The 'Mt. Rushmore' question for Seahawks fans

What happened in 1933 and what is your Mount Rushmore for Seahawks? Seaside Joe 1933

At times, Seaside Joe will use the newsletter’s episode number as a jumping off point for what happened during that year in history. Let me tell you a story about how the NFL started to become the NFL in 1933.

In the same month in which prohibition was repealed in the United States, some would say that one of beer’s best friends was also born: On December 17, 1933, the Chicago Bears beat the New York Giants 23-21 on a touchdown via receiver-to-halfback lateral in the final two minutes and won the NFL’s first-ever championship game. Think about the gravity of that statement.

It has nothing to do with the Bears, the Giants, or even the contents of the game itself that changed history. It’s the context of the game: “Championship”.

It was never necessarily a given that sports would have leagues, that leagues would have divisions, that teams would have seasons, and that champions of those seasons would be determined by the best teams from each division playing in a final game for all the legally-approved champagne celebrations. The NFL doesn’t become the entertainment juggernaut we know it as today without George Preston Marshall:

Before the 1933 season, new Boston Redskins owner George Preston Marshall suggested to the NFL's owners that the league make some rule changes to increase the excitement of the game, including allowing passing from anywhere behind the line of scrimmage, and returning the goal posts to the goal line (which was changed in 1973). Marshall then made another proposal a couple of months later: splitting the ten-team league into two divisions of five teams each, and having the winners of each division play each other in a championship game.

Now, Marshall won’t win the title of “NFL’s greatest person” (“His refusal to integrate was routinely mocked by Shirley Povich, a columnist for The Washington Post, who called him "one of pro football’s greatest innovators, and its leading bigot."“) but the forward pass and the Super Bowl (which didn’t come until decades later but still needed a predecessor) are kind of the two biggies when it comes to describing why the league is so popular.

At the end of the 1932 season, nobody knew who should be called league champions as both the Bears and the Portsmouth Spartans had the same .857 winning percentage. So the Bears and Spartans played an unofficial championship game, which was played on Wrigley Field despite poor conditions for football. After tying 13-13 and tying 7-7 in their two previous meetings, a touchdown from Bronco Nagurski to Red Grange in the fourth quarter broke a 0-0 tie and Chicago won 9-0. It also changed the course of NFL history in terms of passing rules (Nagurski’s touchdown pass was controversial), field goal kicking, and creating a championship game format.

Not wanting to pay a head coach anymore, Bears owner George Halas fired Ralph Jones after the win over Portsmouth and put himself back in the role after a three-year hiatus. The team went 10-2-1 (including a loss to the aforementioned Boston team, whose coach that year was the awesomely-named Lone Star Dietz, a former coach at Washington State University) and pitted the Bears against the Giants in the first NFL Championship game on December 17, 1933.

The game featured Hall of Famers Nagurski and Grange playing for Halas against Steve Owen’s Giants; As was shared in the Seaside Joe comments recently, this NFL Throwback video on how players have evolved in the last 100 years is a great watch and mentions how Nagurski also became a championship wrestler in the 1930s alongside his NFL career. And then later he opened up his own service station, the 1950s version of a podcast:

“A local legend claims that Nagurski had the best repeat business in town because he would screw gas caps on so tightly that no one else in town could unscrew them.”

Owens coached the Giants for 24 years and is also in the Hall of Fame, and his team featured the 1933 version of J.J. McCarthy, former Michigan All-American quarterback Harry Newman. Newman went 24-1-2 at Michigan and then was named as an All-Pro in his rookie season with the Giants, passing for an unbelievable 973 yards with 11 touchdowns!

If you’re not jumping up and down right now that’s because you don’t realize that 11 touchdowns is almost twice was many as second place! That’s the same as Patrick Mahomes, if he threw 70 touchdowns this season.

Newman also threw 17 interceptions, so I guess tack on 100 interceptions for Mahomes.

Harry Newman is not really a legend. I had not heard his name before today and I’m guessing most of you would say the same. But he threw the first touchdown in NFL championship game history, giving the Giants a 7-6 halftime lead over the favored Bears. After Chicago took a 16-14 lead, Newman landed another go-ahead blow, throwing a fourth quarter touchdown to go back up 21-16.

However, that’s when Nagurski threw the pass that became a lateral that turned into the game winning touchdown in the final minute—making Halas, Nagurski, and Grange (who called 1933’s championship “the best game that I ever saw or participated on”) legends, and Newman just wishing that one day he too could open up a service station.

(Newman temporarily quit football in 1935 to pursue a career in liquor, thanks to that whole 21st amendment thing, but soon returned and went to the upstart AFL (but not that AFL, of which there were several iterations) and was out of football by 1938.)

The Bears and Giants would also face off in the second NFL Championship, this time with New York winning 30-13 thanks to 27 unanswered fourth quarter points.

Halas was still coaching the Bears in 1967, meaning his career spanned pre-NFL championship all the way to the Super Bowl era and everything in between. Unfortunately for Chicago, they’ve proven to be far more of an “NFL Championship team” than a “Super Bowl team”.

Now, can the Seahawks prove to be a Super Bowl team in the near future and not the distant past?

Scott M: Who is on your Seahawks "MT Rushmore"?? Your top four all time Seahawks. Hall of Famer's vs Super Bowl winners vs record holders etc...it's always a fun debate.

I’ve gotten the Rushmore question several times recently, so I guess it’s as good of a time to address it as any. I always ask Seaside Jay questions in the “Would you rather?” format, or “What’s your top-3 ice cream flavors?”, so I can’t say that I’m opposed to a Mount Rushmore…I just have not really ever thought about it.

My personal favorite Seahawks would have to exist in the era that I’ve been watching, which basically started with Warren Moon in 1997. But Moon wouldn’t be on the Rushmore. I just want to let those of you who are wondering “Where’s Steve Largent or Cortez Kennedy?” and other snubs that it would be disengenuous for me to put them on a personal favorites list. I didn’t really watch them other than the tail end of Kennedy’s career.

I’m going to just say the first four names that come to mind: Walter Jones, Matt Hasselbeck, Marshawn Lynch, and Kam Chancellor.

I can’t really give answers or explanations, nor are explanations necessary for a Rushmore. These aren’t best, these are just Joe’s four. What are your four?

Eduardo: Laken Tomlinson is looking like he'll start at left guard with both Anthony Bradford and Christian Haynes in competition with Curtis McClendon for the right guard side spot. With both Haynes and Bradford being considerable draft investments in their 1st and 2nd year rookie deals, how feasible is it to see one of them switch over to either back-up Laken or substitute him at left guard at some point during the season to provide that much needed youth, affordability and continuity across the whole offensive line?

I don’t think anyone can answer that question yet, including the Seahawks coaching staff. But Seattle’s far from being in a luxury position to pick starting offensive linemen based on age or salary cap or what could benefit the team in 2026. The Seahawks must figure out their five best offensive linemen, start them, and hope none of them get injured. It’s hard to imagine a scenario in which Seattle has five good offensive linemen, let alone six, so the only way for any of us to find out who the best five are is to wait and see what happens in August and September.

And I don’t say that the Seahawks might not have five offensive linemen only out of concern for Seattle’s past with offensive linemen…I’d say that for basically all 32 teams. Every team has a weak link on the offensive line, the trick right now seems to be not having three or four weak links.

Laken Tomlinson is 32. Sure that could imply that he’s within 12 months of retirement, whether he knows it or not. But it’s not so old that Tomlinson couldn’t be the Seahawks starting left guard in 2025 either. At this point, we should just be praying that the Seahawks have two good guards, as three seems like a farout dream scenario.

I pulled questions from the Super Joes mailbag newsletter. If you want to get into the next Super Joes Q and A mailbag newsletter, upgrade to Super Joes today!