Did Seahawks meet your expectations?

Re-visiting pre-season Seahawks fan survey

This crazy video of kids breaking into T-Mobile Park and climbing on the roof was suggested to me by YouTube this morning and I felt I had to share it with you on the first day of 2025.

Warning: Extremely unsettling heights (if that makes you sick like it does me) and this is not an endorsement to break the law. Maybe the video will be taken down by YouTube soon.

Every week — and continuing into the offseason — I ask Super Joes subscribers for questions and comments to use in the newsletter. To join Regular Joes for only $5 per month or $55 per year, click below. For Super Joes or to upgrade to Super Joes at a prorated rate, do the same for $10 per month.

zezinhom400: Would be interesting to see a recap now of the final record projections everyone did in your surveys on the subject -- think you polled us more than once. How many of us were saying 9-8 or 10-7. And in retrospect now, if that was our reasoned prediction at the beginning, do we view this as a building block year or a stumbling block year?

I polled Seahawks fans before the season on their expectations, here were the results:

• Seahawks win 8-10 games: 61.5%

• Seahawks win over 11+ games: 31.2%

• Seahawks win 0-7 games: 7.3%

It’s kind of funny how that works, right? Even though “8-10 wins” only has three possible results compared to eight possible results for being bad and seven possible results for being great, it’s what we’ve come to expect of Seattle.

About one-third of us thought the Seahawks would be great, and most of the rest of us thought the Seahawks would be consistent: This is the seventh time in the last 10 years that Seattle has finished between 8-10 wins.

Even still, over half of the fans who were moderately confident in the team thought Geno Smith would have another Pro Bowl caliber season, while that number was 74% in the high expectations group. Few of us—like less than 5%—thought that the Seahawks would struggle to pass the ball with Ryan Grubb as the offensive coordinator and DK Metcalf/Jaxon Smith-Njigba/Tyler Lockett as the receivers.

But football is not an individual sport*. For some reason, there’s always an inclination to point the finger at one person per play, whether that’s a positive or a negative, and I don’t see how blaming Grubb absolves Metcalf for his mental and emotional mistakes, or blaming Metcalf absolves Lockett for just being a shell of his former self, or blaming Lockett absolves the offensive line for not being better run blockers, or blaming the guards absolves Kenneth Walker for not always making the best decisions with the ball, or blaming all of these people absolves Geno for horrifically stupid red zone throws and throws at his own end zone.

*To some degree though, I still think the QB is playing almost a separate sport and is responsible for navigating various levels of difficulty based on his environment, just like a video game player who advances through different bosses.

Geno’s season was an average video game player set to a really high level of difficulty that he couldn’t handle.

But in the most general sense, the Seahawks were roughly what most of us expected.

Paul G: Since the end of the 2016 post-season, the Seahawks have won one playoff game. This span includes:

Two head coaches

Two quarterbacks

Four offensive coordinators

Four defensive coordinators

One general manager

There’s a common denominator here.

My question is, “Why should Seahawks fans have confidence that the architect of mediocrity can build a team capable of regularly going to the conference finals and even winning a Super Bowl?”

Maybe they shouldn’t? I don’t think of John Schneider as the architect of the Seahawks because Pete Carroll did most of the work we’re seeing. But Schneider’s first year of making moves, with a few exceptions, was not very good.

Eduardo: I think we pivot from Grubb. I think even with a retread OC (Schotty, Bieniemy, etc.) we trot out a offense that makes the playoffs. I am more concerned on how to move on that whether we move do so at this point. Should Mike Macdonald be given the latitude to pick his OC? Does one promote Peetz? Don't purport to know the path forward, but I do believe that Schneider SHOULD NOT get a second "Carte Blanche" on this one and at the very least MM get's heavy sway in this selection process. If it plays out, and with the benefit of closure without a meaningful game left on tap, what is your best guess on how to move away from Grubb if that's how they play it?

I guess we’ll find out in a week.

Seaside Joe 2133