Seahawks

The Seahawks are becoming increasingly frustrating to watch.  For starters, there has been so much roster churn over the last 2 years that there are fewer and fewer players who have been around long enough that I give a crap about them.  I have to wonder how big a negative impact that is having on jersey sales.  Why would you buy one when there's no telling who will be here from one year to the next.  More importantly, I'm really beginning to wonder if Pete Carroll and John Schneider have any idea what they're doing.  Winning cures a lot of things, and so I gave them the benefit of the doubt last year, but this year the team is performing worse than the much maligned team they took over a couple years ago. 

I will admit that I've been impressed with the performance of the defense, particularly since they spend 2/3 of every game on the field.  They could use some better pass rushing (I'm still bitter about not drafting Da'Quan Bowers), and Brandon Browner can't cover anyone without holding and bumping them all down the field, still, the defense has been impressive.  The offense, on the other hand, has been abysmal.  The running game is worse than ever, and the passing game is a joke.  I still can't wrap my mind around how, with better quarterbacks available, management brought in bad QBs two years in a row while vociferously proclaiming both saviors of the franchise.  Is their talent evaluation really that bad?  Worse than the average knucklehead on the internet who can't complete a sentence without attempting grammar genocide (see Field Gulls for examples of barely literate know it alls)?

More troubling, however, is the questionable play calling.  I don't know if it's a play calling issue or an execution issue, but it is really head scratching how we can have several talented ball catchers on the team - Mike Williams, Sidney Rice, and Zach Miller are all very productive but somehow we can't get them the ball.  And I can't, for the life of me, understand why we aren't throwing jump balls on short yardage plays.  Mike Williams is 6'5", Sidney Rice is 6'4", Kris Durham is 6'6", Zach Miller is 6'5", can you really tell me that we can't get a height mismatch with one of them if we put them all in?  And Kris Durham had a 35" vertical leap at the combine on top of the height!  Yet we haven't even tried it.  And Pete Carroll's propensity for head scratching play calls - like running a draw on 4th down with 14 seconds on the clock and no remaining time outs - continue to be a cause for concern.  In post game interviews he always makes comments about them being emotional calls.  Shouldn't a head coach be in control of his emotions enough to make logical calls?

Penalties and mental mistakes are signs of poor coaching, and both have been plentiful this season.  There were 5 or 6 false starts in Sunday's game against the Bengals, which is bad for an away game in a loud stadium but completely inexcusable at home.  And I thought the bone-headed personal fouls would stop after we traded Aaron Curry, but we still are giving away yards with Red Bryant head butting an opponent in front of a ref and Brandon Browner flipping Jerome Simpson - during a time out!  And I still can't figure out why there was so much pushing and shoving going on with the Bengals, we don't play them often enough for there to be any bad blood.  The Seahawks are just out of control right now.  After leading the team to a playoff win, I've been willing to give Pete Carroll a long leash, but I'm really beginning to question if he has what it takes to coach in the NFL. 

Finally, I was in attendance at Sunday's game and didn't get any kind of explanation why the Bengals didn't get the ball on the 1 yard line after Andy Dalton threw it at the ref in the second quarter.  I can't, for the life of me, figure out how that was not either a fumble or a backward pass, but for some inexplicable reason the Bengals ended up with the ball at the original line of scrimmage (somewhere around the 17 or 18 if memory serves me correctly).  For the love of God, can somebody explain to me what the hell happened?  Did the officials rule it a forward pass despite the fact that it unquestionably went backwards (several yards backward)?