Treating the Seahawks like a high school football team.

What is with some of these posts? Bench Wilson? Start Rawls? Trying to hold on to lightning in a bottle by changing who starts at QB and RB when there there are obvious issues on the team outside of that is what maybe a high school coach would do, hell even college.

This is the NFL folks,it's madness to throw these things out in earnest when RW isn't or Marshawn aren't even having objectively disastrous games.

Some of this is weird.

We are not Mariner fans.

Treating winning as a birthright is bizarre in itself. This is a team full of very good players that is held back by fundamental flaws. You can overcome flaws but first you have to acknowledge them.

It baffled me that people just wanted to overlook all the problems that were evident in preseason, as if they had never watched football before or that teams that cannot execute in preseason magically can do so. But people had visions of dynasties and 12 SBs in a row, even though the data staring them in face said that was not going to happen.

We knew, or should have known, making the SB this year was going to be an unhill climb. An almost impossible one, considering the obstacles and the data. It doesn't mean they suck and we are not the Browns, Bears or Lions with literally no hope or trashed rosters.

We are a team full of gaps. And we are team full of great players where the whole is not near the sum of the parts. But we still have players that know how to play and know how to win. We also had outsized expectations, and frankly a sense of entitlement that had no basis in reality. To be good this year would have been to buck a trend that has existed for over a decade, at least.

When you lose coaches or change coaches, there are always growing pains. It was ridiculous to assume the defense would just be the same. It isn't. It is average. It is actually above average but very brittle, and gets easily exploited at the end of games. We pin winning on our defense, so the lack of it meant we were going to slide. It wasn't that they wanted to lose Quinn, but in losing him - they were going to slip backwards.

Wilson developed at a tremendous clip, aided by a HOF RB that took a lot of pressure off him. And also aided by a defense that assured when he couldn't keep a drive going, the other team was going to be held in check. We do not have that now, and so when Wilson cannot covert - we can only hold the other team for so long. How much of Wilson's stratospheric development was sustainable? People plateau, they develop unevenly. This team bet big on Wilson and we have to hope it pays off, but we didn't help ourselves by gutting his line for some idiotic reason.

However, this is a team that tried to win. And it is a team with a good coach, and winning usually folllows good coaches. This is just a year where the expectations are nowhere near what they should have been. This is still a team that can compete for a wildcard if they fix things. It isn't built to go far in the playoffs and won't, but it isn't like they suck - they just have some large problems they have to quit pretending don't exist.

That doesn't mean you pull down your Seahawk flags or quit wearing your jerseys. It just means we are more even with the rest of the league from now on.

Seriously, the expectations were through the roof because it was assumed that we could once again MinMax on offense and our defense was great through talent and desire alone.

It's hard to know if RW has plateaued unless you're saying this is as good as he gets with the OC and cheapness of the front office in supporting position groups since it's all he knows. I can agree with that, RW is as good as he will be right now.

I just think it is unsustainable what we expected and still expect of Wilson.

The stories of Wilson putting in long 12 hour+ days in film study are legion. But in all that work, it made him great.

Thing is, when you do that - you burn out. I know, my typical day is 7am to 12am - lots of little breaks between but I never stop working - I have a lot of projects. To keep balanced, I will pop on here from time to time. It is a homepage of sorts. Fair enough, it centers me, recharges me a little but even then...I will have a day or few days I have to step back and do nothing.

there is no way that we could or should have expected Wilson would continue to put in 12-16 hour days. Especially someone with so many distractions tugging at his time.

So of course his results would drop.

Then again, we dismantled his line because Cable seems to believe "college kids don't learn enough so lets just bring in a bunch of guys we found in a dumpster who know nothing". Maybe that works for 1 player at a time, I think Sweezy was doing OK in progressing into a good player until we surrounded him with other guys that had no idea what the hell they were doing and so half the line is collapsing or confused at any given time. And predictably Sweezy regressed and even guys like Okung, who should be playing well in a contract year, regressed. I don't think Okung is at fault, I think the FO put idiotic expectations on Cable and he was forced to make chicken salad out of chicken sh*t. So now the line is sh*t salad.

So we cannot run, which removes the play action that Russ needs to even be effective unless HE runs. Which means he can never develop his other areas of skill dev like progressions, audibles, reading defenses, adjusting to the blitz, etc.

So then we have an offense with no pass threat and little run threat. Which is great because Bevell will then call an empty backfield halfback double reverse toss to the peanut vendor.

Cable and Bevell big problems for our passing game. The question to ask is Bevell the reason for our great run offense or was it Cable? The second is, unless we acknowledge that we went cheap on the line and now it is not just our greatest weakness but THE weakness - we are not going to win.

We let Carpenter go and traded Unger and literally had no backups for them. Without an effective or even borderline capable line NO QB can be successful. So shockingly neither is Wilson. Unless we can somehow find 3-4 offensive linemen, this problem is not fixing either.

Playing football without a competent line is like sailing with a broken mast - it doesn't work and no amount of pretending it does fixes that.

It was a risk that paid off until now which is clear based on the complete lack of experience at OL and nothing but homegrown WRs who likely suffer from being coached to the system exclusively - the almost steadfast refusal to bring in outside talent that will help in basic ways. This team has been riding a tiger of MinMaxing on offense.