Could Geno Smith be as good or better than Matt Ryan?
Geno's 2022 season was closer to Ryan's 2016 MVP season than you probably remember, could the Seahawks QB be that good in 2023? 6/4/2023
On Saturday’s article about how much the Seattle Seahawks may have improved over the course of the 2023 offseason, and whether they could be Super Bowl quality, I left a comment suggesting that perhaps with the right ingredients Geno Smith could be as good as Matt Ryan. Not just any Matt Ryan, but the version of Ryan who won the MVP award and reached the Super Bowl in 2016, obtaining a 25-point lead over the New England Patriots which…is the nicest possible thing to say about the 2016 Atlanta Falcons.
How could this be? Geno Smith and Matt Ryan?
In Geno’s 10-year career, he has made 51 starts, thrown for 11,199 yards, 64 touchdowns, 48 interceptions, and spent seven of those seasons as a full-fledged backup.
In Ryan’s first 10 years in the NFL, he was a 10-year starter with 158 games, 95 wins, 41,796 yards, 260 touchdowns, 126 interceptions, and six playoff appearances. Including that 2016 MVP campaign.
I take no issue with the premise that Ryan was a better NFL Draft prospect than Geno (third overall in 2008 vs. 39th overall in 2013), that he had a better career going into his age-32 season than Geno (which would have been last season), or even merely saying that Matt Ryan > Geno Smith. But perhaps the distance between the two quarterbacks is more of a “stone’s throw” than “charting a course across the Atlantic”.
This is similar to an article I wrote last year that I’ve referenced quite a lot, which was the “Geno or Drew Lock might be top-20 QBs next season”, which I posted on April 15th…basically nine months before Geno Smith played in the Pro Bowl.
However, the meat of that argument is largely based on my feeling that being a “top-20 QB” sounds a lot more prestigous than it actually is; at any given time, at least 12 starting quarterbacks are on the hot seat and playing for their jobs. Not accounting for injuries, 11 teams are set to start new quarterbacks in Week 1 of the 2023 season. By Week 6, that number should be higher than 16, which means that half of the league could turn over every year.
Just one year ago, many fans were wanting the Seahawks to acquire Matt Ryan and not wanting the Seahawks to settle for Geno Smith. I didn’t want Seattle to trade for Ryan, but I also didn’t expect Geno to win the job and was especially surprised that he held onto it for the entire season. Now Ryan is semi-retired and I would argue that the table is set for Geno to have stats that rival the numbers that Ryan had as the 2016 NFL MVP.
In fact, Geno’s 2022 season stats were probably much closer to that campaign than you think.
This is a bonus post for Regular Joes: 4 reasons that Geno Smith could be in line for a Matt Ryan MVP-type season with the 2023 Seattle Seahawks Join today to keep reading and to get access to 100s of bonus articles