Seahawks training camp preview: Offense

Position Battles, Depth Chart, The Bubble, and Salary Cap Commitments!

Seahawks report to training camp in: 13 days!

I nearly sent out this message as practically its own newsletter, but I had this thought while watching my “10 minutes of Xs and Os” on Wednesday: If you commit to watching just five minutes of football film per day, then after one year you will have watched 1,825 minutes of footage. That’s over 30 hours!

If that still doesn’t sound like a lot, let me put it this way: The estimates of how much actual football is played per contest (that’s 60 minutes of clock rundown over 2.5-3 hours of TV) run from 11-17 minutes. That means that if you watch 30 hours of football footage, you could technically watch the equivalent of 165 FULL GAMES PER YEAR!

That’s with five minutes of football viewing per day.

The NFL only plays 290 games per year including playoffs, which means that because I watch 10 minutes per day then I could watch the same amount of football that is played in an entire season. That’s with 10 minutes per day for one full year.

That means that YOU could also watch more than a season’s worth of football per year just by squeezing in 10 minutes per day. How do I know you could do it? Because I can do it. I’m watching football in bed, in the car, on the toilet, while I’m cooking, while I’m waiting in a doctor’s lobby, even from the dentist chair. We all have smartphones now, we can all figure it out, and just because I write about football for a living that doesn’t make it any easier for me. These are 10 minutes I chose to ADD to my day a handful of months ago, this isn’t something that requires you to be a football writer to have the time to do it.

Of course, you might also just not want to do it. That makes sense.

But I felt that calculation was worth sharing because the reward for a simple non-negotiable daily habit feels like its more than ten times worth the effort it takes. Maybe for you it’s not watching football that appeals, it could be something else: Learning guitar, taking a hike, listening to classical music, or chopping vegetables. It could be anything.

For me, it’s a lot more than watching football; that just seemed like a valuable addition to my Groundhog Habits (that’s what I’ve been calling my non-negotiable dailies) based on my obsession with writing about football and creating this newsletter for Seaside Joe readers everyday and I’ve known for a long time that my Xs and Os knowledge deficiency was a fault worth improving.

In case you’re new around here, or you’ve been on the fence for a while about upgrading to Regular Joes—of which the following post and hundreds more bonus articles are included—I’ll briefly explain again how this all started and what Groundhog Habits are for me.

In January of 2019, I was 36 and felt like my life needed a complete reboot. I stopped drinking, mostly just because I didn’t want to waste anymore time or money, then I read a book called Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris. I’m not necessarily a strong advocate for “self-help” but I picked out a few routines from that book and applied them to my own life, including meditation, intermittent fasting, and consistent exercise. A meditation teacher told me that my practice should be “non-negotiable” and that clicked in me like the strap of a proper helmet.

I have sent this newsletter everyday since March 3, 2019, meditated twice per day for 20 minutes everyday since April 10, 2019, and I have eaten within an 8-hour intermittent fasting window everyday since that spring as well. That’s roughly 1,600 days in a row for each of those habits. I’ve also had some form of a non-negotiable weekly exercise routine, which lately amounts to a minimum of three 30-minute runs per week; it’s not about doing a lot of something, it’s just about commiting to some of something.

I can’t tell you “Oh I’ve lost (this much) weight” or anything, but I’ve consistently been in the best shape of my life for the last four years and I can say that I was 150 lbs overweight when I was in college.

As time goes, I add to the list. There’s no plan to what I will add, it just so happens that every so often a new habit will reveal itself to me, like when your boss comes up to you and says, “Hey, now you do this.” Seaside Jay will ask me, “Why do you do (X) for (Y) minutes?” and I can only say, “Because that’s what I’m supposed to do.”

Divine assignments.

I have a daily housecleaning routine, a face cleaning routine, several lists and documents that I add to everyday (including how to build a successful newsletter business that I will only debut once I’ve put in at least a few hundred hours of work into it), the Xs and Os videos, and a personal skill that I’m working on that I won’t tell anyone about for years because it’s annoying when people say they’re learning something and then someone asks them six months later, “How’s that thing going?” and maybe they’ve quit!

Would it be cooler for me to tell you I’m learning something or for me to not tell anyone and then one day I just show off that I learned something?!

We know that answer to that!

Every night when I go to sleep, I rest comfortably because I can tell myself that I’ve checked off 14 tasks that day. Again. It feels really good to know that I’ve consistently accomplished that many little assignments for however-many days in a row that I’ve done them. Including Wednesday morning’s latest free newsletter, part II of a completely free origin story on Seahawks safety Quandre Diggs.

Free as the safety that Diggs plays for the Seahawks, but that doesn’t mean that Seaside Joe isn’t putting in thousands of hours per year into this newsletter. And I’m grateful for the fact that this Seahawks newsletter has the highest-rate of paid-to-free subscribers that I can find anywhere on the entire Substack platform, by some estimates 23% is more than four-times greater than the average rate, and that’s a testament to you Seahawks fans who consistently show up to support a newsletter like this one even though so much of the content is FREE.

Still, for me to ever dream of having a paid newsletter consultation business, there has to be a proof of concept: Can I, Seaside Joe, be one of the most successful content creators in the entire industry AND can I do it without a social media presence, marketing, promotion, or getting plugs from most of the people in the industry? Oh, and do it without ads, which is something you can’t find on any other website: Twitter, YouTube (unless you pay), Facebook, The Athletic (paywall), ESPN, practically any sports website you can think of…

How many times have you watched a YouTube video, that already has ads, and then a few minutes in the creator stops to read an ad?

I can’t really tell other people how to create a lucrative newsletter business unless I actually have a lucrative newsletter business, so I’m asking you today to consider how you can support this small business, ad-free Seahawks blogger who has maybe written somewhere between one and 1,593 days of articles you’ve read…PLUS bonus content. Because Seaside Joe is not just 365 articles per year, it’s more like 500 articles per year, and as you can tell…practically none of them are short, willy-nilly, unresearched, and off-the-cuff blabbering into a webcam for ten minutes.

I’ve perused all the NFL newsletters on Substack and absolutely none are like Seaside Joe. As I wrote recently, we create more content than then top-10 combined. And yes, also more than your top-three or four or five Seahawks bloggers, including The Athletic.

If you’re a free subscriber, consider joining for $5 per month or $55 for the entire year. You can also choose the Super Joes “founding member” level at $120 per year and you’ll get exclusive access to the “suggestion box” for questions and topic suggestions plus an extra article per month. If you’re already paying at $5, you can upgrade to Super Joes at any time for a prorated rate. And if you haven’t subscribed at all yet, just enter your email below, even if it’s one of those fake “coupon sign-up” emails:

Another way to help, if you’re already a paid member, is to give a Seahawks fan a gift subscription. Then you’ll be doing something nice for all three of us.

As always, sharing Seaside Joe with the Internet, forwarding articles you like to friends and family members, or just shouting out “Seaside Joe” on other message boards is also helpful. Maybe not this season, maybe not the next, but at some point in the future I bet everyone will know about Joe. And you’re still at ground zero of it all right now!

But I also have always despised ASKING for something without OFFERING something. Yes, there are hundreds of bonus articles and thousands of free articles from the past, and you’ll also get access to all the Origin Stories archives, but today I’m also going to get started with our training camp coverage by previewing what to watch for on offense: Depth chart, position battles, salary cap updates, and who could be lost in ‘no man’s land’ this year.

Seattle Seahawks players report to 2023 training camp on July 25th and the first practice open to fans is the following day.

Full open camp schedule here.

The Seahawks will be one of the most intriguing NFL teams to follow between now and final cuts, as they add two first round picks, two second round picks, their biggest free agent signing in quite some time, several key position battles, and Geno Smith can settle in for the entire fall knowing he’s the starting quarterback.

But can Seattle, fresh off of a surprisingly good season that left fans unexpected disappointed with how 2022 ended, take advantage of what many are calling the weaker conference and an NFC West division ripe to be stolen from the 49ers? In today’s Regular Joe bonus article, I’ll preview the Seahawks offense for training camp, then in the next bonus, we’ll move to the defense and special teams.

You can join to keep reading this and then read that. Or you can join because you feel confident that if I can create this much content for the last 1,593 days, I’ll strive to create even more for the next 1,593 days.