Geno Smith release ends year of media's about-face on giving Seahawks poor grades for trade

As social media has successfully silenced dissenting opinions, it has stripped the Internet of original thoughts

Remember back in the day before cable TV when a channel might only come through obscured by wavy lines, static, or color bars distorting the picture so badly that you only kind of know what you’re watching?

That’s sort of what’s happening with the world and social media in modern times and while we could paint this picture in countless genres of life, obviously at Seaside Joe the example I’m going to use is the NFL:

There are a lot of “experts” who say that they watch every game and they are paid to analyze football for millions of fans but I have to question if they know what they’re watching or if they even have the intent to give us a clear picture of the players anymore.

On sites like X and YouTube where people are rewarded for attention instead of accuracy, covering the league has become a ME business, not a WE business.

At Seaside Joe, it’s a SEA business:

For example:

Why was it ever controversial to say this a year ago when the Seahawks traded Geno Smith to the Raiders for a third round pick:

“Trading for Geno and giving him a contract extension was a stupid move by Las Vegas”

In fact what I wrote when I posted the breaking news was considered a hot take:

Seattle should be BETTER — not worse — with the offseason they’ve had so far: Released 5 players, including Tyler Lockett; Hired Kubiak to replace Ryan Grubb; Traded Geno for a 3rd round pick; DK Metcalf on the trade block; Tendered Brady Russell and Josh Jobe

This was right before the Seahawks traded DK, which I also expected and praised as a step in the right direction for Seattle. Others will say “hindsight is 20/20” about Geno and DK but not us. Actually, I do not think that grading those trades as good moves for the Seahawks was anything special. I don’t pat myself on the back because:

It was right in front of our eyes, but you had to have a clear signal.

Shouldn’t the “hot take” have been that: “Spending a third round pick and $60 million for a quarterback with an 0-1 career playoff record and a turnover problem will get the Raiders over the hump”? But it wasn’t and this is the degree to which it wasn’t: ESPN’s Benjamin Solak giving Seattle “the universally panned move” award for trading Geno.

The “UNIVERSALLY PANNED” award!!! For somebody who was hired by ESPN because he has a six-figure following on Twitter. I hope some day in the future having 100,000+ followers is seen as a red flag, not a green light.

NFL.com’s Kevin Patra gave the Raiders a full letter grade better for their end of the deal:

SBNation gave the Raiders an A for a “tremendous move” and questioned if the Seahawks were just doing a complete teardown. The Athletic’s Jeff Howe actually used the word “stability” in the headline to explain why Las Vegas made such a good move in fleecing Seattle for a quarterback.

No matter how much you like or liked Geno, is “stability” the word you’d imagine using for a quarterback who spent seven years as a backup and then once he did get a foothold on a starting job was traded away from one of the most successful franchises of the last 25 years because he had spent over a year asking for a raise despite the team missing the playoffs both seasons?

On Friday, the Raiders did set a record with Geno: Most money ever spent on a player for only one season with a team.

If you wanted to keep Geno, that’s okay too:

It’s the fan’s job to rationalize, but it’s the media’s job to be rational.

I know that some Seahawks fans reading this are saying to themselves that they were Geno fans, perhaps even still are Geno fans, and believe that the Raiders dragged him down. That’s fine too! Your opinions are valid and just because some of us got this prediction right, tomorrow we’ll get something wrong.

How many predictions has Seaside Joe gotten wrong this year already? I would have predicted a Kenneth Walker franchise tag if the Seahawks didn’t beat me to the news that it wasn’t going to happen. That’s just one, there will be many more.

But if you were against the Geno trade that’s okay: You’re not on ESPN. You don’t write for The Athletic. You don’t have a million followers on Twitter. Actually at this point your instincts about the NFL are more trustworthy than what’s coming from the mainstream: Segments and articles and tweets that can no longer overcome the desire to stick with the crowd that has poisoned their opinions from being reasonable and rational to —> reactionary and trendy.

Many of the take-havers no longer care that to do the job with integrity is to inform, educate, and entertain fans even if those opinions or facts could lose you a follower, reader, or viewer. Instead what I’m usually seeing from media hopefuls to the top of the media food chain is the belief that their goal is to gain followers.

“If I get 100,000 followers, someone will hire me.”

And it’s hard for me to argue against this because ESPN, The Athletic, Yahoo!, and many other mainstream media companies have hired people off of social media because they got “vetted” by a follower count and inclusion in this tiny group of the in-crowd NFL accounts on twitter.

“Now I have 100,000 followers, I can’t afford to say ‘the wrong’ thing.”

Then when those people like Solak or Bill “Seahawks had the worst offseason of any team in 2022” Barnwell get to ESPN, fans are left pondering things like “Why do they like Justin Fields so much?” and “Why are they covering Shedeur Sanders more than Drake Maye?” and for our side of things on Seattle, “Why wasn’t one person willing to argue against the notion that trading Geno Smith was a ‘terrible move’?”

Whether or not Geno dragged down the Raiders or vice versa (both deserve blame), where were our grand “experts” when it was time to predict the relatively foreseeable outcome that a quarterback who had never succeeded at anything without the Seahawks would struggle on a franchise that hasn’t won anything in 25 years?

If Geno had been traded to the Vikings or Steelers, a pro-trade agenda would have at least made more sense. He went to the Raiders (a word that defines itself) and NOBODY was willing to argue that he was in a worse situation than he had in Seattle?

Not one person in the media was ready to be like, “Yeah, I think Geno’s going to get a little bit exposed by going from a perennial playoff contender to the Raiders, a team that lost six more games than Seattle did in 2024”?

I mean, that story might exist out there but I know that I couldn’t find it but I found a ton of people who were willing to pan the Seahawks for trading him away. So it wasn’t just a matter of being nice to everybody on both sides of the trade—it seemed more like as soon as the first word got out there that “Seattle made a terrible move”, then that’s what the media had to agree would be the acceptable opinion. There had been such a groundswell of support online of Geno as “the underrated quarterback being dragged down by the Seahawks over the past couple of years” that the crowd knew the assignment when Seattle traded him instead of extended him.

I’ve just always hated crowds.

If you need to fit in, it’s time to get out

All it would take is one person to step out and say “I think this trade might be a disaster for Geno and the Raiders” and yet I don’t feel anyone in the media wants to step out anymore. Sports is supposed to be entertainment, but there’s nothing less interesting than universal agreement.

I don’t mean argument for the sake of argument like a First Take show. I mean a world where you can watch 10 different YouTube videos about a trade, or scroll through 100 tweets, or read 5 separate articles, and they don’t all say the same thing. Is that what you’re experiencing? Because it’s not what I’ve been experiencing.

There are too many parrots.

Instead, we see that anyone who shares opinions directly opposed to “accepted” mainstream narratives (the value of a hyped up quarterback; a playoff team being called overrated; any time Seattle trades a quarterback) that dissenter gets piled on, sees their social credit score drop, and could get permanently ostracized for being a “hack”.

Whether or not this person is later proven right becomes totally irrelevant. By that time it’s too late; they didn’t say “the right thing” at “the right time”.

How did we get to a point where accuracy, or even just righteousness — a confidence to share your actual beliefs — was less important than fitting in?

Why this matters

You may also be wondering why any of this matters — ESPN would have been cancelled 10 years ago if it wasn’t the background noise at a million bars and gyms in America everyday — but it’s hard to believe that those narratives aren’t impacting the actual decision makers. It’s not just that the media approved of the Raiders’ Geno trade and extension…it actually had to happen first. A GM really made that trade with approval from coaches and ownership and Tom Brady:

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-The Browns really gave Sanders seven starts last season and still claim to be giving him a chance to be the starter in 2026. (He’s one of the worst quarterbacks to ever start more than a game in the NFL and that shouldn’t be disputed.)

—The Jets really gave Fields more guaranteed money last year than the Seahawks gave Darnold; Fields won 14 games in four seasons, Darnold won 14 games in one season with the Vikings.

—The Vikings really let Darnold leave over relatively small money to get the J.J. McCarthy era started.

Because there’s a single shade of acceptable opinions, coaches and GMs get fired, players get overpaid, prospects get over-drafted, and while the number of options you have for where you can get your NFL content continues to grow, most of it is simply Internet Junk Mail. It’s just a different person saying the same thing that was said at ESPN, Fox Sports, PFF, The Athletic, Yahoo!, Twitter, YouTube, etc.

And when everyone has the same opinion, nobody has an actual opinion.

The broken clock of acceptance

I started with an analogy about watching television, but I’ll leave with one about a broken clock being right twice a day. If just feels like opinions are so meaningless that when one hits, it just happened to be pointing in the right direction that day by accident.

It also means that the media’s adoration for a player today will be proven hollow by tomorrow:

• Nobody was allowed to criticize quarterbacks like Geno Smith and Justin Fields a year ago

• Now nobody is sticking their neck out for these players when their stock is down and praise doesn’t carry the same social caché it used to

Similarly, if you said it was a great idea to trade Geno and praised the Seahawks for making the team better with their offseason moves last year, it was called a hot take. Now being on the Seahawks bandwagon (nationally speaking) is trendy and it’s largely because of the moves that they were criticized for by the people who now claim to love those trades!

That’s why when I’m asking about things like “the media said this about a player” or “the Seahawks are ranked here by this writer”, it’s hard for me to muster up any energy for a response because it’s rarely even that person’s own opinion. It’ll change with the tides and nobody is willing to swim upstream anymore.

• Seattle got Cs and Ds when they traded Wilson and Geno.

• Revised grades for both deals are now straight As.

We should all be so lucky to have had teachers who would have changed our grades several years later when the signal improved.

Schneider, not Spytek

Luckily the Seahawks don’t suffer from having a general manager who cares what the media thinks and in fact Seattle is benefitting from the teams that do have that problem. It’s not just trading Geno:

• They got Byron Murphy in the draft in part because certain quarterbacks were overrated in that class.

• They got Darnold because the media labeled him as “the problem” in Minnesota

• They got a second round pick—that helped them get Nick Emmanwori—because there was so much fanfare around DK Metcalf

So maybe I shouldn’t be so mad about the fact that the media gets so much wrong because it has actually done a lot to help the Seahawks.

But that’s just my opinion.

Seaside Joe 2559