What’s harder: to have loved and lost, or to never have loved at all?
A more pertinent question to NFL fans: is it better to watch your team suffer an obvious and painful decline from being a perennial Super Bowl contender, or to never have competed at all for the league’s glittering prize?
I’d certainly argue the latter. It’s disingenuous to paint the Buffalo Bills’ four Super Bowl losses as some kind of a rough time to be a fan. They made the playoffs six straight seasons, and provided their fans with tons of memories, including a 51-3 slapdown of Bo Jackson’s Raiders, the Frank Reich/Oilers comeback, and beating John Elway and Dan Marino in consecutive AFC title games. Sounds pretty lousy, huh?
But for the Seattle Seahawks, it does feel the decline isn’t going to be either a slow or relatively painless one. It’s coming fast, it’s going to hurt and it may even be here now, based on the evidence of their first two defeats in Denver and Chicago.
Despite struggling last season with key injuries in the secondary, no running game and an awfully inept offensive line, the Seahawks still won nine games and six of their seven defeats were by eight points or fewer. Despite missing the 2017 NFC playoffs by a game, major salary cap and age issues necessitated some changes, but the Seahawks didn’t stop at “some.”
Richard Sherman, Cliff Avril, Michael Bennett, Sheldon Richardson, Kam Chancellor (through retirement), Jimmy Graham and even long-time punter Jon Ryan, all ended up finding new NFL homes through trades or by being released.
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Are the Seahawks a worse collection of talent, somewhat by design? That’s a good question, but few now are arguing that they aren’t worse.
If anything, Monday night’s 24-17 loss to Chicago made me think the Bears looked a bit like the 2012 Seattle Seahawks, a team who went 11-5. I’m not suggesting Mitchell Trubisky is now Russell Wilson, nor am I thinking the Bears are winning 11 games this season. There’s no chance they are, but Chicago is operating with a young, cheap, mobile quarterback, while building up a fast, ferocious defensive side that has impressed in execution and just plain rough football, especially where the quarterbacks they’ve played so far are concerned, Russell Wilson and Aaron Rodgers.
It’s that concept the Seahawks utilized to put their “Legion of Boom” defence into play, and the rest was history.
While neither Aaron Rodgers and the Packers nor Ben Roethlisberger and the Steelers have been back to the Super Bowl since facing each other in February 2011, the Seahawks went to back-to-back Super Bowls, had a five-year streak of winning at least one playoff game per season, and their franchise is on a run of 10 straight home playoff wins, dating back to 2005.
But the party seems quite over, and I say that without the Seahawks even having played a home game yet (they host Dallas on Sunday).
The Seahawks offensive line was pulverized by the Bears front seven, and it didn’t do much better against Denver’s. I get it, those are two really good pass rushes, but the first two games were such mismatches in the trenches. I can make the case that takeaways by the Seattle defence and Russell Wilson’s incredible vision and ability to improvise are the only reasons those contests were close.
Seattle has some young talent on the defensive side of the ball, as cornerback Shaquill Griffin demonstrated with his two interceptions Monday night. But Wilson is going to have it tough getting time in the pocket to throw and trusting a running game that might be as non-existent as it was at times last season.
If you’ve watched Andrew Luck manoeuvre the Colts the past few seasons he was healthy, you get a sense what Wilson is up against. But he’s 30, and the less Wilson scrambles by design, or by necessity, the better.
The end often comes fast for franchises when they lose a franchise quarterback, and the examples are numerous, but this Seahawks situation looks more like the quick decline of some other fantastic defensive units in the past.
The Bears won one playoff game between 1991 and 2005 after most of their defensive stars retired. The Ravens, coming off the 2000 Super Bowl, won only one playoff game themselves in a seven-year span after that before rebuilding around Ray Lewis.
But this one feels different because the Seahawks still have the star quarterback, and those franchises didn’t.
It’s going to be a long year in Seattle. Pete Carroll is 67 years old and in the last year of his contract. Wilson needs a new, lucrative deal before the start of the 2020 season. It’s a franchise to keep an eye on, but their fans seem resigned to the fact that the post-season triumphs and signature moments are probably over for at least the next couple seasons.
