Expectations for Geno Smith, Mike Macdonald: Seahawks fans answer

Seahawks fan expectations survey results, Part 1: Seaside Joe 1980

Last week, I posted three different surveys for Seahawks fans with the intention for each of you to choose ONE door to walk through so we can gauge how people with different expectations for win totals would have different expectations for other parts of the team:

Do you think the Seahawks will go 7-10 or worse?

Do you think the Seahawks will win between 8-10 games?

Do you think the Seahawks will win more than 10 games?

I find the results to be fascinating and a unique look into the souls of Seahawks fans that you won’t find anywhere else, and I’ve been running Seahawk fan surveys since the early 2010s. If I had simply asked for all of your expecations as a group, I don’t think we would learn NEARLY as much about Seahawks fans as we did by separating into sections based on overall win expectations:

By doing it this way, I already know from the start that 61.5% you expect the Seahawks to win between 8-10 games; 31.2% of you expect the Seahawks to win over 10 games; and 7.3% of you expect the Seahawks to win fewer than eight games.

Now that we know those answers, we can find out how you are different from people who have higher or lower expectations of the 2024 Seattle Seahawks than you do. Here is how I decided to define the groups:

Fans who voted 8-10 wins are the “Control Group” because this was by far the largest section: 271 of 440 people voted 8-10 wins

Fans who voted 11+ wins are the “Test Group” because based on how many people voted in each section, I think we can balance our control group against fans who have high expectations: 137 of 440 people voted 11+ wins

Fans who voted 7-10 or worse are the “Seeds of Doubt Group” because this was a really small group compared to the other two: 32 of 440 people voted fewer than 8 wins.

There are so many results to go over that I’m splitting the survey results into separate posts. In Part I, I’ll cover your expectations for Geno Smith, Mike Macdonald, and Mike Macdonald’s defense. If you think Seaside Joe earned your premium subscription ($5 per month, $55 per year) today, or just a free subscription, I appreciate it. You’re supporting a small mom-and-pop-and-Clark Seahawks newsletter business.

Geno Smith

If you are in the test group, you are 14x as likely to believe Geno Smith will be an MVP candidate. If you are in the control group, you’re almost 4x as likely to call Geno “fine”.

8-10 wins: 1% think he will be MVP candidate

11+ wins: 14% think he will be MVP candidate

8-10 wins: 53% think he’s Pro Bowl caliber/similar to last 2 years

11+ wins: 74% think he’s Pro Bowl/similar to last 2 years

One of the most interesting findings was seeing how tied expected team success is to expected QB success. I guess that IS expected, but there are plenty of other franchises (I think) where there would be a high opinion of the QB and a mid-opinion of the current team; for example, Justin Herbert could be an MVP candidate on a 10-7 Chargers team. Trevor Lawrence could be an MVP candidate on a 10-7 Jaguars team. (In Matt Ryan’s 2016 MVP season, the Falcons were just 11-5.)

Not a single person in the 11+ win ‘test group’ voted that Geno was worse than “Fine”, whereas 6.3% (a total of 17 fans) voted lower than “Fine” in the ‘control group’. But 19 fans in the test group voted Geno could be an MVP candidate, which is more than the number of fans who are low on Geno in the control group even though the control group is much larger. Where we really find the separation between the two groups though is in the section asking fans to describe Geno in one sentence or less:

Control group: “Adequate”, “Fine”, “Good”, “Mediocre”, “Journeyman”, “Great story, not a real solution”, “Above average”, “Inconsistent”, “Makes me nervous”, “Bridge”, “Serviceable”, and so on.

Don’t get me wrong, out of 271 answers there are people in there who LOVE Geno Smith too. But a search of the term “Solid” brings back 20 results, so I think that’s a fair description of how the 8-10 win group feels about Geno: He’s somewhere between average and solid. And then there are people who have strong feelings below and above that grade.

Test group: “Underrated”, “Better than people give him credit for”, “Top-10”, “Accomplished, proven, and invaluable team leader who can win The Big Game”, “New OC will work miracles” (noting the addition of Grubb came up a few times), “Top-6 QB this year”, “Consistent and unflappable”, “Geno is Rudy+Talent”, “Great”, and I did see the word “Elite” was used at least once.

Again, there are answers that fall below this in the “mediocre” range and I saw the word “Solid” just about as often as I saw it in the control group. But there’s a very clear line here where this group had huge compliments for Geno that the other group simply didn’t have for him or if they did, it was rare.

Someone broke the rules and wrote more than one sentence, but I guess sometimes you should break the rules because I’m sharing it:

“We don't need or want him to win the Super Bowl for us. Point guard, great value, win with defense, running the ball, spreading the ball around on offense with a balanced attack. I'm all for Geno and I don't think we need to overpay for one player if the team isn't good enough. It's a team sport and too much emphasis is being put on the quarterback to carry teams.”

I feel like that’s a paragraph that fans in both groups can mostly agree with.

And the ‘seeds of doubt’ group? Maybe better than you think.

Out of 440 surveys TOTAL, only 3 fans think that Geno Smith is ‘benchable’. And 2 of those came from the control group! The seeds of doubt group is half in favor of calling Geno ‘fine’, while the other half is split between being as good as he was the last two years and being “not good, but not benchable”.

I wonder to what degree these groups are being swayed by the fact that Sam Howell is the current backup. If the Seahawks had drafted Michael Penix, Jr. (not that they could have, but in a universe where they could have), how many people would already be curious about making a switch before the preseason has even started? It’s like right now, Geno is the grass on the top of this picture and Howell is on the bottom, but what side would Geno be on if his backup was Penix or J.J. McCarthy?

As I wrote before the draft, I’m all for sitting a rookie quarterback for the entire year and having that level of patience in development. However, the issue is that any time the ‘bridge’ quarterback has one bad half of one game, the next guy starts to look awfully tempting. That next guy being Howell, unless he has a really exciting preseason, is great news for ‘24 Geno.

Mike Macdonald

You are 160% more likely to expect an “A” for Macdonald’s first season if you think the Seahawks will win 11+ games, and half as likely to expect a “B”.

8-10 wins: 25% expect an ‘A’, 70% expect a ‘B’

11+ wins: 65% expect an ‘A’, 34% expect a ‘B’

I did not expect something as simple as the difference between an A and a B to look so dramatic in a pie chart, but it does feel that way. I also am—this is just a personal opinion/observation, not a judgment—surprised that more people in general don’t think that Macdonald will get an A. Just because the reaction to him being hired was so positive, I assumed most people were ready to give him an “A” even if Seattle goes 6-11. And this survey went out before my “Success is the only option” article was posted.

Seeds of doubt group mostly in step with control group

The ‘less than 8 wins’ group had a similar rate of B scores as the control group, but only one person said “A” and this is where we have the only two people out of 440 to vote “D”. However, the big difference is the potential for a C grade, as 25% here said that was expected, whereas only 5% voted that way in the control group and just one person (.7%) voted that way in the test group. Of course, Macdonald might have more pressure on him to fix the defense this season than to win games.

Seahawks 2024 defense

8-10 wins: 30% expect top-10 defense (2% top-5)

11+ wins: 62% expect top-10 defense (10% top-5)

< 8 wins: 3% expect top-10 defense (0 top-5)

Control group:

Test group:

First and foremost, I want to make it clear that I do not know what it means to be a “top-10” defense. Seriously. Are we talking about points allowed? Yards? Yards per play? EPA/play? Even if you define for me what a top-10 defense is, like “It’s EPA”, then I would next ask: Okay, but when? Every week? At the start of the season but not the end (2023 Eagles)? Against top-10 offensive teams or just against bottom-10 offensive teams?

I think the concept of being in a range of quality is more abstract than we talk about, but for the purposes of this survey to me, this is just a gut feeling. In the same way that some people know in their gut that Geno is a top-10 QB—which can mean SO MANY THINGS—that’s what I’m really driving at here.

That being said, I can confidently say that the Seahawks were not a top-10 defense in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, or 2023. I think in 2017 and 2018, the Seahawks might have been knocking on that door, but would not have been in most people’s top-10. We probably have to go back to 2016 for the last time that most people agreed the Seahwks had a top-10 defense. That was eight seasons ago.

Hence, most of you seem perfectly happy with the middle ground: If the Seahawks defense can climb out of the basement, that’s good enough!

If you were in the test group, you might just find the idea of a 9th-best defense being in reach, which I personally think is totally fair. And despite Seattle’s really horrific defensive performances in the last five-ish years, almost nobody here voted outside of the top-20. Well, almost nobody in those two groups.

The seeds of doubt want proof in its pudding

0 of 440 fans expect bottom-5, but almost one-third of the seeds of doubt see 20-27 as being the expectation. Two-thirds—same as control—voted for an average defense. And one fan thinks that the Seahawks will go 7-10 or worse in spite of a defense ranked 6-10, which could be the case. I don’t think that’s super unreasonable.

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