Did 'Seahawks training camp notes' from 2023 prove useful?
5 BIG Seahawks training camp stories from 2023 that didn't tell us anything about what was to come next: Seaside Joe 1975
I have not yet said anything about how the first week of Seahawks training camp went and there’s a very good reason for that, an explanation that is much more thought out than the excuse of, “Well, I didn’t want to.”
It would be easy to copy/paste (as in quote) or re-hash what’s been reported everywhere else—storylines such as “Geno Smith looks fantastic”, “Jaxon Smith-Njigba looks fantastic”, and “K’Von Wallace looks fantastic”—so the lack of those stories on Seaside Joe in the first week of Seahawks training camp had nothing to do with laziness. Hopefully nobody thinks Seaside Joe is shucking responsibilities after 1,975 straight days of Seahawks articles.
To me, it’s a matter of the VALIDITY of the storylines.
Like anything else posted on Seaside Joe, I think about the usefulness of the information I could provide, not whether it is “popular”, or even if it is necessarily “fascinating”. I would love to share fascinating and popular stories with you every single day—and that’s the idea—but I have no intention of doing that unless the story is also worthwhile and legitimate.
Dee Eskridge becoming one of the Seahawks best receivers last year would qualify as “fascinating” and there were actually quite a lot of stories like that being posted during the 2023 offseason. I wrote my own story about the rumors of an Eskridge breakout myself last May, but with the added element of recapping his career to that point and what made him such an intriguing prospect before his underwhelming start with Seattle.
Those offseason stories bled into the first week of training camp too, only to be trumped on August 4th with the news that Eskridge would actually be suspended for the first six games of the season…and oh by the way, it turns out that the Seahawks basically knew the entire time that he’d probably miss a significant portion of the season for disciplinary reasons. So while the story of Eskridge’s offseason that got reported was, “Look how good he’s going to be this season”, the one that SHOULD HAVE been reported was, “Eskridge isn’t going to even be an option until Week 8 at the soonest.”
Up until today’s post, the Seahawks have not practiced with pads on. That changes on Monday, the first day with pads. NFL Network’s Steve Wyche had this to say about pre-pads training camp reporting:
“It’s we in the media that glam a lot of players up before the pads come on because it’s all that’s on display. Now, it’s about to be real.”
That is some refreshingly honest self-checking by Wyche to reveal that everything you’ve heard up until now is just because the NFL media needs to report SOMETHING during the first week of training camp. I feel that I can justify my existence without telling you that certain Seahawks “look fantastic” before the pads on, in practice, against sometimes second or third-string competition.
But the greater national media doesn’t feel they can stand by and give you stories about Geno Smith not holding out, avoiding training camp drama, understanding why the Seahawks would be talking to a starting center free agent, and why most NFL rebuilds fail.
And if nothing else, we can get the whole community involved with our most interesting Seahawks fan survey ever. (still time to submit your answers!)
One of the great advantages of having the Internet, a tool that I’ve tried to utilize consistently throughout my career, is the fact that nothing you say is every truly gone. Through simple date-defined Google searches, we can find out what people were saying about the Seahawks in the first week of training camp in past years and then look back with hindsight to decide for ourselves, “Was this useful?” and “Did this report signal valuable information about players to come in the future?”
That’s really the only reason we read a training camp report at all, right? To find out if certain players would be more valuable or less valuable than expectations going into camp. We want to know (and we want to know as soon as possible), “Is this player going to help the Seahawks this season?” That’s the main thing fans are wanting out of camp observations, not just to find out if a player is having a “good” camp. That’s meaningless.
“It’s not meaningless! A good camp could lead to a good season.”
Yes, it could. And a good practice or a good camp could simply just mean that the player had a good practice and nothing else. It could even just mean that the player made ONE good play in one practice, the play got reported because it was the highlight of the day, and then the player is on some “stock up” report because of one play.
There is NO WAY to separate a report that is indicative of a player who is about to have a breakout season and the report that only exists because the player had a good practice or a good week of practices. So therefore, without being able to know the difference between the two reports, ALL reports have to be considered suspect.
And that is the reason why I have not bombarded you with training camp reports during Seattle’s first week back at VMAC.
If you’re still unsure if any of this makes sense or is accurate, let’s use the Internet to look back at 2023’s first week of training camp before the pads came on.
These are 5 reports from 2023’s Seahawks training camp that do not look very useful now that we have the benefit of hindsight, including: One player who was supposed to be the breakout player on Seattle’s entire defense (but he became a bench player for most of the season instead), and four who basically had no impact at all, whether that was being released, suspended, or kept on the bench.
I’m also going to use last year’s storylines as jumping off points for this year’s storylines and how much of what happened in 2023 seems to be repeating itself in 2024: