

Being a stay at home dad, I take my 3yo with me when I run errands. Last time I had to see my optometrist, I packed him up and off we went. In the exam room, the dumpy, middle aged assistant saw his blue and green shirt and said she liked his Seahawk colors. She got all fired up, talking about how she and her kids bonded over the Super Bowl win engineered by Russell Winston against the Patriots (yeah, seriously) and then looked my boy right in the eye and bellowed “Are ya ready for some Seahawks footbawww little guy?!?!?!?!?” This was in May. Months away from any football. She is the poster child for most Seahawk fans.


Will:

People always think of Seattle as a progressive bastion, but every day the 12s remind me that we’re just as racist as the Deep South. Friends of mine shared a Facebook post of a police officer begging Russell Wilson not to kneel because the flag meant so much to him. Anytime Doug Baldwin tries to petition to our state legislature to enact police reform, our fans constantly chide him to stick to football. Speaking of which: notice how I called them the 12s? The team can’t even call them the 12th man anymore because we were too cheap to pay Texas A&M royalty fees anymore. And our fans bought it.


Seth:

I decided to visit some friends who moved to Oakland last year and timed my visit with a Mariners - A’s game. It was my first time rooting for the away team and everything was going smoothly until another section of Mariners fans started up a SEA! HAWKS! chant. At a baseball game. In another city. The 12s deserve every bit of the hate they receive and then some.

Sarah:

Russell Wilson has the emotionless smile and cold, dead eyes of a serial killer. I fully expect to see him on the news one day stabbing someone in the face repeatedly while chanting “Go Hawks” in a dull, robotic monotone. And he’d probably get only a four-game ban for it because, hey, the NFL fucking sucks, too. Also, predictably: RUN THE FUCKING BALL FROM THE ONE-YARD LINE, YOU UTTER COCKWOMBLES.


Mary:

Do you like overthinking team dynamics? Long articles on the meaning of competitiveness, and what “real” teamwork look like? Despite being bigoted drunks from Kent, Seahawks fans are now suddenly experts in longform essays on the “bigger issues” in football, interpersonal relationships on teams, and what life means and oh my God shut the fuck up. We get it. Our quarterback is Carlton Banks with a moral superiority complex. He’ll no doubt make his daughter go through one of those fucked up purity ceremonies when she turns 15. Our defensive players are smart enough to stage press conferences about pressing issues regarding racism, the importance of unions, or world fucking peace but can’t manage to stay healthy enough to actually stop a first down. Hey, Judy from Snohomish: Trust me when I say that you don’t need to work “the Seahawks haven’t been playing like a true team the last couple of years - you can tell!” into your big presentation at work. It’s all bullshit, and we know it. Just tell everyone your team sucks. You remember how, don’t you?


Willis:

Growing up as a young kid in Seattle, baseball was king. The Mariners and the Huskies were the only teams people cared about until Hasselbeck and Shaun Alexander fucked up Super Bowl XL. And now if I even bring up those years, it’s crickets for them. Even the Huskies, which made it to the college playoffs last year, are second stringers to the Seahawks Industrial Complex. It’s Seahawks 24/7, with the media buzz hovering around the team examining every tweet like the fucking Da Vinci Code.


Bloodshark:

Our fanbase has become every bit as entitled, smug, and insufferable as the Patriots’, only they have five Super Bowl wins and we only have one. The Seahawks are one of the best teams in the league but unless they win the Super Bowl every year people act like they’ve turned into the fucking Niners. My favorite player of all time is a man who could probably strangle a puppy to death and not feel a single emotion. I have a bobblehead of him and I had to turn it away from me because I couldn’t stand the thought of it watching me sleep. Every time I close my eyes, I see Malcolm Butler intercepting the ball. We let Golden Tate go to keep Percy Harvin, who I’m forced to have fond memories of because he scored a kickoff touchdown in a game that was already over. Fuck Rick Mirer, fuck Dan McGwire, fuck Jim Mora, fuck Aaron Curry, fuck Jeff Fisher and most of all fuck Ken Behring.


Andy:

Oh god, I can’t wait until I have to take out a micro-loan just so I can get a seat in the “Hawk’s Nest” (Actually just a section of uncovered bleachers raised high enough so that you get all the rain AND wind, in addition to a shitty view) surrounded by tech bros.


Matthew:

The Seahawks suck because if you drive 20 feet outside of the Seattle city limits there is a 100% chance you will see a truck like the one pictured below.


Miles:

Pete Carroll is a truther. Russell Wilson is phony. Richard Sherman is a dick. People in 12th man jerseys are Worse Than Hitler. And so on and so on. There are a lot of reasons to hate this team, but only one gets me down to my very soul: Motherfucking Tom Cable. Tom Cable haunts my nightmares. This violent, abusive human thumb is my least favorite person in football. I hate him more than Ray Lewis. I hate him more than Peyton Manning. Tom Cable fails upward with more consistency than anyone not named Donald Trump. “Don’t blame Cable,” cry the sycophants that are one drunken night away from tattooing “In Carroll and Schneider we trust,” on their foreheads. “The Seahawks pay their O-line less than any other team in the league, he doesn’t have anything to work with,” they say. These people are full of shit. Tom Cable bills himself as a master talent developer, so much so he managed to convince the team (run by actual, honest-to-god adults) to let him try to turn a defensive lineman and a fucking basketball player into starting linemen. Meanwhile the Seahawks have drafted more linemen than any other team in the NFL since 2010, many of those picks coming in the first few rounds. How many of those picks is both halfway competent and still on the team under the careful guidance of Tom Cable, O-line Guru? Just one, Justin Britt, who needed three years starting and three different positions to reach the grand heights of no longer being one of the worst players in the entire goddamn league. Next year, when the line commits 20 false starts a game and Russell Wilson comes on field in week six in one of those electric wheelchairs, Tom Cable will sit there, pretending to be angry on the sidelines but secretly smiling, secure in the knowledge that some -how he’s the assistant head coach (Seriously!), that some have speculated he might be Pete Carroll’s eventual replacement (Seriously!), and that legions of mouthbreathing fans love his “aggressive” style and how he “works with so little.” (This one is less unbelievable, sadly.) Tom Cable is immortal and also he can eat shit.


Josh:

Scrape away the film of over-maintained beards and Tiger Beat Russell fans, and you have a fan base as miserable as any you would find in the Rust Belt. Oh, and god forbid we pick up Kaepernick as a solid backup because Austin Davis needs to fail in a wetter climate. Considering some of my own friends, with whom I regularly watch ‘Hawks games, proudly fly Blue Lives Matter flags outside their homes, at least I know the team had their fan base’s interests at heart. Oh, and knock it the fuck off, Russell. The entire team is one Twitter poetry-slam away from sacrificing you, Aztec-style, in the middle of the field. I already know I’ll get to enjoy another 9-7 campaign that ends in the second week of the playoffs, long enough to knock off an interesting underdog so Seattle is hated even further without the history of success to justify it.


David:

That feeling when you finally realize that your head coach is a 9/11 truther, your starting QB is a shameless hollow-dead eyed brand bot, your defense is now more infamous for off the field gossip and social consciousness preaching than slowly declining on field play, and your fanbase has become insufferable as any fanbase that has sniffed success. Be prepared, 12's, the hard rain is gonna fall because that championship window is going to shut sooner than later. Fuck Malcolm Butler, forever. Fuck our offensive play calling that lead to the Malcolm Butler Play, forever. Fuck the ‘12' jersey because it’s a symbol of how disingenuous, non-committal, and fickle our fanbase is.


Adam:

I’m from Alabama and didn’t start watching the NFL until 2012. When it came time to pick a team to root for, I decided to be cute and truck with the team with best uniforms: Seattle. A year later they won a championship and erupted in mainstream popularity, leaving asshats like me to justify my fandom with the only explanation that’s dumber than just admitting that I’m a Super Bowl bandwagoner. Fuck Malcolm Butler, and fuck all the Brady jerseys I see in Alabama now.


Jon:

It’s hard to like anyone on the roster other than Micheal Bennett. If they’re not an enormous asshole, they #Praisethelord every other sentence. Our coach is an up-jumped Tony Robbins and our GM is a luckier, less-insufferable version of Sam Hinkie. Game day here in the Emerald City sees the unwashed hordes from such exotic locales as Sumner, Everett and Renton arrive in droves bedecked in bootleg Chinese jerseys and RealTree camo aboard bro-dozers that require step ladders for ingress/egress with more “$Hillary Lied, Americans Dyed” bumper stickers among them than GED certificate-holders. Then there’s the gate-keeping smarmy locals (YOU’RE NOT A REAL FAN , YOU DIDN’T WATCH JIM ZORN/RICK MIRER/KELLY STOUFER GET HIS SHIT PUSHED IN OR SIT THROUGH THE CHUCK KNOX OFFENSE, WHICH WAS FOR THE UNINITIATED:RUN, RUN, RUN, PUNT, REPEAT) like me who think they’re so fucking smart and write wordy e-mails and/or blog comments about how stupid our mostly-yokel fanbase is and defend Pete’s decision as “logical given the down, distance and improbability of an interception on such a short route.” Oh hey, we are that bad. Fuck football, fuck this team, fuck these awful fans and fuck this one-horse town.


JC:

The offense is helmed by less talented miniature Christian football A-Rod, and the secondary is anchored by the kid who just returned home after taking Philosophy 101 telling all the adults in the family how unenlightened they are before asking for money to see the latest Transformers installment. That said, none of this compares to the ‘Twelves’ (We are no longer the 12th Man, Paul Allen got tired of paying A&M royalties.). Being loud does not mean someone is on the team. Do not compare sore throats on Monday from yelling to the sore brains and bodies of those on the field. However, I’m the worst. I’m why we suck. I’m a giant hypocrite who realizes all of the above but will berate an old woman if she’s not pulling her weight to help our defense by getting the opposition to jump offsides. Her feeble voice can make a difference.


Ufford:

This team exhausts me. I used to follow the Seahawks obsessively during the offseason, but I just spent the last six months avoiding them at all costs. What was there to know? The goal-line failure of Super Bowl XLIX indelibly ruined team chemistry? The future Hall of Fame cornerback wanted a trade? The team avoided drafting in the first round for the fourth time in five years? The top draft pick got his head crushed riding an ATV before training camp opened? Russell Wilson acted like J.J. Watt, but for Jesus instead of the troops? OK, so I didn’t avoid Seahawks news. But I TRIED to. This team is a goddamn reality show. Of course, I’d happily take six days of tabloid headlines if it meant Sundays were fun, but they’re not. The Seahawks’ end results tend to be good, but the process to get there involves a lot of teeth-kicking and heart attacks. Try cheering for Seattle and you’ll know: no other team with a ceiling so high has a floor so low. In 2016, the Seahawks played three games without scoring a touchdown; the only other teams who can say that are the Rams and Jets. They also beat the Falcons and Patriots, which was fitting. That’s what the Seahawks are good for in the Russell Wilson/Legion of Boom era: they play brilliantly often enough to set fans’ hopes sky-high, then fall short in a staggering variety of painful fashions. They are the loudest, most successful disappointments in the NFL. p.s. Michael Bennett is exempt from all of this self-loathing.

Submissions for the Deadspin NFL previews are now closed. Next up: Kansas City Chiefs.