Is it arrogance?

[mrt144]

Um, Fluke and Sweezy were both VERY cheap Free Agents that contributed big time last season.

This team has more pressing needs coming up than overpaying a free agent.
Wags, Russ, Frank, Reed etc. These are all guys that are very important to the future of this team.
You can't just go out and pay a safety 13 or 14 mil when he's not NEARLY as good as Earl was????
These players have earned their stripes with this team and are flat out priorities.

To pick up on this a bit - I feel like 2015-2017 could be termed "The Era of Too Many Studs". When you draft so many studs and their contract comes up, there is a salary cap benefit towards working on an extension ahead of FA. As such, there is a benefit to holding on to every stud you can when you can.

Ultimately that is undermined by two things: Injury and depth experience. In my mind, I think the injuries are obvious. Bar Wagz was there a Pro Bowl or All Pro calibre player drafted by the Hawks that didn't sustain a significant injury at some point on their 2nd contract?

More importantly though, it creates a vacuum of "Next Man Up". How was ET or RS or a handful of the cream we kept ever going to cede a snap to an understudy if not through injury? A core issue with the team is that the team was so top heavy in salary and talent that the understudies could never get a requisite amount of seasoning to rise to their potential. More bluntly, We had too many good starters at select positions to find better values among non starters, if possible. This compounds the issue with injury as now you have an unseasoned player out there, trying to carry the load of a bonafide stud and only seen as a stop gap until that stud gets back. Quizzically though, we were almost bereft of talent at other positions and it seemingly worked well enough because of Stud Power.

This raises the question: "How do you balance holding on to the studs against developing new studs with better salary terms?" I don't have an answer because I don't really have agency there, despite my wishes.

 

[SoulfishHawk]

Well, this front office has taken some serious blame for flat out FLUKE injuries. How in the hell can a front office know that Kam and Cliff (2 of your best players in their prime) were going to have to retire??? Other guys thru wear and tear get hurt, Earl TWICE, Sherm has his first injury etc. If they would have traded these guys away prior to that, many people would have been whining that they were "giving up" on great players etc. Yet they don't give up on them, and most of them get injured. Either way, it's not good enough for one side of the argument.

 

[TwistedHusky]

In hindsight, we are going to look back at a team stacked with HoF players. And as fans, we are going to look at that roster and see players that were equal or better than many recent HoF inductees - because HoF is almost more about longevity than greatness.

Then we are going to look at the record and wonder why, with all that greatness, we effectively did nothing after that 2nd SB. We'll know why, but we will never get that kind of a roster again. So sure, the FO will have fallen short.

But it is valid that the FO gets that credit for building that roster. Then they get the blame for failing to use it right and worse, pulling it apart before it needed to be.

This says nothing about how great the FO was in getting us to the SuperBowl. Everyone appreciates that in what might be one of the most dominant defenses of all time. But just like the Seahawks letting go of Kam or Sherman had nothing to do with the previous greatness, but more to do with the reasonable expectation of greatness forward?

That is why this argument exists.

Is the FO an aging Jay Buhner, once ripping home runs all over for a short period of time but now making more and more strikeouts, rarely hitting home runs, and now starting make some costly errors?

Or is it Griffey in his prime? And people are just upset about the strikeouts even though every player but Edgar is going to strike out occasionally?

Or it is more like Brett Boone, ridiculously dangerous for years then peaking, and finally no longer near as effective because of a fundamental change (like a lack of PEDs or a change in the FO when they let an important guy go)

And what even defines success? Is SB appearances a realistic measure? Or more a function of matchups?

How much should we have expected from that roster? And how much credit does that FO/coaching staff deserve for building that roster that they kept having trouble meeting expectations with lately?

It is reasonable to expect future success when they had to have all these amazing players to achieve it? Or are we expecting they can do that again even though they seem to have struggled with this for years?

 

[mrt144]

Well, this front office has taken some serious blame for flat out FLUKE injuries. How in the hell can a front office know that Kam and Cliff (2 of your best players in their prime) were going to have to retire??? Other guys thru wear and tear get hurt, Earl TWICE, Sherm has his first injury etc. If they would have traded these guys away prior to that, many people would have been whining that they were "giving up" on great players etc. Yet they don't give up on them, and most of them get injured. Either way, it's not good enough for one side of the argument.

Totally! There is no foresight on catastrophic injuries. The howls would have been wild if the Hawks didn't re-up contracts with any of the studs they drafted.

I guess what I'm shooting for and what I don't have answer to is the following: Is there a conceivable way to make a top heavy team less brittle to the possibility of a catastrophic injury? I don't know that there is and that might be the just desserts for pulling in a haul and re-upping them.

 

[chris98251]

Arrogance is buying that Lear Jet but not knowing how to fly it. Or 5 carat diamond for the wife just because you can but is it really practical when you need to hirer security to go with her everywhere so she doesn't get robbed?

Sounds like a lot of that in this thread, Pete and John develop players, they have more a lets get a talented across the board roster rather then a elite guy at two positions, those guys they develop can turn into the elite guys if we keep working with them as proven with the LOB years.

 

[MontanaHawk05]

Think about how we view this front office like how they view the players on the team. If a player had two amazing seasons five years ago but was steadily declining the team might cut that player. I think that we all would agree that the team shouldn't keep players on the roster for what they did in the past. A lot of the arguments against me was that since this regime led to Super Bowl victories that we should continue to have faith in them. I don't consider that optimism. I consider that sentimentality. Like, I LOVED Lofa Tatupu, but I thought that the Hawks made the right choice in releasing him. The same thinking should be applied to coaches and GMs.

There's a difference between supporting PCJS out of nostalgia and supporting them because they've proven they can win Super Bowls with their current quarterback and current philosophy in the same conditions that applied five or six years ago. I'm doing the latter.

It's difficult to compare the Seahawks to Lofa Tatupu for a variety of reasons...

1. Individual players and team philosophies don't necessarily atrophy the same way. If Tatupu is getting older, then there's every reason to think that he'll never be the player he used to be. That doesn't have to be the same of philosophies. It could be, but that's a separate argument, and not the one you're making.

2. Tatupu wasn't the best LB of all time. Your comparison of a philosophy to a player would work better if Tatupu was the greatest LB of all time (as an analog to the Seahawks winning a Super Bowl). If Tatupu had been that, and especially if injury had simply derailed him temporarily without any evidence of lost potential, you can bet the team would be more hesitant to part ways with him.

3. Cutting Tatupu is contingent on demonstrating that he's declining in quality. Pete's philosophy hasn't declined in quality. A lot of people are looking at the fact that Seattle hasn't kept appearing in the NFC championship for the past four seasons as proof that there's been a decline. I would argue otherwise. No team can make the conference championship every year and the teams that do, do so by luck as much as by team composition or coaching.

I personally view the Seahawks' current quality as akin to Russell Wilson's 2016. He put on weight intentionally over the offseason and it backfired; he got hurt and it robbed him of some quality. But he bounced back. The conditions around him had not changed significantly and the game had not passed him by, so he was able to return to greatness the following two seasons.

Same with the Seahawks themselves. It's a temporary roadblock, created by the NECESSITY of reloading the roster. This roadblock was always going to come. Only the Patriots have been able to overcome that challenge with such consistency, and it's taken the greatest HC/QB combination of all time to do it.