RiverDog wrote:I'm not confident, either. But it's going to be exciting. I was ready for a change, so unlike past seasons, I'm really looking forward to this season. Good, bad, or indifferent, it's the beginning of a new era of Seahawk football. Kinda like the old world mariners setting out for the new world.
Only coach that would have excited me is Harbaugh. Only guaranteed Super Bowl coach in my opinion. Under Paul Allen, that is what I was accustomed to having as a head coach.
My actual feeling on what I think will happen:
1. I don't think John Schneider will pick the next great head coach. I expect to be noncompetitive for the next 2 to 3 years until Schneider is fired along with his head coach choice. If they really crash and burn, then fired even sooner. If we go 4 and 13, I expect a faster move to remove John depending on if John blows the team up. John may get another year if the team is blown up, but given the draft capital the Russell trade netted us, it would be a complete and total failure on the upper management if the team is blown up after a failure of the talent acquired from the Russell Trade. This was a huge trade and if you can't turn the draft capital into something competitive, then the talent acquisition which a GM is responsible for is bad from the top. So we'll see how that goes.
2. If this team isn't competitive in 2 to 3 years, then we start with a new GM and likely head coach. That will be about 11 to 12 years of noncompetitive play with no end in sight.
3. Then we will truly see how well the ownership is at managing a winning team. I'm not confident of that either. I have no idea how Paul Allen set up the team trust or how invested Jody Allen is in a winning team or who she employs as her adviser similar to who Tod Leiweke was to Paul Allen.
The Mariners are a foreboding comparison to where the Seahawks may be headed. Noncompetitive with a fanbase happy to just make the playoffs now and again like back in the 80s. I hope it doesn't go as dark as the early to mid 90s.
I'm not one to toot my horn like
hawktawk, but I've been mostly right about the direction of things. Not because I know special things, but because the facts are evident. Even way back when I figured the Super Bowl loss was the end of the Pete Carroll era and it was the end. It may have just had a period put on it with Carroll getting fired, but he never recovered from that. I had a feeling we would never recover from that loss. That Super Bowl loss is the kind of loss that breaks a team. It broke Carroll and Seattle. He was always thinking he was one player away from getting back and never realized how far he really was away.
I also felt when they traded Russ that Pete was likely done too. I was against the Russ trade from an emotional standpoint, but from a reasoned standpoint both Russ and Pete seemed done. Neither was going to recover from that Super Bowl loss. It was just a slow descent into mediocrity or worse.
Paul Allen dying was a huge loss. Paul Allen turned the Seahawks into a perennial contender. Paul Allen is the one who went, "My team is not doing well. Things are not going in the direction I want. I will absolutely fix this." He did. That element of the team is gone. I feel very little confidence in the ownership of the Seahawks. As the team falls into a sort of noncompetitive middle ground with an unclear ownership future, I think we'll eventually be sold.
I hope we get as good an owner as Paul Allen in the future. Whether I live to see that, who knows how long it will take.
To me the long-term outlook for the Seahawks is extremely poor. It might improve should John Schneider surprise me with some weird hire he has vetted personally that is not anyone we have penciled in. But who knows. this just looks like one long, slow descent back into the 80s Seahawks ball. If it falls into early 90s Seahawks ball, that will be truly terrible. I don't think we can get that bad. Or rather I hope we can't get that bad.
I don't share your excitement. The most important factor that made this team successful for the last two plus decades is gone. Without Paul Allen, I have little confidence in our future. It's all a bunch of coin flips and unknowns. With Paul Allen the one thing you could be sure of, he wasn't going to settle for anything but the absolute best coach he could possibly get and even that coach was going to be held to a standard for winning. This is all the natural progression from Paul Allen being gone until we have a new owner more invested in winning like Paul Allen was.
Maybe Jody Allen will prove me wrong, but I doubt it. I'll follow like I do every year through the good and bad. I'm glad we had one absolutely stunning five year run while I lived. I thought I might die with no Super Bowl during those 90s years. Paul Allen changed my attitude about the Seahawks. Now with him gone, it feels like we're in limbo again.
