Seahawks fans excited for the "New" "Mike Macdonald" "Witherspoon" "Defense"

Part 2 of our most interesting Seahawks Fan Survey yet: Seaside Joe 1997

Aug 19, 2024

The Seattle Seahawks have played two preseason games since I posted part one of the fan survey results that I started to gather at the end of July, so that distracted me from finalizing your answers to a 12-question (x3 surveys) poll that was divided based on YOUR expectations:

The “Control Group”, which is for fans who think the Seahawks will win between 8-10 games.

The “Test Group”, for the most optimistic fans, those who expect 11+ wins.

And the “Seeds of Doubt Group”, for those who are skeptical until they see the results on the field in the regular season and are keeping expectations low, specifically under 8 wins.

Now I can finally squeeze in the rest of your answers. Read part one here, in which we talked about how your expectations for Geno Smith and Mike Macdonald specifically impact Seattle’s chances of winning games in 2024.

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In the first newsletter about the survey, I asked for your ideas on how to share all of the word/phrase answers that I collected and it was suggested Super Seasider Scott M brought up the idea of a word cloud generator. Great idea, Scott!

To give you an example of how that could help us better understand our fellow Seahawks fans, let’s go back to the topic of Geno Smith. The “seeds of doubt” word cloud for Geno looks like this:

Seeds of Doubt sees Geno as a “good enough, capable bridge QB”. Let’s go to the other side of the pond then and compare that to the test group, those expecting 11+ wins said this about Geno:

The Seahawks fans with the most positive outlook on the 2024 season seems to put Geno in a light more like this: A “good leader, better than you think, maybe even great”. A word like “underrated” comes up quite a lot here, and it didn’t seem to come up even once for the other group.

As I wrote in part one, the word “solid” seems to run the gamut here for Geno and the control group, as you can imagine, is a little bit lower on him than the test group, although basically siding with him as a solid quarterback who can get the job done for now. If these word clouds make you think of anything else you want to add about Geno’s present situation, share it in the comments:

Control Group (8-10 wins) Word Cloud:

Of course, if everyone had put the same spelling of “Macdonald”, then his name would be the biggest word here, but no word came up as often as “new” in any of the three surveys. Which I maybe only find interesting for one reason:

If the Seahawks had not fired Pete Carrol, the word new would not have even been mentioned once, and in fact we might be seeing topics like ‘old” and “stale” quite often. “New” doesn’t always mean “better”, but it definitely means new. And though they actually have most of the same personnel as last season, the perception of the team is that it’s a new version of the Seahawks because all but one member of the coaching staff has been replaced.

The name “McDonald” came up more often than “Macdonald” in two of three surveys, so Mike Mac is going to have some work to do to get his last name in headlines so that nobody will forget it. Just remember that it’s “Mac”, as in Mac from the movie Mac and Me.

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Seeds of Doubt (<8 wins) Word Cloud:

There’s nothing really negative here for the seeds of doubt group, it’s a lot of the same as even the most optimistic Seahawks fans. I guess the only word that couold have a negative connotation is “blood”? Even that could be positive, pun intended.

We see the words “coaching nobody understood” next to each other, which is also how Macdonald and Ryan Grubb plan to surprise opposing teams this season.

Let’s wrap up the survey results in rapid fire mode

I don’t think I asked a very relevant question to the current moment when I put “Do Seahawks need to pull of a midseason trade?” so my critique of myself is to save that one for October. All three surveys were about the same: About two-thirds of your say “No”, the other third said “Maybe”, and a few of you answered “Yes”. That was a bad question to ask, so I’ll own that.

How many Pro Bowl Seahawks?

My wordy question here mentioned that Seattle had 3 Pro Bowl players in 2021, 4 in 2022, and 6 in 2023. How many would there be in 2024?

Again, not my favorite question because a) the Pro Bowl, not that important, and b) Who knows what a good number even is? Really what I was attempting to get at is that great teams do need great players, usually about 7-8 of them, at least. Patrick Mahomes gets most of the attention in Kansas City, but the Chiefs also had two other probable Hall of Famers (Travis Kelce, Chris Jones) in the prime of their careers, All-Pros Trent McDuffie and Joe Thuney, Pro Bowl center Creed Humphrey, plus really good starters/stars like L’Jarius Sneed, George Karlaftis, and Nick Bolton.

In an ideal world, the 2024 Seahawks would have as many good-to-great players as the 2012 or 2013 Seahawks. The big differences here were between how many good players the Test Group thinks the Seahawks could have compared to how many the Seeds of Doub group thinks they have right now.

Seeds of Doubt (16% for 0-2, 0 answers for 8+)

The Control Group had the answers set at 60% for 3-5 Pro Bowlers and 36% for 6-7 Pro Bowlers, obviously leaving few people anywhere else. We could say that maybe the average here is that the Control Group sees about 5 Pro Bowlers on the team.

Test Group (1% for 0-2 Pro Bowlers, 12% for 8+ Pro Bowlers)

Regardless of the Pro Bowl’s meaningfulness, it’s hard to not have a great team if you have EIGHT Pro Bowl players in a single season. The 2005 Seahawks had seven Pro Bowlers, the 2013 Seahawks had six Pro Bowlers.

It is definitely easier and much more common to have 0-2 Pro Bowlers than it is to have 8+, which again, if that’s an error, I put that on me. Not you. I was the one who set the parameters, so I definitely overrated the possibility of 8+ Pro Bowl players on one roster. So as you can see 6-7 Pro Bowlers narrowly edged out 3-5 Pro Bowlers, so we could probably say that the optimistic group expects about 1 more Pro Bowl Seahawk than the Control Group does.

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Controlling the Control Group: General Annual Expectations

Finally, how does your optimism or skepticism this year compare to other years?

Question: “How would you GENERALLY describe your expectations going into a new season for the Seahawks?”

Control Group:

Seeds of Doubt:

Test Group:

I like this question (but not my follow-up, “How does this year’s expectations compare to your general expectations?” because the survey answers were mostly the same as the first part of the question) because we can clearly see a line drawn in the sand here: The skeptical fans are usually skeptical, the optimistic fans are usually optimistic, and the fans in the middle are usually in the middle.

Perhaps what we learned from this survey is that around this time of year, a) most fans are guarded optimists, then about b) half as many people as that are super optimistic, and then c) a small percentage of Seahawks fans (this might be different for Jaguars fans or Browns fans) are not going to believe the team is good until they see it happen for a prolonged period of time in the regular season. As I said in part one, this would be an even more interesting test to run in the middle of the season, probably especially if Macdonald has some unfortunate growing pains to start his Seahawks career.

Even if you’re not in the Optimistic Group today, at least we know that’s where all of us want to be by the end of the year.

Seaside Joe