1 Super Bowl & 10 missed playoffs or 10 playoffs and no Super Bowls?

Would You Rather -- Seahawks edition!

Time to address the “Would you rather?” and “Simulation” questions in last week’s Seahawks fan survey. Today is the 2,300th day in a row that Seaside Joe has sent out at least one newsletter about your favorite NFL team. That’s EVERY day since March 4, 2019.

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Would you rather win one Super Bowl and miss 10 playoffs or make 10 playoffs and win no Super Bowls?

Over Pete Carroll’s first 13 years in Seattle, the Seahawks made the playoffs 10 times and won one Super Bowl. Carroll’s tenure gave Seahawks fans the first taste of what it’s like to win the Super Bowl, and to almost win another, but also the feeling of reaching the playoffs eight other times and never coming that close in any of those trips.

In Carroll’s eight playoff appearances that we talk about far less often than 2013 and 2014, Seattle went 5-3 in the wild card and 0-5 in the divisional round. In those five divisional round losses, the Seahawks faced deficits of:

• Down 28-0 to the Bears

• Down 20-0 and 27-7 to the Falcons

• Down 31-0 to the Panthers

• Down 36-13 to the Falcons

• Down 21-3 to the Packers

Seattle’s “resiliency” to make a couple of those games close by the end is just another way of saying that the Seahawks could have made a third NFC Championship game under Carroll if they had just played better in the first half.

So we have experienced the full spectrum of the Seattle Seahawks being fine, good, or great in the past 15 years — the Seahawks have missed the playoffs in three of the past four and four of the past eight years, while only winning one wild card game (17-9 over Josh McCown’s Eagles) since 2016.

In the decade since Seattle won and lost a Super Bowl, they kind of have been that team that doesn’t make the playoffs for 10 years. The only difference is that the Seahawks have made the playoffs six times, but have consistently faltered once they make the postseason. Is that “worth” winning one Super Bowl?

I posed this question in last week’s survey and two-thirds of you answered that it was worth it:

There cannot be a right answer to this question. It can only be defined as a matter of personal taste.

Missing the playoffs for 10 years can be a painfully long draught and maybe there are some Mariners fans out here who are living the experience of what it’s like to cheer on a franchise that some call the worst in pro sports.

(I don’t like bringing up the Mariners because I know that I’m out of my element compared to many of you — I stopped following baseball 15 years ago — but they are such a good and local example to use for this…by all means correct me in the comments if you think I’m talking out of my ass.)

The Mariners are the only team in baseball to have never reached the World Series and they have made the playoffs just once since 2002, at which point they were swept in the ALDS. And though the Mariners didn’t win or even reach the World Series in 2001, they were the best team in baseball with 116 wins and we saw how much interest waned as Seattle fell from the top to the bottom in the next few years, eventually turning into one of the worst slumps in American sports history: Mariners attendance peaked at 3.54 million in 2002 and bottomed out at 1.72 million by 2012.

How much would the Seahawks be risking with one Super Bowl and 10 missed playoffs?

We’ll never know because it’s a totally hypothetical, not-real scenario that will never be tested. We can’t possibly know what next season will bring, let alone the next 10, so some fans will always have hope for “next year”.

The Seahawks don’t run the same risk as the Mariners because they’re in the NFL and fans consistently support their favorite teams regardless of how bad they are, even if its over multiple decades. I’ve obseved my Panthers fan friend and noticed that although there was a period of time when he couldn’t bring himself to watch every game, there is always a reason for him to come back.

• Trading up for Bryce Young

• Firing Matt Rhule

• Hiring Dave Canales

• Hiring and firing Frank Reich

Even just the fact that the Panthers went 5-12 last season — compared to 2-15 the year before — gave him some reason for optimism. The Panthers scored 94 points in their last three games, so Carolina fans are thinking that maybe Young (7 TD/0 INT in those contests) is finally ready. So what does it matter that the Panthers were the worst team in the NFL (and didn’t have the number one pick because they traded it already!) a year earlier?

Optimism isn’t hard to come by in a league where the worst teams are rewarded with advantages, there’s a 17-game schedule in which there is more room for immediate improvement, drafted players + free agents can help almost immediately, and coaching has such a huge impact on outcomes.

This particular “would you rather?” is difficult to answer because you’ll never have hope stripped away entirely. Even when I tell you that the Seahawks will miss 10 straight playoffs after the Super Bowl, I’m sure some of you have a thought in the back of your head that maybe I’m lying or maybe Seattle will still find a way to make the playoffs regardless of my rules. Oh what an underdog story that would be!

When it comes to the Seahawks and what will happen tomorrow, there are no absolutes.

Well, except for one. There is one thing we KNOW will happen tomorrow…Seaside Joe will be sent out. Tell a friend!

Top Pick or More Cap Space?

Speaking of more hope next year, the next Would You Rather was based on having more draft capital or more financial capital. Most of you would like to have more cap space as opposed to the top pick in next year’s draft.

“The Seahawks choose between being GIFTED the first pick in 2026 draft or a salary cap exemption that allows them to spend $25 million more than every other team each year for the next 4 seasons. What should they choose?”

There is one way I can think of in which the top pick in the draft would be worth more than $25 million per season: If the Seahawks were able to draft an elite quarterback, similar to Jayden Daniels on the Washington Moons last year, then that player would have a net value much greater than his rookie contract. Even if he’s the number one pick.

Cam Ward’s cap hits over the next 4 years:

• $9 million

• $11 million

• $13 million

• $15.5 million

Ward is getting paid about $12 million per season over the next four years, which is considerably less than the top-15 quarterbacks in the NFL. In some cases, Ward is making about 1/6th as much as the top-paid QBs in the league. If Ward plays like a top-10 QB (which is a big if, don’t get me wrong) then his net value goes well beyond $25 million per season.

The top pick in 2026 could be Arch Manning and Manning could be a good NFL quarterback — or it could be someone else and he could be a lot better than Arch Manning — or the Seahawks could even do what the Bears did in 2023 and trade the pick to another team for a massive bounty.

On the other hand, $25 million in additional cap space per year over the next four seasons would allow John Schneider to keep more players who are set to be free agents and to outbid other teams for free agents who Seattle has been consistently losing out on because of their aversion to financial risk.

What played into your decision on this question?

Are we living in a simulation?

Here’s the scenario in which I most often end up pondering the simulation argument:

Have you ever been stuck in traffic and it seems like no matter where you turn or what you do to get around it there’s just another unforeseen roadblock stopping you from getting to your destination?

It’ll be like you hit traffic and then you decide to take your shortcut that ALWAYS works but then as you start taking the backway all of a sudden there’s construction going on and you’re being re-routed towards an even longer route and so you go a third way but then you’re stopped because of an accident and it’s blocking everything…now a 15-minute trip in your most familiar neighborhood has turned into an hour.

Why is that?

I’ve always thought that the funniest explanation is that “the computer must be running a software update for that part of town and that’s why I’m not allowed to get there or see it yet”.

I will always go with the funny explanation for my pain and torture over a boring and realistic one.

Just 8% of us are sold on the simulation theory, while 59% of us said outright “no” and 33% are open to the possiblity:

If it seems like simulation theory can only be as believable as watching The Matrix, which is pretty much just a philosophical action movie, here is what Oxford’s Nick Bostrom wrote in 2003:

I argue that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to become extinct before reaching a ‘posthuman’ stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of its evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we shall one day become posthumans who run ancestor‐simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation.

Later, astronomer David Kipping theorized that instead of three possibilities there might only be two: That humanity either doesn’t reach simulation age or we do. That puts the odds at a 50/50 coinflip rather than a low probability of existing in the Matrix. Said Kipping: “The day we invent that technology, it flips the odds from a little bit better than 50–50 that we are real to almost certainly we are not real, according to these calculations. It’d be a very strange celebration of our genius that day.”

Since humanity is pretty much left in the dark as it pertains to most of life’s philosophical questions, maybe simulation theory just gives us a sense of belief that one day we’ll get an actual answer to this one. The Matrix tells us that it can be as simple as taking a pill — and that’s not only very intriguing, it’s something anyone can do!

I wanted to bring this question back to the Seahawks but decided to delete my follow-up, which was:

If you DO find out that we are living in a simulation, will you still be a Seahawks fan the next day?

I think that’s called the blue pill.

Seaside Joe 2300