Why Seahawks won't trade for Quinnen Williams

Same old story: Guy goes to Twitter, guy wastes his time and your time, and nobody is better for it: Seaside Joe 1535

The real world value of athletes using “social media negotiating tactics” can be summed up as simply as the first two words of the phrase: “Social media.” I tweeted on a daily basis for nine years and probably devoted at least 40 hours per week to that website, and as bad as I am at self-accounting, there is no doubting the total amount I was paid for that work:

Divide by…

Carry the one…

Pay taxes on this, that, and the other thing…

Final tally: $0.

If a disgruntled athlete removes team from their bio as a strategy or tweets that they’re open for business, in my opinion they are having no impact on negotiations for a new contract and at the same time adding no value to the Internet except for spreading rumors that lead to nowhere 99-percent of the time. Like most content that is eating up hard drive space and bandwidth, it is merely “Internet litter”. The latest culprit of this flawed strategy is Jets defensive tackle Quinnen Williams and now Williams has fans of other teams, including the beef-needy Seahawks, believing he might be on the move. Like Lamar “I’ve demanded a trade from the Ravens” Jackson, Williams is not going anywhere.

Playing his next card on Twitter isn’t going to have an impact on his future and the proof is in the tweeting.

Monday Bonus Article: Seahawks 2023 practice squad roster projection!

How Twitter scams its own writers and readers

I’m going to do “a classic Seaside Joe rant against Twitter,” so if that doesn’t interest you, I encourage scrolling down to the “Quinnen Williams Chapter” section and reading ahead. That will be more football-related, while this part is football journalism-related.

Twitter is known as a “microblogging service”, which is a fancy term for “Getting writers to write without having to pay them for providing the actual content that drives hundreds of millions of people to the website which allows the site to then sell ads (about 25% of your timeline) that make up the rest of the website and to also sell user information and call them “the product” instead of treating them as customers.”

If I had been the founder of Twitter, I would have also gone with “microblogging”.

Now someone could go back and read all 100,000 of my tweets and say, “Damn, I don’t know, Ken. This timeline is kinda weak! I wouldn’t think you should be paid more than one-tenth of one-cent for each of them.”

To which I would say, “Great. Then Twitter owes me $100.”

Surely even if my Twitter account was the worst of the worst, we could all agree that some people on there are doing enough right to justify being paid a penny per tweet or more. If you’re a microblogging service, couldn’t you just as easily be a micropayment service? Call it “The Superman III Strategy.”

When you subscribe to Seaside Joe, everything you read here was created by Seaside Joe, except for what you get in our awesome community section.

When you go to Twitter, nothing was created by Twitter. Except for the platform itself, which is under constant complaints of bad design, poor management, flawed strategy, and fake numbers to “juice” the assumed popularity of a tweet, video, account, or the entire site because that’s how they raise the price of ads.

I know that if you’re reading this then you’re probably subscribed to Seaside Joe and therefore a) know how I feel about social media and b) have higher odds of being in agreement with me already, although that is not a prerequisite to being a reader of Seaside Joe.

We can disagree!

You can also be tired of hearing my rants against Twitter but every time I reminded of its existence—which in today’s article shows you again how hand-in-hand it is with having to report on the NFL—I am brought back to the same place. Lately, when I read a tweet, it’s been the same question I ask myself:

“Why are you tweeting?”

Even when a reporter for a major newspaper, network, or website shares news I have to ask myself, “Why tweet this?”

If Bob Condotta or Gregg Bell or another mainstream reporter tweets out Seahawks news and reports—often not breaking, exclusive news but widespread updates that could be found anywhere—I keep asking myself why they do that. I understand why it benefits ME and YOU, but how does it benefit THEM?

They aren’t paid by Twitter if they get retweeted or become more popular. They don’t drive more people to their respective company websites either, as studies have consistently shown that the majority of links never get clicked. Not even one time.

Your content might go viral, but it also might never get read. Turns out a majority of the content shared on Twitter (59 percent) never gets clicked on, according to a recent study by Columbia University and the French National Institute.

Their study looked at a month’s worth of visits to five popular news sites (BBC, Huffington Post, CNN, New York Times, and Fox News). The researchers discovered that 2.8 million shares on Twitter drove 9.6 million visits to 59,000 pages – and a poor correlation between social shares and views.

Essentially this means that having a large number of Twitter shares doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll get tons of traffic. No surprise there – a lot of people share links without ever clicking.

People hate clicking links. In fact, if you even attempt to write something that entices you to click your link so that you can have a job, they call it “clickbait” and try to spoil your news on Twitter so that others don’t click the link.

Traffic usually comes from Google and being linked on other websites.

But even so, only a small fraction of tweets are connected to links. At the seasidejoenews account, I only tweet links to Seaside Joe, which sounds like a direct contradiction to what I just wrote but I’d rather have a fraction of value to a tweet—maybe bringing in one new reader a day—than a value of ABSOLUTE ZERO.

You might say, “Well, if you worked really hard on your Twitter account, you might have more followers!” To which I would say that those followers would only take interest in the Twitter account, which has no value, as opposed to this website, which has a lot of value. That falls right back into the trap of doing work FOR TWITTER and not FOR YOURSELF, which is the conundrum that most media members—and far too many athletes—find themselves trapped in, including Quinnen Williams: They’re confusing attention for money.

So what’s the answer as to “Why” reporters still tweet? I think it’s simply because that’s what they think they’re expected to do. It’s following in the footsteps of everyone else instead of walking your own path. Except nobody cares if you stop tweeting. If you are a reporter and you’re reading this, you can stop tweeting and nobody will care. Not your boss. Not your company. Not your followers. Unless you are literally being paid to tweet, like your LinkedIn page says “Social Media Manager” on it, you can stop tweeting “for work”. If your company says that being active on Twitter is part of your job, then get paid for it.

Nobody I know in this business is paid for tweeting.

The further we get from pre-Twitter journalism, the harder it is for people to remember that legacy media was doing better before social media. It wasn’t until I completely separated myself from Twitter in 2020 that it dawned on me how hypnotized I was by the allure of getting more attention or how far I had strayed from acting logically.

Putting effort into a Twitter account is a fight for attention. Putting effort into composing articles or making videos or creating anything that is itself a product instead of you becoming the product, that is a fight for adding value to the world instead of adding litter.

Why make a big deal out of it and am I giving out the secret sauce for free? Well, yes, I do think that this is the secret sauce but I have no expectation that anyone would stop tweeting because of something I wrote. Even if they did, the more people who become aware of Substack, the better it is for me: Bring more Seahawks fans to this website. PLEASE!

But some fraction of that Twitter litter is necessary in order for me to have immediate information as it relates to the team and the league that I cover, so I can’t really do this unless I have that. And every time I am reminded of that, I can’t believe that I’m the only person who is saying stuff like this.

The only one. Or maybe there are more and I just don’t know about them because…they’re not on Twitter. What a pickle!

Monday Bonus Article: Seahawks 2023 practice squad roster projection!

The Quinnen Williams Chapter and the Seahawks budget

The reason I get annoyed with moves like the one that Williams made—and how the media covers it and how fans react to “news” like it—is that it’s nothing new and never matters.

Having been on this side of writing for 14 years and sort of recognizing patterns that constantly repeat themselves with regards to media coverage and fan reactions, I can’t help but get frustrated to see that memories seem to fade within days. Everything is such an emotional reaction instead of a logical one, which goes back to the fuel that drives websites like Twitter and Instagram: Feeding off of emotions instead of logic.

People keep falling for the same stupid tricks over and over again and acting as if we haven’t seen players scrub teams from their social media accounts, only to return to the team. Lamar Jackson publicly demanded a trade only weeks before signing a contract with the Baltimore Ravens. It’s all part of the process and our lives would be no different if we simply ignored it.

“But Joe, I remember that Russell Wilson scrubbed the Seahawks and then was traded!”

Yes, that’s true. And if he didn’t scrub the Seahawks from his Twitter bio, does that mean he would still be on the Seahawks? No, the two moves are completely unrelated. “But if Quinnen Williams scrubs the Jets from his bio, that might mean that he’s on the verge of a trade!”

Or it might mean that he’s on the verge of a new contract. Or it might mean that his account was hacked by a foreign country to infiltrate and obfuscate the integrity of American sports. Or it might mean that…

Ignore emotions, trust logic:

Quinnen Williams is one of the very few Jets first round picks who is not a bust. As poorly as New York has run the franchise for the last 50 years, will they really choose to keep Carl Lawson or Corey Davis if it means losing Williams?

The Seahawks don’t have any cap space. They just restructured Tyler Lockett in order to be able to sign their rookie class and add Mario Edwards, there is probably less than $1 million to spend. Williams is playing on his fifth-year option at $9.6 million and there’s little the Seahawks could do to bring that number down, even after signing him to a contract extension.

Williams is likely looking for a contract in the range of four years, $95-$100 million and over $60 million guaranteed. The Jets have $106 million in total contract liabilities for 2025, while Seattle has $186 million. By comparison, New York is far more capable giving Williams what he wants than the Seahawks.

Though the two teams have made similar trades in the recent past, both Sheldon Richardson and Jamal Adams, neither is in the development stage now that they were then: The Jets just traded for Aaron Rodgers in order to get over the hump, losing Williams now would negate that added value. The Seahawks are putting their faith in the 2022-2023 draft classes in order to build a successful core for a long-term vision; trading for someone like Quinnen Williams would not only cost them $25 million in spending per year, but also multiple first round picks in the future.

That seems like a move by the old Pete Carroll and John Schneider, not the current regime.

Do I think the Seahawks would love to have Quinnen Williams? The Seahawks would love to have Quinnen Williams.

And Patrick Mahomes. And Ja’Marr Chase. And Micah Parsons. And the 2021 Super Bowl trophy. And the 2022 Super Bowl trophy. And the 2023 Super Bowl trophy…

Quinnen Williams is on the Jets and I don’t care how many times he changes his Twitter bio or what it says…He’ll stay on the Jets. Nobody’s value changes based on their actions on Twitter.