Seahawks don't act like a team committed to Geno Smith

Seahawks' actions prove they like, but don't love Geno Smith as the long-term answer at QB: Seaside Joe 1866

Love Is Blind is a reality show on Netflix that documents “single” people who do a version of speed dating in which they can’t physically see the other person until after they propose and accept marriage. Given those conditions it would be remarkable if even one marriage worked out, but apparently through six seasons there are eight couples who claim to still be happily married. I have one simple solution to make that success rate higher than Geno Smith’s completion percentage:

Take the experiment off of TV.

If you don’t watch Love Is Blind because you think it’s a “dating show”, let me reassure you that’s not what it is but if you like dating shows then it works as that too:

Love Is Blind is an endurance test for fame seekers.

“What happens when you make people extremely uncomfortable (or ‘uncomfy’) and push their limits on how far they’re willing to go for 15 minutes of fame?”

I almost gave up on Love Is Blind entirely, but season six was so entertaining and gave us arguably the worst/best couple in TV history: Chelsea and Jimmy.

Jimmy and Chelsea probably suffer less from the fame seeking aspect as some co-stars, their problems seem to be more deeply rooted in horrible communication, but each of them are so clearly tortured from the moment that they meet in-person that as a viewer you start screaming at the television, “PLEASE break up! PLEASE! STOP THIS!” Why are they forcing themselves to keep trying when 99.9% of non-TV couples would have ended the same level of relationship with a text message or a ghosting? Because they are on TV.

The fact is that despite getting engaged, most people who propose or accept marriage on Love Is Blind are not seriously committed to one another. They’re trying to get through as many steps as they can stomach to guarantee they get air time on the show—so that they can promote their brand or company, start a podcast, gain Instagram followers, increase their dating credit score—and lying through their teeth as often as they need to, even going as far as saying “I love you” and getting engaged.

The majority of people on Love Is Blind who get engaged are only committed to their own self-interests and not to a partner, which is why we’ve seen them cheat, lie, have secret girlfriends who they were already with when they went on the show, and even get married to different contestants than the one they picked in the pods. I mean, this is the show in a nutshell:

If you took the entire show concept off of TV and did it in real life—which I’m sure those companies exist now—I can’t imagine you’d run into those same commitment problems. You’ll probably always have a high rate of breakups when you force people to make a marriage decision within 10 days of meeting each other, but at least you’re weeding out all the people who only want to be on TV and that’s like 90% of the cast.

The people who are there to make a genuine commitment to someone else and not the ones who are only there so that they can have more dating options when the show airs, that’s who you should expect to have marriage success.

Ever since Russell Wilson was traded to the Denver Broncos and Geno Smith was named the starter in 2022, the Seattle Seahawks have done more looking than settling. Despite giving him a three-year deal in 2023 and then making a clear financial commitment to Geno for the 2024 season, the Seahawks haven’t disguised their intentions to replace him.

That’s not something you could say about every team and every quarterback of a similar age, value, and financial situation. Seattle could have made it obvious that the franchise thinks as highly of Geno as the Falcons think of Kirk Cousins, a quarterback who is two years older, coming off of a torn Achilles, and if we’re being completely fair seems to be playing about as well as Geno over the past two years.

But the Falcons don’t seem to be eyeing every quarterback in the draft, as the Seahawks are doing, despite Atlanta being much higher in the order than Seattle.

“That’s because the Falcons just made a huge financial commitment to Cousins.”

Exactly. They see 36-year-old Kirk Cousins as the present and the future, even if that’s just three or four years. Everything the Seahawks have done at quarterback in the past two years appears to be saying that Geno Smith is like, you know, the present-ish, we’ll see, I think this is going so great right now and I think the world of you and I know that whatever happens between us you’ll make some team so happy because you are like LITERALLY the best guy I’ve ever met…but definitely not the future.

In Love Is Blind terms, the Seahawks spent hours talking through a wall (2022 QB competition), then got down on one knee behind a wall (a bottom-of-the-market starting QB contract in 2023), and now they’re trying on dresses/tuxes (guaranteeing his 2024 salary and paying his roster bonus). But they’ll never get to the alter and say, “I do”. It’s all just waiting out the “uncomfiness” for as long as possible while they accumulate backup plans. And the Seahawks seem to have a full DM inbox at quarterback.

The Seahawks are not committed to Geno Smith and even if they keep up the charade for another season, this is bound to end in a reunion show meltdown.

Backup Plan: Drew Lock→Sam Howell

A month before the Seahawks re-signed Geno Smith, they acquired Drew Lock in the Wilson trade and I believe that acquisition was made with the intention to get a starting quarterback. Just a year earlier, Jared Goff was essentially a “throw-in” to the Matthew Stafford trade and he soon proved as capable of winning games at the position as all but maybe 10-12 QBs in the world. He may even have a brighter future than Stafford given the age difference. I know that Goff was a number one pick, a Super Bowl starter, and he had a lot more experience than Lock, but he was still basically a salary dump only moved so that the Rams had a place for Stafford.

Consider that Lock was traded before the 2022 draft, arguably the worst quarterback class of modern times. In John Schneider’s opinion, Lock was as good or better of a prospect as any quarterback in the draft and maybe hadn’t lost that much value from being an early second round pick in 2019.

When I wrote a retrospective of the 2019 draft last year, I was reminded that many people expected the Giants to pick Lock and not Daniel Jones in the top-10. Just imagine if an NFL team had picked Lock in the first round, most wouldn’t have scoffed at the idea of another team trading for him as a reclamation project; look no further than the perception that Sam Darnold can be a capable starter for the Minnesota Vikings.

He’s never been a capable starter before but as a former top-3 pick it’s like, “Yeah, sixth time’s a charm.”

I was convinced that the Seahawks were pulling for Lock to beat Geno in the QB competition—it would certainly benefit Seattle if the player who is seven years younger than the other won the job—and both John and Pete Carroll have insisted that he almost did were it not for a positive test during the pandemic that stripped away his chance at a preseason start. Geno never gave the team a chance to look at Lock in 2022, but over his two starts in 2023 I would say that Lock played as well in his audition as Geno did as Wilson’s backup for three games in 2021.

But there’s a difference between ‘good enough’ and ‘good', so the Seahawks were not incentivized to re-sign Drew Lock and cut Geno Smith because if they’re not getting an upgrade then why rock the boat? Especially when an opportunity presents itself to get a quarterback who is younger, cheaper, and being traded for less than what he’s probably worth because the team feels it has to make room for his replacement in the draft?

Trading for Sam Howell is the updated version of trading for Lock. He’s four years younger than Lock, signed for two more years on a rookie contract, and though Howell was a fifth round pick he was certainly being talked about as a future first rounder at the beginning of his college career at UNC. That’s why I wrote that Howell is arguably the best bargain acquisition of the offseason. For any team.

In the same way that trading for Drew Lock represented for Schneider an opportunity to get a QB project who is probably better than 95% of prospects in that draft class, Howell is a QB project who is probably as good or better than 90% of the prospects in 2024. When you eliminate the QBs who the Seahawks have zero chance of selecting—Caleb Williams, Jayden Daniels, Drake Maye, and possibly J.J. McCarthy, if not more than four—then Howell has maybe as much upside and “comfiness” as any 2024 rookie.

You can’t even claim that age is a negative: Howell is several months younger than Michael Penix and Bo Nix. He is three months older than Jayden Daniels.

Is it better to struggle with an NFL team than to succeed against college competition when you’re surrounded by future NFL players? On one hand, Howell struggled last year. On the other, he had one of the worst coaching staffs and supporting casts in the league; how would Howell have played last year if he was playing at Washington or LSU? I bet he would have been pretty good, he might have even won the Heisman.

It is easy to dismiss trading for Howell as merely securing a backup to replace Lock, which definitely played a part in Schneider’s decision to make the move, but it would benefit the organization in a myriad of ways for the 23-year-old to play so well in training camp and preseason that the Seahawks feel they have options. Who can say that Howell won’t have the same “a-ha” moment with offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb that Goff had with Ben Johnson; or Cousins had with Kevin O’Connell; or Baker Mayfield had with Dave Canales; or Brock Purdy had with Kyle Shanahan?

It isn’t common for QBs to have dramatic breakouts by changing teams or coordinators, but it does happen. And if it doesn’t, the Seahawks haven’t slowed down their meetings with QB draft prospects anyway.

I’ve picked three winners for the ‘W’ sunglasses + Seahawks care package and I have two more to go. By the way, if you’re TIM O’D…, you won and I sent you an email! If you want to help support Seaside Joe and become a premium subscriber, you can do so by clicking here or clicking this button:

Seahawks pre-draft QB meetings

The Seahawks had South Carolina QB Spencer Rattler in Seattle on Monday for a pre-draft meeting, a significant show of interest for a team that already has Geno Smith and Sam Howell. Even if the Seahawks don’t draft a quarterback this year, which is how 11 of 13 drafts have gone under Schneider—zero quarterback taken—these meetings aren’t a smokescreen.

Not only have the Seahawks had some contact, even if minor, with Drake Maye, Jayden Daniels, and J.J. McCarthy, they obviously have a strong connection to Penix, have met with Nix, and are now linked to Rattler. Including Michael Pratt, another reported pre-draft meeting, that’s essentially the top-SEVEN quarterbacks in the 2024 class behind Caleb Williams. This is from the NFLMockDraftDatabase QB big board:

The Seahawks meeting with every top QB prospect? Where have we heard that before? Oh yeah: The Seahawks met with every top QB prospect last year, which essentially means that the team that paid Geno “$100 million” has flirted with at least a dozen potential draft replacements in the past 13 months since the extension. That’s not a very firm commitment and it’s not being done to get other teams off of the scent of wanting to pick a prospect at a different position.

Though Seattle didn’t choose any quarterbacks last year until signing Holton Ahlers as an undrafted free agent, and though the team might not draft any QBs this year and instead sign someone like John Rhys Plumlee, it’s not for lack of trying: John Schneider is just waiting to be swept off his feet by a prospect who is here for the right reasons.

And I don’t believe that interest in Daniels, Maye, and McCarthy is necessarily ‘due diligence’ either; my McCarthy skepticism set aside for now, the Seahawks may be expecting one of the non-Caleb top-four players to fall within striking distance of a trade. If the Seahawks get an opportunity to acquire a quarterback who Schneider feels could be the next Josh Allen or Patrick Mahomes, he will take it. Something I wrote about before last year’s draft too.

Research on the QBs expected to be draftable—Penix, Nix, Rattler, Pratt—could be double checking their homework to make sure they’re not making a mistake by overlooking any of these options.

But they’re CLEARLY looking, which isn’t what you’d say about all teams with similar situations at quarterback.

Geno’s Future

The Seahawks stand to gain $25 million in 2025 cash/cap if they release or trade Geno Smith after the season. If Seattle gets into a situation similar to 2012, when they entered camp with Matt Flynn, Tarvaris Jackson, and Russell Wilson, it is even possible that the Seahawks are able to find a home for Geno before or during the 2024 season. In this case, Geno would be Jackson (I guess), Howell would be Flynn, and a rookie—Rattler is viewed as being about a third round pick—would be Wilson. As unlikely as it is that any rookie QB is going to look as good in preseason/camp as Wilson did in 2012, adding any notable third option would clearly indicate that the Seahawks aren’t committed to their first option.

Are the Seattle Seahawks kicking Geno Smith out the door as soon as possible? No, because if that were the case they should have released him in February and saved the cap space instead of letting him reach his guarantee deadline. But every action indicates that the Seahawks are checking their phone every five minutes to see if they’ve got any messages from other quarterbacks who they might see a better future with over Geno.

That’s their level of commitment and if reality TV has taught me anything, it’s that that’s the same as no commitment.