The thing that pure football fans don't get about this team is that it's been built of different stuff. Seattle possesses an entirely different chemistry in terms of its makeup and motivation than other teams. Where the rest of the league runs on benzene, we purr on diesel. Sure, the game is the same across the league, but what creates the combustion that makes things go is different in the PNW.
Ad much as I am often frustrated by Pete's sometimes too optimistic approach for it being idealistic, I also know that it's only seen as idealistic because it doesn't work for everyone. And therein lies the issue with appreciating it and evaluating it.other teams are constructed on easy to measure, football metrics. Pete's teams are measured somewhere outside of that, in the ether of what makes sport special to begin with. So for as angry as I sometimes am that we get beat in stupid ways, I also am reminded quite often that when the recipe works it is difficult to stop. It's just been a struggle to get the 'mix' right with this new group, between players and coaches.
I'm probably more turned on and tuned in to exactly what Pete is preaching because in my career, I've employed a lot of the same approach to team building and tapping into the strength of the human condition that Pete does.
There is literally science behind what he's doing. And it's not some fabricated, NCAA based, rah rah wishful thinking way of doing things. Folks like Peter Senge, a professor at MIT and author and thinker on strategies to harness the intangible strength in the human condition and between people in team settings.
An excerpt from wiki on Senge:
Throughout his career, Peter has been asking, “how do we create the conditions for people to work together at their best, cultivating the innate systems intelligence that is our birthright but is all but lost in modern culture?” As an engineer by training, his work has always emphasized tools and methods, not for their own sake but as vehicles for building individual and collective capacities.
I post this only because what this FO is often so misunderstood that it's difficult to evaluate and likely won't be appreciated in the grand scheme of things (across the NFL) for a long time. Sure. The results are what they are. But it's not as though there aren't but a handful of teams that rise above the ranks of the very good every year to be great. By that I mean that while we have underachieved to a degree, we also are better than most. I'm not satisfied with that, but I know that neither is anyone in the FO.
We can all ride KCs nuts for being as good as they've been. But how good were they before they got Patrick? And for Reid, I seem to remember him struggling through some lean years in Philly before he got Donovan.
The Packers? For all the creativity and dominance they once dished out, how good are they without Rodgers? How many titles have the won even with him since 2000?
I could go on.
We can lament our situation all we want. But it could very easily be worse. And only in very few circumstances could it have been much better. Unless we actually believe we should have won a championship, post LOB? Save for 2019 and 2020, I don't think this team was built for it after 2015. And if you consider that it took 4 years for Pete to cobble together a good enough roster to actual make a run after 4 years following 2015, that's not unimpressive. What makes it look bad that we didn't, is in part, a warped perspective on how the qb position over that period performed. #3 was both a blessing and a curse. There were other factors like the complete dessimatiom of our backfield that few teams could have overcome, but that somehow gets lost in the shuffle when evaluating how good this staff has actually been.
It's very easy to look back on Pete's tenure here and the moves that the FO was trying to make and see that
Ver 1.0 of the team took Pete 3 years to take from garbage dweller to champion and what should have been multiple championships. That lasted from 2010 to 2015.
Ver2.0, Pete reconstructed after the LOB dismantling and took from 2015 to 2019 to position for a real run. And, in 2019 and 2020 we failed in the end, but that failure falls far too much on the shoulders of Pete and some system failure as it does on the failure of an offense to function effectively... for the same reason the one in Denver now fails and has resulted in a team that is reliant on a strong defense to succeed (sound familiar?). And that doesnt forgive a defense that became far too leaky. But we didnt HAVE to be great in every facet of the game. We just had to be good enough and complimentary enough in all of them to succeed. And i think we should have been that.
Folks forget that in 2020, we had arguably one of the most talented rosters in the league. That's not me stating opinion. Tyler and Dickson were snubbed and we were still only behind the Ravens in ProBowl votes.
If you can bring yourself to accept these arcs of development, rather than seeing everything post LOB as some protracted experiment in failure (which requires looking at ME3 as something more of an obstacle than a savior - which btw, John Schneider saw him as in 2019) then moves like adding JA make a hell of a lot more sense. The team was primed to win in 2019 and 2020, and he was seen as the steel that would galvanize the defensive side of the ball enough to give us a shot. What happened after in the complete unraveling of Russ and the culture break that ensued needs to be viewed in the proper context. He was supposed to be the finishing piece for the old engine. When he was extended, that was STILL the mindset. Now? His place here makes less sense now.
And now, Pete has again, well within the 4 year span that he took initially and between 2015 and 2020, but on track with what he did between 2010 and 2013, positioned this team to be competitive. He in some ways is a victim of his own success, having extracted what he did from this group in year one of what is now year 2 of V3 of PCs Hawks.
It can look great at times. It can look bad at times. At times, it can seem disjointed and illogical. But in some ways, evaluating it all from the outside is akin to lifting the hood of a diesel powered car and expecting to see and measure the performance of gas powered components- agree that's probably not the best example. But if you dig into sport psych and additionally, the philosophy of the 'other Peter' Peter Senge and other contemporary experts on the human condition, it might make a bit more sense.
At the end of it all, seeing it all the way I do. As frustrated as it sometimes can be to watch this team go through its struggles, I have to just remind myself that sometimes the cause for what I'm seeing as failure might nit be what on the surface it appears to be. Because in the end, what's under that surface is just flat different than what we might expect.
He deserves the space to see this ver3.0, through.
