Seahawks fans say how, when, and where they first became Seahawks fans

From Seattle to Sydney, What this Seahawks survey says about where Seahawks fans come from: Seaside Joe 1631

Not that there was ever a doubt, but I now have irrefutible proof that Seattle Seahawks fans, and specifically those who are Seaside Joe subscribers, are the most wholesome and honest people on the planet. Better yet, in the entire National Football League.

Seahawks-Cowboys preseason recap: The game as I see it and why Jaxon Smith-Njigba will be an instant NFL superstar

This week, I posted a five-question survey to find out where Seahawks fans are from and not just a geographic location, but an era and a reason for being a fan in the first place.

Not long after the newsletter went out, I asked Seaside Jay (the future Mrs. Seaside Joe, which means after she takes my name she’ll be Seaside Jay Joe) if she had read it and filled out the survey and she confirmed that she had. To give you some background, Jay did not know anything about football before we met and what she knows three years later is what she reads in this newsletter.

She is a fan as far as she is happy for me when the Seahawks do well.

When Jay told me that she had filled out the survey, she only had one question:

Seaside Jay: “That poll about ‘How long have you been a Seahawks fan’, is the last option meant to be a joke option?” (This is the answer: ‘I started following the Seahawks because of the 2009 Jim Mora team’)

Seaside Joe: “Yeah.”

Seaside Jay: “Okay, that’s what I figured. I chose that one.”

Jay knows who Pete Carroll is, of course, but couldn’t tell you the difference between Mike Holmgren and Matt Hasselbeck. Which is fine! I’m touched every time she reads the newsletter despite not being an NFL fan. I just want you to have the context for why she chose the Jim Mora option, which is that she correctly sensed it was a response for those who wish to goof.

Well, guess what, you all took this very seriously.

Out of 420 responses, only ONE PERSON chose “I started following the Seahawks because of the 2009 Jim Mora team”….Seaside Jay.

This is why soon we will be Seaside Jay Joe and Seaside Joe Jay.

Out of 420 responses, 419 of you didn’t choose Jim Mora, but here’s how you did answer:

• 33.8% of Seasiders have been following the Seahawks since the 1976 inception season. That makes one-third of you fans since the beginning!

• 24% of you have been fans since shortly after that, around the Chuck Knox eighties era.

• 17.6% of you became fans during the Pete Carroll/LOB era.

• 13.8% of Seahawks fans here have been following since the 2000s/Holmgren era.

• 9% gave the fifth-most common answer, which is following since the nineties/Cortez Kennedy era.

• Just 1.4% of you said that you’re a very recent Seahawks fan. (Brand new fans are always welcome)

• And 0.2% goofed around.

Remember around the time that the Seahawks won the Super Bowl that fans of other teams would say for a while after that, “You’re bandwagon, you haven’t been following the Seahawks for very long”?

Well, this seems like irrefutible proof to the contrary: 34% since 1976, 24% since the eighties, and 9% since the nineties adds up to about 67% of the Seahawks fans we know around here following the team for at least about 30 years. Not even I started following until the late-nineties.

I often say that the collective knowledge of the people who read what I write about the Seahawks will heavily outweigh what I know about the Seahawks, and the fact that two-thirds of you have been following the team longer than I have is more proof of why I lean on the community for answers and insights.

Here is how you answered the other four questions in the survey. There were so many responses in the Longest Yard Contest, that I’ll need to get back to you for a winner there but what I can tell you (and you’ll soon see) is that this community stretches all over the globe.

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Two-thirds of you became Seahawks fans for geographic reasons

(Apologies to anyone out there who isn’t a fan of pie charts. I respect your dislike for pies, this is just what Google Forms gave me and I’m short on time to re-do it as a graph.)

But barely any of you live in Seattle and most don’t live in Washington

I became a Seahawks fan for geographic reasons and now I live in California, so I can relate to most of you, it seems.

Only 5% of voters, the least-common answer, live in Seattle. “Okay, but surely a lot of people just don’t live in the city of Seattle but live nearby.”

Well, only 15% of Seahawks fans in this poll live near Seattle. That’s 20% in the Seattle-area currently. Sandwiched in between those two answers, 12.6% of fans here live in Washington but not near Seattle.

What’s most interesting though is that just over 67% of you who voted do not live in Washington State: 44% live in another state, while 23.1% do not live in America.

Right now there are 231 comments (many of them are mine, but over 170 aren’t) in the original article and I wish I could highlight a bunch of them but there are actually SO MANY great stories that I don’t want to single a few out and leave behind a bunch of awesome ones. I recommend going into the comments and browsing if you have interest in doing so this weekend.

Nobody follows the Seahawks out of spite

Again, nobody took a bite on the semi-joke answer, there were zero answers for “spite”. (Some people do follow sports teams out of spite.) I do think that with almost 20% voting “other” that there could be opportunities to find out what options I could have put in there instead of spite. Let me know in the comments if you have an other to share.

Almost half voted location, as expected, with the other second-most popular answer being that “I liked a certain Seahawks team and just kept following them.” In the comments of the original article though, I saw a lot of replies crediting the uniforms, helmets, and team colors, which got just 3% of the vote.

Seaside Joe group attendance game meetup?

About 40% of you have been to a game in Seattle, but nowhere else, while a quarter of Seasiders haven’t been to a game before. And one-out-of-five voted that they have been to games in and away from Seattle.

A lucky 32 people (7.6%) said that they’ve been to Seahawks games in at least five different stadiums. I haven’t been to Seahawks games in five stadiums, but when I first became a full-time writer in 2014, I went to NFL games in Dallas, Jacksonville, Washington, D.C., Buffalo, Chicago, Denver, and Seattle within a single month. And I haven’t really gone to many games since then.

That was pretty much enough.

(Best non-Seahawks stadium: Mile High. Worst: FedEx.)

I’ll post the longest yard winner when I find out and be sure to come back for the post-game “As I See It” on Seahawks-Cowboys on Saturday night. Tell other Seahawks fans about Seaside Joe so they don’t miss out on the best place for Seahawks fans.

Only $5 per month or $55 for an entire year of Seaside Joe, that’s going to be over 365 daily articles and over 500 total articles in the next 12 months!