What Everybody's Getting Wrong about the Seahawks
“Teams are worried about whether the Seahawks can be as good as they were last year, not how much better they can be.”
The Seattle Seahawks are not getting the same treatment as their Super Bowl-winning predecessors. Whether it’s a west coast bias or a coincidence, I can’t say, but rarely does the reigning champion get so roundly predicted to lose the division or miss the playoffs altogether or finish tied for the worst record of the John Schneider era.
A month ago, Bucky Brooks of NFL.com went for bold, and predicted that the Seahawks would finish 7-10, the same record that the Miami Dolphins had last season.
Brooks went on Seattle Sports radio to defend his prediction by arguing that it’s hard to sustain success after winning the Super Bowl:
“It is really hard after you win a title to sustain yourself the next year,” Brooks said. “Normally that next year you come back because there’s a few different things. There’s some natural complacency that seeps in, the team is never the same and the energy that you face from everybody is drastically different. With a team that’s still on the young side, the maturity that is required to handle that, that’s going to be a lot early.”
Well, there you have it. I can’t be mad, that’s just how Bucky Brooks thinks. He believes that it’s not Seattle’s fault, it’s the Super Bowl’s fault. So it’s not personal, right? That’s what he would have said about any reigning champions.
Right?
Just one year earlier, Bucky Brooks ranked the Philadelphia Eagles as the best team in the NFL, months after they won the Super Bowl, and he had nothing to say about “it’s really hard after you win a title to sustain yourself”.
Brooks even PRAISED the Eagles for getting rid of veterans, the same thing that the Seahawks are being CRITICIZED for this year.
“The defending champs are not resting on their laurels with general manager Howie Roseman making shrewd moves to keep the team young, athletic, and dynamic. The Eagles moved on from a handful of key veterans to create room for an influx of newbies to help chase back-to-back titles.”
How could anyone not question Brooks’ reasoning when he gave two totally opposing appraisals of the same picture? If anything, Bucky should be claiming that he DOES have a coastal bias, because that would be preferable to the explanation that he just makes up his mind as he goes.
What if we keep going back?
It’s difficult to compare these last two Super Bowl winners to the Chiefs because Kansas City won the championship in three of five years and were consistently in contention. But in 2022, Brooks predicted that the Los Angeles Rams would go 12-5 following their Super Bowl victory with Matthew Stafford.
He didn’t say anything about life being hard on reigning Super Bowl winners. Maybe he should have …
The Rams went 5-12 that season.
I can’t find everything Bucky Brooks has ever said, but nowhere in my research did I locate a single instance of him arguing that life is hard on champions—quite the opposite—until it was the Seattle Seahawks.
Though the media has largely been pushing a narrative that the Seahawks “did this to themselves” by not re-signing four of their free agents (one full-time starter, one-half of a backfield, and two rotational defensive pieces), we’ve already proven that this didn’t matter to Brooks last year. He cited Philadelphia’s free agent losses…
As a POSITIVE.
You can’t lose what you gave away
As I wrote all the way back in March, the Seahawks didn’t lose any free agents. They know exactly where Kenneth Walker, Boye Mafe, Coby Bryant, and Riq Woolen are. They’re not “lost”.
Seattle didn’t want to re-sign them and for the most part no departures were due to a lack of cash or cap space.
The Seahawks intentionally extended players such as Abe Lucas, Charles Cross, Rashid Shaheed, and Josh Jobe, among others, and it wasn’t that those players were cheap. Just like Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Derick Hall this year, they were priorities.
Walker says that to his knowledge, Seattle never made him an offer during the season. He’s not a Chief by accident. Whether you as a fan agree with that plan or not, it was the plan. Considering how the Seahawks thrived last season and have also been able to extend others while adding more help (Sam Darnold, DeMarcus Lawrence, Cooper Kupp, Shaheed, etc.), being picky with their own players and who to keep seems to be working.
How much cap space would the Seahawks have left—and would they have won the Super Bowl—if they had caved to the demands of Geno Smith and DK Metcalf?
Maybe the media isn’t ready to look back and admit fault for criticizing Seattle last year for trading those players away. So they’re doubling-down instead.
I know it…and so do many of you.
Seasiders Speak
In the final question of the survey I posted last month, I asked this question:
“What’s one Seahawks opinion you think everyone else is getting wrong?”
Out of over 200 responses, 30-percent of you had practically the same answer, twice as many as any other response:
“Seattle’s offseason losses are overblown, the team didn’t get worse, and losing those four free agents does not mean the roster declined; if anything, the Seahawks had a smart replacement plan in place and executed it well with younger, cheaper players.”
Among the Seahawks fans who subscribe to Seaside Joe and respond to surveys, there’s very little-to-no concern about the losses of Walker, Bryant, Mafe, and Woolen. Here are some quotes from Seaside Joe readers on why the media is wrong about the downfall of the Seahawks and blowing their free agent losses way out of proportion:
“We won the SB a year early. We were always trending to be better this year than last year. I haven’t heard once that we’re still very much an improving team.”
“That the Seahawks are somehow ‘worse’ because they weren’t splashy in the offseason. The players that were let go are being replaced, just not how ‘the experts’ wanted them to be replaced…Poppycock.”
“The narrative that the Seahawks lost so many players, instead of realizing they chose who to keep and let go.”
“We get no credit for developing talent.”
“The Seahawks have a young roster with ascending talent in all three phases, have re-established player development as a priority, and replaced the good players lost in free agency with both potentially ascending talent and established veterans… Result: Seahawks reloaded. JS master stroke!”
And one of the best single pulls from that group in particular is this:
“The Seahawks get no credit for developing talent.”
It is peculiar that the Seahawks would get dinged so hard for losing those four players considering where most of them were at in their careers before the regime change in 2024. Bryant didn’t become a starting safety until Mike Macdonald; Mafe was more sacks than substance and became a more efficient and well-rounded linebacker; and Woolen …
For a guy who has been quietly benched as many times as he has, it’s a credit to Macdonald that the Eagles still gave him $12 million.
Offensively, Walker was on nobody’s radar to be a $15 million running back until after the playoffs. His situation prior to last season wasn’t bad enough to be compared to Christine Michael, but many had lost faith after his injury-riddled 2024 campaign that ended in 3.7 yards per carry.
When they want to discredit the running back, they say “It’s the supporting cast doing all the work!”
When they want to discredit the team though, it turns into “They can’t replace the running back!”
Which is it going to be then? Or does it depend on the narrative the writer is trying to support, instead of building a story based on the facts?
Here are a few more choice quotes:
“I don’t know about everyone, but the national narrative that the Seahawks lost too many key pieces is incorrect in my opinion. I think after some growing pains, the team will be better with the replacements especially Price.”
“That the defense will miss Mafe and Coby Bryant. I think the replacements will be better and the defense will be better overall, barring injury.”
This is not to say that Bryant would have been injured had he stayed in Seattle, of course that’s not a fair assumption, but unfortunately the safety will miss at least the next two months. By a stroke of fate, the Seahawks should be in better hands with Bud Clark as a reinforcement than the Bears are at the safety position.
Mafe has been cited as a defensive standout at Bengals camp. No surprise there really, it is the Bengals defense after all. And with Woolen, it sounds as though the hope in Philadelphia is that he’ll stop getting stupid penalties and become a more consistent coverage corner with the Eagles.
We’ve heard that before.
There’s an excitement about Walker in Kansas City, as there should be. He’s a great running back. There’s an excitement about Jadarian Price in Seattle too. He could become a great running back, nobody can say for certain. However, as a rookie replacement he does guarantee that the Seahawks had enough cap space and cash to use those savings at running back to pay players like JSN and Hall.
I wrote about those cap saving differences last week too.
Subscribe to Seaside Joe, don’t miss a newsletter, and support the only Daily Seahawks blog/website/writer/whatever. $5/month? $55/year? What a 365-day steal:
I’ll sleep fine at night if all four of those players (and Dareke Young) become even bigger stars in Philadelphia, Kansas City, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Las Vegas than they were in Seattle. I’ll sleep great actually, I’ve got a king sized bed and it moves up and down so that I can sit upright in it and watch TV when I want.
Don’t worry about my sleep!
But the Seahawks can’t worry if those guys will be successful. That’s like worrying that there are a LOT of great players who aren’t on the Seahawks. Most of the great players aren’t on the Seahawks, and that’s okay. No team has all the great players—regardless of what anyone tells you about the 2026 Los Angeles Rams.
Seattle has to worry about the players they do have—Price, Clark, Julian Neal, and Dante Fowler—and the ones that they could have. And as one of you pointed out, they’re pretty good at developing them.
Here were some more Seaside Joe quotes because y’all said it better than Bucky Brooks ever could:
“I think it’s ridiculous how regularly folk play up the importance of the team’s offseason departures without acknowledging their own doubts about those same players/coaches prior to the start of last season (e.g., Walker, Kubiak).”
“I said all year last year we were one year away. If we won the SB in our 1 year away season, how dang good are we going to be this year? One of the younger rosters in the NFL - just how many players have huge steps forward that they’re going to take?”
“Teams are worried about whether the Seahawks can be as good as they were last year, not how much better they can be.”
How much better can the Seahawks be? Most didn’t even think they were good enough to beat the Rams last season, and Seattle proved them wrong then, so why not do it again?
Here are quotes with other answers of what outsiders are getting wrong:
“The Rams window is starting to close. I don’t get it.”
“I also think the national narrative that the Seahawks took a step back while the Rams passed them is flawed. I think the Rams got better, but they definitely needed to. I don’t think they’ve added enough to overtake the Seahawks.”
“The Rams know they are beat if they don’t win this year. They look desperate.”
“The Seahawks are significantly better than last year. Better coaching, more improved players growing into their prime, deeper roster. They will improve on last year. 15-2, best shot of any team to win again.. could be a historic season for the ages!”
“That they cannot win a second consecutive Super Bowl. Almost all the media feels this way. They are in for a surprise!”
“That they say the Seahawks are not the team to beat for SB…and I love it that way.”
Actually, not every fan agrees that replacing Walker with Price is a good idea, and I appreciate that we have a good diversity of opinions here. That’s the way it should be: Embrace the debate.
“Going from K9 and Charbs to Price/Holani/Wilson is a major downgrade at the rb position.”
“Not sure if this qualifies, but I’m still super-bummed we let K9 go. Even if Price is a big hit, I fear we will miss K9’s ball security.”
“That losing Walker is not that big of a deal. There are certain moves and cuts that he makes that only about 5 RB’s in the league can make.”
“RB isn’t plug & play. Big mistake letting K9 go.”
“Jadarian Price is a step backwards from Kenneth Walker”
After playing 20 games last season, increasing his workload in the playoffs, I do have some questions about Walker’s durability with Kansas City. But I also see the skepticism with Price given how unusual it is for a running back with zero career college starts to be picked in the first round.
Other fans were more keen on Sam Darnold disrespect.
“That Sam Darnold could regress. Last year WAS his regression year.”
“Sam Darnolds value to the success of this team… his cool demeanor, lack of need for the spotlight and willingness to call himself out, I honestly don’t think there is a better match at QB for this team.”
“For anyone who thinks Sam can’t be a top 5 QB. I think he’s going to be top 4 or higher.”
There was even some love for Seattle’s “worst” starter:
“That Anthony Bradford sucks; he actually was overall above average last year and will be good — although probably not pro bowl good — this year”
“Anthony Bradford is way better than people give him credit for”
“Anthony Bradford is not just a good Guard, he’s a Top 25% Guard.”
Or perhaps my favorite, “Anthony Bradford is fine”.
And this split on Devon Witherspoon’s value to the Seahawks:
“People are wrong when they say this team should not resign Witherspoon unless it’s a really team-friendly deal. Witherspoon has an outsized impact on this team, IMO.”
Compared to:
“Everyone is wrong that Witherspoon is worth being the highest paid corner in football… Don’t get me wrong, I love the guy. But he is smallish and thin. He could get hurt easily and miss a significant time.”
And if that’s not clear enough, another fan made perhaps the most bold controversial statement of the entire survey:
“Devon Witherspoon is overrated. There; I said it.”
Well, you’re definitely going to get a lot of Seahawks fans who disagree with you there. But it’s okay when we don’t agree with other people on everything.
However, if you’re Bucky Brooks…can you even agree with yourself?
Everybody sans Seaside Joe followers are getting it we. ;)
Nice to see my answer get in there. No-one can figure out what I, Bradfords biggest fan and defender, could have said. Mwahahaha
Best thing I ever did for my enjoyment of both the Seahawks and the NFL was to just stop reading mainstream... ummm... lets go with rubbish. I get why they say the things they do, doesn't make them less foolish. We are, as always, incredibly lucky to have SSJ. Content made by fans, who can separate their fan-side whilst keeping the passion and depth of knowledge, is always a step above.