After Holmgren, the Flood

by John Morgan on Dec 3, 2008 12:46 PM PST in Seahawks Player Analysis

Gerry Butler sent me this cool graphic. It shows each team's win total from 2001 to 2007. He color coded season to season variations thus:

Green- Good Season immediately followed or preceded by a bad season

Yellow- Bad season immediately followed or preceded by a good season

Red- Bad season directly preceded by a good, then a bad, in that order. Signifies a downward spiral.

Gray- Anomalies to the trend in both good (NE) and bad (Arizona, Detroit, Houston)

With "Good" and "Bad" seasons defined as:

Good Season- 9 or more wins (or playoffs. Hard to determine with STL 2004)

Bad Season- 7 or less wins (8 wins if team won 11 or more games in the season preceding or following)

The ebb and flow of the NFL. Seattle will most likely end with two to four wins. Of the twenty five team seasons with four or fewer wins, fifteen finished the following season with a losing record, three ended at eight and eight and seven finished above five hundred. Only the 2004 Chargers won more than 10 games and only seven total won more than ten games in either of the next two seasons.

Seattle's last seven seasons have been special. Built on a well constructed offense and buttressed by a weak division. That run is over. Seattle is now building towards its next great team. That won't likely arrive in 2009. That won't likely arrive in 2010. Fans need to have a little faith. The NFL is cyclical.

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you can prep us all you want for another shitty season...

…but I don’t necessarily think it’s a given.

I pin a good 80% of our problems this year on injuries. Injuries of a scope that likely will not be seen again for quite a while.

Given the return of some healthy players, and a high-ranked draft, I can’t see why this team can’t be just as good or not better than some of the past few years. And DEFINITELY this year’s.

The real “X-factor” is Mora and the new staff. Can anyone be worse than Marshall, or Dehaven?

by djafrot on Dec 3, 2008 1:01 PM PST reply actions

I think there's a chance we could see a good season next year

it just seems that things are stacked against us a bit.

by BrianL on Dec 3, 2008 1:25 PM PST up reply actions

Well stated.

It’s not as if we are a turd team trying to remove ourselves from the dregs of the league’s bottom-feeders. We have both talent and a committed ownership that wants to put forth a winning product year in and year out. I have faith that we will recover from this disaster of a season, and could very well threaten for the division again next year. We have work to do, but it’s not like we’re the Lions or Bengals. We haven’t had the burden of a poor front-office or owner that has not a clue nor care how to put a winning team together. We have a lot of parts in place with this organization and not a ton of glaring weaknesses in personnel. We should have a lot of hope, yet tempered expectations, about next season.

by Misfit74 on Dec 3, 2008 2:20 PM PST up reply actions

I'm not in John's head but...

I don’t think he’s implying that we will be shitty again next year. I think the point was not to expect another 13 win, top seed season again. We would be hard pressed to do worse than this season, and I feel we have too much talent to repeat a 2-4 win season. That said, we do seem to be a team with enough holes that it will take a few years to get back to being close to the top of the NFC.

I fully believe that with a little re-tooling and a healthy team we can contend for the division and a playoff spot next year, but it might take a few years of solid drafting and offseason moves for us to be an NFL top dog.

by Badical Turbo Radness on Dec 3, 2008 3:25 PM PST up reply actions

he says "now building until its next great team", and that it won't be until 2011

I think that implies we’ll be pretty shitty for a while.

And I don’t know who around here is thinking we’ll be 13-3 next year. Most of the Hawks fans I see are pretty damned pessimistic. I’m probably one of the more optimistic ones I know.

by djafrot on Dec 3, 2008 10:18 PM PST up reply actions

I think we're arguing semantics and mincing adjectives

to me, great is 13-3, or similar. To have a great team, would mean that we dominate. There’s a lot of ground in between great and shitty.

by Badical Turbo Radness on Dec 3, 2008 10:22 PM PST up reply actions

i guess so... I must just be missing the overall point of the article.

by djafrot on Dec 3, 2008 11:45 PM PST up reply actions

The standard he set was 10 wins

I think is safe to say that it would be tough for the ‘Hawks to win 10 games next year. 8-8 is a long way from a 2 win season, but it certainly isn’t “Great.” Based on what we know of the NFL, it may be a couple years before this team is in the playoffs again.

by Jo-Jo on Dec 4, 2008 2:30 PM PST up reply actions

It's only probabilities

re injuries: how many of those other teams with losing records had similar excuses?

by Mr Fish on Dec 3, 2008 1:42 PM PST reply actions

Up and Down and thankfully back up again

The main thing to look at with this might not be wins specifically. 25 times in the last 7 years a team has had a bad season (< 7 wins) right after a very good season. (>9 wins). After those bad seasons the team immediately had a good season again 16 times, while continuing the trend with another bad season only 9 times. So, chances are, the team will be good again next year.

If you look at the graph only a couple teams have been immune to this up and down trend and the Hawks have been one of them. Hopefully they rebound like the Steelers of 2003, a good team with bad luck that got retooled with a good draft and continued their winning ways.

by gbutlerii on Dec 3, 2008 2:37 PM PST reply actions

I always started counting from 2003 when Hasselbeck solidified

But putting 2001 and 2002 in this context looks a lot better.

by Will Kier on Dec 3, 2008 2:57 PM PST reply actions

I've never bought into the idea of sports being cyclical

A team’s success is directly related to their personnel decisions and injuries. There are no magical underlying trends to why a team is good or bad. When you take out injury years most of those teams fall into two categories: teams that are managed well and teams that are managed poorly (Minnesotta and New Orleans fall into a third catergory of consistenly average) . The teams that are managed poorly stay on the bottom with rare exception (2005 Bengals, 2007 Browns, 2001 Giants and Bears), Teams that are managed well stay on top with rare exception (Titans 04-06 cap fiasco, Denver and Philly’s 07).

The teams that actually display any kind of cylical trends are generally teams that underwent management changes. The ‘07 Cardinals added Whisenhunt. Lovie was in his second season as head coach of the Bears in ’05. 2003 was the beginning of Del Rio’s time in Jacksonville and the second season of Fox in Carolina, while Oakland was one year removed from Gruden and San Francisco saw the end of the Garcia/TO/Mooch era.

The difficulty in maintaining greatness shouldn’t be confused with some kind of statistical force. Teams ran by Belichick, Parcells, Polian, Dungy, Gruden, Ruskell, or Shanahan shouldn’t expect any kind of sustained losing streak just because they’ve had a sustained winning streak. The Seahawks feel like they’re miles away from contention right now but realistically they’re just a smart offseason away from being in the mix for another division crown. It might sound like I’m being a pie in the sky optimist but it’s not about being a homer, it’s about expecting Tim Ruskell to continue to be one of the best GM’s in the league.

by Nate Dogg on Dec 3, 2008 7:42 PM PST reply actions

I like your outlook waaay better Nate...

why does John have to be such a downer? :-P

by JordonB on Dec 4, 2008 12:17 AM PST up reply actions

I don't know if he's being a downer,

He’s just being realistic. Even if we were completely healthy, we still wouldn’t have been as good as last year (see: this year’s relatively healthy but still shitty defense) when we were already Super Bowl pretenders to begin with. And with AZ’s improvement, its likely we would have been one or two wins shy of last year’s team (8-9 wins). We’re a far cry from our 2005 team, and with all due respect to Ruskell, he hasn’t put the same team together as Belichick/Pioli or Dungy/Polian. That’s no fault of his own, though, because you can’t just find Tom Brady’s and Peyton Manning’s easily. Ruskell may be “one of the best GM’s in the league” but no team outside of NE or Indy has really had a sustained winning streak without some bad years.

by SeaTownBlueDevil on Dec 5, 2008 4:11 AM PST up reply actions