Vision Board: Seahawks-Cardinals

What are your visions (predictions) for Week 7? Seaside Joe 1693

Oct 21, 2023

∙ Paid

Hold Ja’Marr Chase to 70 yards, 0 TD

Defense holds CIN to season-low rushing yards, 4 sacks, under 20 points

Walker, Charbonnet combine for 200+ rushing yards, 6 YPC

The good news is that I’m giving myself two out of three this week. Though Chase finished with 80 yards, he was held to six catches on 13 targets and reportedly only one catch and three yards came against Devon Witherspoon. I certainly hoped Witherspoon would be a Defensive Rookie of the Year candidate and thought it possible, but he’s been even better than expected.

The Seahawks sacked Joe Burrow three times and held Cincinnati to 17 points and a season-low 46 rushing yards. I’m taking my W.

The most ambitious vision was 200 rushing yards but Seattle only managed 62 yards from Ken Walker and five from Zach Charbonnet. It’s difficult to get 200 rushing yards anyway and Walker had a really good game, but what’s maybe a little frustrating is that it seemed as though he had one or two opportunities to actually pop off extremely long gains and didn’t find the wiggle this time.

I was right on 6-of-12 visions going into Week 6, so now I stand at:

8/15 for the season

This week brings the 1-5 Arizona Cardinals, but also quite a bit of fear on my end.

Though the Cardinals were two of Seattle’s “easier” wins of 2022 (if the NFC West had replaced the Cardinals with a better team, would the Seahawks have been 8-9 last season?), Arizona’s advantages include the element of the unknown with a brand new coaching staff and one of the top-ranked rushing attacks in the NFL. The Cardinals have rushed for at least 130 yards in four of their last five, including last week’s loss to the Rams without the injured James Conner.

Arizona ranks second in yards per carry and sixth in rushing yards.

But literally beyond Arizona’s strengths and weaknesses, I see the Cleveland Browns and the “throwback game” in Week 8. I know that Pete Carroll is not going to let his team fall for a trap game and it only matters where the Seahawks heads are at, not mine and yours.

However, following such a pitiful performance by the offense against the Bengals in Week 7 and needing to strut their stuff, the pressure is on for Geno Smith and the boys and look great against the Cardinals prior to facing a Browns defense that has only given up seven touchdowns all season…and four of those belong to one player: Lamar Jackson.

I’m not in the mood for a bad game against the Arizona Cardinals…but this isn’t a mood ring, it’s a vision board. Here are three Visions for Week 7 and since we just had a fantastic review of last week’s loss (must click/watch) via The QB School, let’s use notable school scenes from movie history as the theme.

Seahawks passing offense chooses to LIVE

Ms. Dangerous Minds writes “We want to die” on the chalkboard
“Is that true?”
“If we want to die? Shit no. We want you to die. If it was between you and us? Hell yeah.”

The Seahawks rank third in turnovers this season, largely thanks to not fumbling yet, but now it feels like Geno Smith is being too risk averse to have success. Geno has turned down open receivers, including one who is the fifth-highest paid at his position in the NFL and one who is a first round rookie, for potential touchdowns.

That feels like avoiding death instead of living life…and I just don’t think that Seattle is going to make the playoffs if the offense continues to turn down potential touchdowns out of fear of interceptions; taking a sack or throwing it out of bounds or going for the easy one-yard checkdown on third down can sometimes be as bad as a turnover.

Luckily for Geno and the Seahawks offense, playing the Arizona Cardinals should be an opportunity to pad your stats, especially given the eight-game gauntlet that follows this Sunday.

I see this as a stat padding opportunity, even though safety Budda Baker will return and play his first game for the Cardinals since Week 1.

The Vision: Geno Smith throws 3 touchdowns

Some people—not you, the person reading this and having internal thoughts “Is he talking to me???”, not you—but some people have taken it personally when I write an objective analysis that Geno Smith isn’t that good of a quarterback. There’s nothing personal about how I write about Geno and it would sure benefit me a lot more if Geno was GREAT than if Geno was MID.

Nobody wrote more positive things about Russell Wilson from 2012-2022 than I did and yet do you know how our relationship started? By me writing over and over again in the summer of his first year that Wilson would never be a full-time starter and that fans should stop overrating a 5’10 third round pick.

If I was making this personal, why would I have written so many nice things about Wilson over a decade of him proving me absolutely, 100% wrong?

Seriously, give me a break. Not you—you would never!—but that person.

What do I stand to lose if Geno is great? What do I stand to gain if Geno is mid? The answer to both questions is: NOTHING. The weirdest part for me is that every time I write about Geno after a bad game, I don’t expect any backlash. I’m like, “We all saw the same thing, right?” Apparently not. And that’s okay, I love seeing things from different perspectives.

Just remember that the guy that “that person” is mad at, me, wrote in June that Geno Smith could have a Matt Ryan-like MVP type of season if all went well. That was Seaside Joe who said that!

To think that I would go into games hoping to see Geno play poorly, what’s the logic behind that belief? There isn’t any because when the Seahawks score a touchdown, I go “Yay” and when the Seahawks don’t score at all, I go “boo”. There’s fandom boiled down to the root…maybe that’s why it’s called “rooting”.

In my opinion—and this is only my opinion, hardly a fact—in 5-10 years when we talk about Geno Smith, we’re going to be saying, “Remember when people got so heated over Geno Smith?!?!” A fever dream that maybe only partially eclipses the eras of Tarvaris Jackson or Jon Kitna, two quarterbacks who were not all that bad!, perhaps inflated by the fact that now we live in the social media age.

Why so many Geno fans then? Well, besides being the starting quarterback and all the extracurricular benefits of that job, Geno was very productive through 13 games last season and averaged almost two touchdowns per contest: 25 TD, 8 INT, 106.8 rating through Week 14.

But in his last nine games: 10 TD, 6 INT, 87.3 rating.

Geno had 2 TD passes in 11 of his first 13 starts, but he’s only had 2 such performances in his last 9 starts.

That changes this week against a Cardinals defense that is at the start of a rebuild under new head coach Jonathan Gannon. Arizona has allowed 9 passing TDs and ranks 27th in net yards per pass attempt allowed. Though DK Metcalf is being called a game time decision, but Seattle is so deep with the supporting cast that Jaxon Smith-Njigba, Noah Fant, Jake Bobo, Colby Parkinson, Zach Charbonnet, Kenneth Walker, Will Dissly, and even Cody Thompson can help support Tyler Lockett in the mission to catch touchdowns.

There are no personal attacks of Geno Smith on the Seaside Joe newsletter. By all means, go be great Geno. My prediction is that Geno will look great against the Cardinals and all the people throwing insults at people like me for merely pointing out what I thought was obvious against the Bengals (and the Rams, and the Giants, and in the second half of last season) will hurl more insults and say “Wow, those people are so wrong, so stupid.”

And then the Seahawks will play the Browns next week.

That is the game I have been looking ahead to for weeks as the real test case, but until then…Squeeze every ounce of juice possible against the Cardinals.

Choose to live. Or you want to die.

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