FanPost

2023 will be the final year of the Seahawks' current run of greatness.

Every franchise wants to have a great team. Once you have a great team, the question becomes how long you can sustain it and how much you can win in the meantime. So I was wondering how long the current run under Pete Carroll and John Schneider would last.

Fortunately, it's easy to predict the future if there is no requirement that your predictions be correct. So let's press onward.

I have discovered a little-known provision in the NFL rules that requires the Seahawks to be terrible every 16 years, or more precisely in any season in which the year number is 8 modulo 16. Bill Belichick was the only other person aware of this rule--and was planning to surprise the league by invoking it when the Seahawks play the Patriots in 2024.

Don't believe that such a rule exists? Well then, let's look at the historical record. The first incident of this came in 1976, when the Seahawks were an expansion franchise. They went 2-12 and got outscored by 200 points on the season. Yep, terrible, but about what you'd expect from an expansion franchise.

The next incidence came in 1992, when the Seahawks went 2-14. The defense didn't get the memo that they were supposed to be terrible, and was actually quite good. Cortez Kennedy won defensive player of the year and by advanced metrics, the Seahawks had one of the few best defenses in the league. The offense compensated for this by being perhaps the worst NFL offense since the replacement players strike season. That's how you get 2-14 in spite of an elite defense.

And then came 2008. A record of 4-12 doesn't look as bad as a two-win season, but the Seahawks that year were so bad that their awfulness poisoned the other Seattle sports. The Mariners lost 101 games that year. The UW football team went winless. The Sonics fled town before the NFL season started to avoid the taint. Awfulness is supposed to get you a high draft pick, but the Seahawks got Aaron Curry in the 2009 draft, not much of a consolation prize. So yeah, that was worse than the record looked.

But the good news is that the terrible season every 16 years doesn't have to be the conclusion of a long run of awfulness. They'll be terrible once every 16 years, not for 16 years at a time. In the 2007 season, the Seahawks were 10-6 and won a playoff game. In 1991, they were only 7-9, but they did score more points than they allowed. In 1975, my spreadsheet reports that they had a winning percentage of #DIV/0!

If you accept that the rebuild needs to happen and get on with it, you don't have to stay terrible. The 2008 debacle was followed by great drafts in 2010, 2011, and 2012 and a fun game with everyone's favorite NFL score of 43-8 to conclude the 2013 season.

So if you're wondering when PCJS will move on and our current stars will be gone, see the thread title.

(To state the hopefully obvious, this post is satire.)