The Raiders are the worst Seahawks team ever

Geno Smith and Pete Carroll are getting a bitter taste of Silver and Black

For years we had to hear that the Seahawks were bad for Geno Smith and making him and others, both players and coaches, look worse than they actually are because of problems with the front office and the offensive line. Now Geno Smith and Pete Carroll are finding out what it’s like to work for a franchise that is actually terrible.

(That last one is a joke and not a real quote but perfectly encapsulates the narrative that was shoved down our throats.)

I’m going to do something that a lot of writers and some Seahawks fans refused to do in the last few years: I’m going to defend the Seahawks.

It hasn’t been easy to watch Pete Carroll’s legacy get Raiderized and it was the last thing that I expected to happen when Las Vegas hired him because for over 30 years the worst his team has ever been is “mid”. Barring a miracle, 2025 will be the first time a Carroll coached team has flirted with being the worst in the NFL or college since he was defensive coordinator of the 4-12 Jets in 1992.

Although there were smatterings of “fire Pete” from the start of his career in Seattle until he turned the team around in 2012, Carroll still found ways for the Seahawks to finish 7-9 in 2010 and 2011. Now coaching for a franchise that is anything but patient (the Raiders have made four coaching changes since 2021 and 14 of them since 2002!), Carroll could bookend his head coaching career with “one-and-done” opportunities.

Carroll saved the Seahawks and that can’t be forgotten. But you have to want to be saved. In the NFL that means having ownership that’s willing to say, “This is your job, not mine.” Unless you have a really good owner which…the Raiders do not.

For every time you said that the Seahawks were “holding back” Pete or Geno, do 50 push-ups.

With Carroll, even his most ardent supporters were left to defend a 1-4 playoff record in his last seven seasons at the helm. My stance at the time, and I think this was fairly universal, was that maybe Carroll didn’t deserve to be blamed but I wasn’t upset that Seattle was going to try something different. That feeling became easier to embrace when John Schneider successfully landed the top defensive coordinator in football to replace him.

Somehow Geno’s departure and actual value was far more divisive among fans and media than the greatest coach in franchise history.

(“What on Earth are you Geno-haters watching?” is such strong analysis!)

The love for quarterbacks runs so deep that oftentimes they will even get priority over the entire organization despite the fact that players come and go but the franchise will stay in Seattle for as long as we can help it. Sometimes this quarterback adoration led to popularizing a narrative that “the Seahawks are holding back Geno Smith” and could not possibly be the other way around.

Well, I’m going to try and avoid playing the blame game as much as I possibly can but it would be impossible to write this without receipts:

There was a lot of talk for the previous two seasons of Smith “masking” Seattle’s issues and that if it were not for the Seahawks he wouldn’t throw so many interceptions and take so many sacks.

I agreed that the offensive line was not very defensible, but it’s illogical to argue that Smith was “masking” a problem that … EXISTED. If he was masking it then why did Smith take 50 sacks and throw 15 interceptions for an offense that only scored 22.1 points per game? (The Seahawks are averaging over 29 points per game this year.) How is that the definition of a mask?

I mean the example of a great quarterback “masking” offensive line problems would be someone who gets rid of the ball and throws touchdown at a high rate such as Peyton Manning and Tom Brady. Manning had a career sack rate of 3.13% despite being far less mobile than Smith (7.86% sack rate) and averaged 35 touchdown passes compared to Geno’s average of 20 in the past two seasons.

As hard as this will be to believe, this is not an attempt to dump on Geno after the fact. There’s no reason to do that. Who cares? That part of it — “how good or bad is Geno?” — is in the past and has no bearing on the present moment… even if Smith made it a point to let people know that the Seahawks “disrespected” him by not agreeing to his contract demands.

A quarterback who is still turning accountability into a joke after he demanded a raise — which the Raiders gave him in the form of ~$60 million guaranteed — and is on the verge of getting the one coach who believes in him fired….AGAIN!

I’m not out to blame anyone for Seattle’s losses of yesteryear, I’m just defending the Seahawks of the right now because they are ACTUALLY a great organization. That’s not homerism because I would say that about the Seahawks even if I was a Raiders fan. If the Seahawks were a bad organization, I would write that they are a bad organization.

Bringing up evidence that the Seahawks actually elevate players and coaches to perform their best shouldn’t be banned just because it means having to unearth old tweets that so righteously criticized the franchise for “making Geno look bad” every time he looked bad. Maybe he was just bad for those games.

Why are they allowed to criticize the Seahawks every time the quarterback throws an interception but we aren’t allowed to defend the team when the quarterback throws an interception…for a different team?

I get it, he really loved it in Seattle:

And he’s always been consistent:

I mean, I see no lies in this statement:

In his final season with the Seahawks, Geno Smith said he treated it like his last season with the Seahawks. I mean, that’s real. That’s what he really said.

“I think that’s a fair question to ask anybody,” Smith said. “They didn’t have a definitive answer. ... It was kind of up in the air. And so for me, going into the [2024] season, I was like, ‘OK, well, this may be my last season here.’ I literally had a playlist called ‘The Last Dance.’ I wanted to go out there and give it my all for my teammates.”

Instead of going into 2024 with the mindset to play out his contract (which ran through 2025) or to not worry about his future and focus on the next game, instead of believing he would play so good that he would retire with the Seahawks, Geno went into it like he had senioritis. Is it any coincidence that his QBR dropped by 10 points compared to his first two seasons with the only team that showed confidence in him after his career tanked?

Prior to padding his stats in a meaningless season finale against the Rams after Seattle had been eliminated from playoff contention, Smith had 17 touchdowns and 15 interceptions with one of the lowest Y/A in the league. In sealing his third consecutive season without a playoff win, Smith demanded a new contract and therefore he was traded; I believe that the demand was fueled by Twitter.

Players NEED to listen to the haters.

If you don’t listen to “the haters”, then you’re not accountable for anything (see above quote by Geno himself) and the only thing you’re left with is an echo chamber of support so overwhelming that the only logical conclusion must be: “I’m not respected enough by my own organization.”

If you are in a respectable organization, they will tell you how good you are. Geno was in a respectable organization and now he’s not. He has the money but he’s lost the support. Is that fulfilling?

“Aren’t the Seahawks a better TEAM now though?”

Yeah it’s okay to say that the Seahawks upgraded the offense by making a change at offensive coordinator and Schneider making two bold player decisions above all others, one being to trade DK Metcalf and the other is taking Grey Zabel in the first round.

All that being said, the offense is more similar to 2024 than we might assume (the major changes are QB, LG, WR shifting, and upgrade AJ Barner) and in general the interior of the offensive line is still kind of bad. Zabel is both super talented and a rookie making rookie mistakes every week. Anthony Bradford is still really bad. The center position is serviceable. Abe Lucas is healthy but he did play half of last season too.

Even if you believe that the Seahawks were always going to be a better outfit for a quarterback this year, not just Sam Darnold, remember that Geno didn’t want to wear it. He’d been planning his exit for months.

He wanted to be somewhere that respected him. Like…the Las Vegas Raiders.

(Clip: Raiders fans mocking Geno Smith for his “blame it on me” quote.)

But that’s not the quote I’ll always remember. “I didn’t fit the aesthetic of the Seattle organization. The Raiders just fit me.” - Geno Smith.

The Raiders wrote him a check. He didn’t write back.

Seaside Joe 2452