Pete Carroll confirms Geno Smith will be Seahawks’ Week 1 starting quarterback

The quarterback competition (that never really was?) is over.

In the post-game press conference on Friday night, Pete Carroll confirmed that Geno Smith maintained his lead over Drew Lock and he’s going to be the starter on opening night against Russell Wilson and the Denver Broncos on September 12th.

Carroll cited Smith’s familiarity with Shane Waldron’s offense as well as taking care of the ball among the reasons that he prevailed over Lock. In this preseason, Smith’s drives only yielded 13 points whereas Lock’s drives got 34 — yes, the context of who they were playing with and the depth charts they were playing against is absent here. Of course, Smith had no turnovers whereas Lock had three interceptions (one of which clearly wasn’t his fault) against the Dallas Cowboys and a costly fumble against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

In camp, Smith has worked with the first-team almost exclusively, while Lock was working with backups. The one time he had sustained first-team reps he ended up getting COVID-19 and thus couldn’t start against the Chicago Bears last Thursday. Based on the training camp reports it doesn’t seem like Lock ever really was in the mix to win the job from Geno, and while Carroll didn’t doubt that Lock can play football, he didn’t give him the job.

Seven years removed from his last full-time starting job, Smith is now tasked with being the Seahawks’ immediate successor to Russell Wilson.