Someday Seahawks: Week 2 of college football features Levis vs Richardson
Seaside Bonus, 8/10/22: A word on Twitter addiction and who to follow on Saturday
I think one of the biggest advantages that any writer/journalist/content creator can have these days is not being addicted to Twitter. If it were not for the two-year break that I took from Twitter (and continue to take from all other forms of social media), I just don’t even think that Seaside Joe would be possible.
I can’t speak for anyone else, but after daily tweeting for nine years without a break under the belief that it would be good for my career (writer pro-tip: it’s actually bad), the disconnect wasn’t even something that I knew I needed. Social media addiction is not the same as any other drug addiction because the hits don’t come from outside of the body like heroin or alcohol; instead, the drugs come from directly inside your own brain.
It wasn’t even like I perceived a life before Twitter and a life with Twitter, it was more just like regular production and consumption of social media was merely a part of life. Like brushing your teeth or watching Survivor.
And I’m nearly 40 years old. I grew up without cell phones and I remember life before the Internet. I was in my thirties when I became addicted to social media and I know that a lot of people who are tweeting more frequently today than they were in 2012 are much older than I am.
But “social media addiction” isn’t considered a global threat to humanity by most people and I count myself in the majority there. One could also argue that drug addiction isn’t as bad as that either and prohibition failed.
It might, however, be a global threat to good journalism and the ability to spread accurate information that reflects our reality.
Sometimes that information could be quite sensitive to humanity. Sometimes that information is about NFL Draft prospects.
Today I’m just talking about the latter.
This is where we get into the territory of those “stolen opinions” I was talking about earlier in the week. It’s not necessarily true that these are consciously stolen; more like hordes of people tend to “crowd surf” popular narratives and believe them in the moment because that’s also really the advantage of these websites. To be able to have places that aggregate information during an era of information overload.
It’s not natural to follow every single aspect of every single thing that you like. There’s too much going on. I’m not just talking about draft prospects, I’m referring to everything in your universe, anything that takes up a fraction of your time, and the supposed advantage to sites like Twitter, Reddit, Instagram, Facebook is that you only get the short hand snippets of information that you really need. Or think you need.
But who is deciding what it is that you “need” and who is fact checking the information itself?
Last Saturday, I did a Twitter search for Spencer Rattler, a player who a lot of experts have been telling us is great for a long time. Then last year when I was watching the top 2022 draft prospects each week, the player who everyone said is great never played all that good and he was benched at Oklahoma for Caleb Williams. Since I only rate prospects after I watch them, I’ve never had to go through the motions of rating Rattler as a draftable quarterback.
Sure enough, he wasn’t deemed draftable enough and instead of entering the draft, he transferred to South Carolina. Then when I checked on him last week, the “Top” tweets about Rattler were showering him with praise.
Oh, is Rattler finally starting to tap into the potential he had as a five-star recruit? How nice.
Except I don’t believe in “top” tweets. That’s someone else’s opinion being fed to you by aggregation. Instead, I always cross-reference with “newest” tweets and I always fact check. If the prospect is worth it, then watch the whole game. Sorting by newest tweets instead of top tweets, almost everything being said about Rattler—I mean it, almost everything—was about how poorly he played last Saturday against Georgia State.
The top tweets are still mostly about how Rattler’s so talented. Rattler went 23-of-37 for 227 yards, with one touchdown, two interceptions, 4.2 adjusted yards per attempt, and -12 rushing yards. His 28.6 QBR is the lowest in the SEC through a game, and the next-lowest belongs to Will Levis.
Want to guess what the top tweets about Will Levis were like last Saturday? You already know the answer.
I just can’t emphasize enough how the top “football experts” in the media will push only one side of a narrative and nothing else. So if you follow Nate Tice…
All you have to see is that “Levis has such a strong arm.” I’m not noticing a string of tweets about any of Levis’s negatives, of which there are still many and I’m not going to go through all of them this morning because we’ve been down this road before and it’s meaningless until Levis actually shows improvement, and he was absolutely BAD last Saturday.
So why wouldn’t Tice, a writer at The Athletic with 42.7k followers, give a more nuanced and balanced picture of Levis? I’m not going to put an answer on him, that’s not for me to say. But I know what the typical thing to do on Twitter is when a prospect becomes popular…crowd surf the more trendy side of the narrative.
I do not mean to pick on Levis—or Tice, who comes off as very nice—but it seems that is the prospect who is going to be “Malik Willis” this season. And when it turned out the NFL viewed Willis as I expected and not as millions of fans were told when the media was pushing him as an option in the top-three, top-10, first round, or second round, it’s not as though anyone on Twitter has had to issue an apology.
Because they’re all on Twitter. They were all pushing the same idea. You don’t have to be held accountable when everyone was supporting the same premises.
And I’ve always hated being forced to follow other people’s ideas.
Decide for yourself.
I want to make it clear that I don’t think I’m better than someone who is using social media so frequently, but I do know that I feel better for having quit Twitter for two years. I was there the same as them for nine years and even now I frequently tweet out of the Seaside Joe account because I see that as an extension of the newsletter, not as an extension of myself.
I can only speak to my experience and I’m sure there are countless people—better people than I—who use Twitter as regularly as I used to without losing their sanity. I would just say that if you are one of them, and you haven’t gone through a Seahawks season without Twitter in five, six, or 10 years, do you really remember what the control situation feels like? The seasons where you don’t tweet?
If you’ve been tweeting through every Seahawks game since 2012, do you really know what you’re missing out on by not tweeting? Or more importantly, do you really know what you’re engaging in by tweeting so much?
Here are some of the important quarterbacks worth following early in the season. These names are chosen based on what I’ve seen over the last two years but as the season goes on, some will drop off and others will be added. If you want to see someone added to the list, tell me in the comments.
I was actually going to remove Rattler this week but it so happens he is playing against K.J. Jefferson, so he gets another chance anyway. Levis faces Anthony Richardson, so that is also one of Week 2’s games with two quarterbacks that people will be keeping tabs on. Some of these names, like Graham Mertz or Kedon Slovis, really aren’t that close to the NFL radar but they are facing QBs I’m still tracking for now.
We might as well also follow the notable 2024 eligible QBs when those opportunities arise. Use this forum on Saturday to note anything you see that you think might be of interest as we work towards the 2023 NFL Draft.
Great perspective Ken.
There is a qualitative difference between a thousand opinions and (essentially) the same opinion a thousand times. The survey of the Seaside Joe community is an example of the former.
I will need to do a better job of emphasizing this point over the next couple of months, since I know what I've done to hype up Grayson McCall around here: Bryce Young is one of the best QB prospects I've ever seen. Anyone other than him as the number one pick doesn't make any sense to me.