Maelstrom787":1929hlap said:
It's not that people don't have a right to complain, it's that people have grown so disgruntled with relative success that it's hard to speak in even remotely positive terms about the team without a select group of usual suspects coming in to detract from the conversation, usually with points irrelevant to the topic of discussion that derail the thread.
I had been living among another fan base who had recently won their first Super Bowl before the Seahawks won theirs and a chunk of our fan base has taken on the same thing they had going.
For so long we were just happy to even get a playoff berth because in a "good year" the team was "still in the hunt" (almost always needing lots of help from other teams to get in). I remember thinking "man, they almost won a playoff game!" in that OT loss to the Packers with Holmgren.
But once they won a Super Bowl (and went to another one after that) a lot of the fan base flipped to where the other team's fans I was living around were at: anything short of a Super Bowl win would have a lot of them in a pretty negative state. I thought this would probably be the case and it is.
A lot of the posters here will insist that they just need to see improvement/deeper in the the playoffs. But if this team consistently loses in NFC championship games/divisional games instead of divisional/wild card games are those people going to be less disgruntled? For most of them, I really doubt it. I don't think they're being honest with themselves.
I don't think there are many "whatever the team's GM and coach does is awesome!" types. I've seen them but there aren't that many; I feel like there are way more of the "just dump this person and this person now" types, probably because it's easier to be negative. It's easier to be negative because winning is hard because there are 32 teams and its so competitive. Even the bad teams can get some wins; the worst teams really aren't that much worse than the best teams. This isn't college football.
Most of us ride the excitement/disappointment/praise/criticism cycle at various levels. I regularly pointed out most of the 2019 season about the defense dragging the team down (and the first half of the 2020 season). I'm not mad about it, I just recognized that giving up 30 PPG was a serious death sentence and no amount of "Let Russ Cook" was going to sustain much, as evidenced from some bad games in the middle of the season.
I thought giving up a fourth round pick for Marshawn Lynch seemed stupid. And after being so wrong about that, I just sort of gave up trying to analyze and figure out whether things were good or bad on the fly.
I'm at the point (and I've been here for awhile) where I'm not going to try to analyze every single item and turn it into some strategic explanation with maximum confirmation bias about how the team is doing. I don't know, and neither do the other people here. We don't know what's actually going on in the building, and there are so many variables on an NFL team and the league that the idea of us having it "figured out" is ludicrous. It may be fun to speculate, but we don't know.
I have gotten very good at finding enjoyment in individual games, events, etc. during the season. This team might not win another Super Bowl in my lifetime (and I'm really not that old). I'm not going to waste every season being disgruntled because something something. I'd like to see them be better, and there are moments where I'm like "what?" but I've got it pretty good at this point with a team that isn't an utter laughing stock and is competitive nearly every game and every year.
