Why You Shouldn’t Cheer For: The Seattle Seahawks

By J-Dub and Meehan

As part of Sports Blog Movement’s Super Bowl coverage, we are taking a page from J-Dubs own blog Dubsism. There, he made it a point to depart from the usual Super Bowl bluster; we aren’t here to tell you a bunch of shit about who’s going to win, why there going to win, and we sure as shit aren’t getting into those godawful “human interest” story about some third-string linebacker whose kid has a disease you never heard of.

This year, J-Dub is teaming up with SBM Managing Editor Ryan Meehan, whose dyspeptic rants make for the perfect complement to  J-Dubs’ “crabby old man” bullshit. As far as the Super Bowl is concerned, this means SBM will be taking the Dubsism bit about telling you why you shouldn’t cheer for either contestant, and giving it the twist only SBM can give you.

Having said that, here’s why you shouldn’t cheer for the Seattle Seahawks.

1) The Seahawks have gotten to this point by relying on their fanbase, which is more than just a bit annoying.

Dear Mr. Lincecum, We regret to inform you that your medical marijuana card issued in another state is not valid in New Jersey.

There is some solace here because we are convinced the Seahawks fanbase is not going to travel well.  Not all Seahawks fans are multi-millionaire, multi-Cy Young award winning pitchers who love bong hits and microwave burritos. Most Seahawks fans just love bong hits and microwave burritos.  The crowd in MetLife Stadium won’t be Seattle stoners whipped up on Red Bull, they will be stockbrokers who will be headed to the headed seats in their Lexus SUVs because they have grown tired of listening to their wives bitch about how cold it is.

The element of weakness for the Seahawks in all of this isn’t just because their fans won’t be there to support them, but because in general it’s silly for a big-league professional sports franchise needing to rely on that sort of thing.  It’s not true football competition in the sense that at some point, it stops being a gridiron struggle and starts being a contest to see how many times you can force a false start or a delay of game penalty. That’s why for some reason the 12th man sort of takes away from the whole competitive nature of the game because it switches the focus from strategy to being  loud and fucking obnoxious.

Not to mention, that fan base not only insults the ears, it rapes the eyes as well.  Picture a bunch stoned lunatics wearing every type of green wig imaginable standing next to a bunch of other stoned lunatics dressed liked what can only be described as a neon birds moments after it hit your windshield. You’d rather un-repress the junior-high memory of the time you were molested by a clown at the state fair. Honestly, football teams should pride themselves on being football teams, not leaning on a group of 70,000 psychotic bong-suckers to show up every Sunday and get rowdy to the point where undercover police officers hang out in the stands wearing the opposing team’s jerseys to spot prime DUI candidates.

Making Raider fans look normal in comparison since the demise of the Kingdome. Yeah, we can’t believe we just said that either.

2) The lack of a “big name” offensive player draws the casual fan away from rooting for a team like this.

Let’s be honest, the Seahawks don’t really have a guy who is going to touch the ball on every drive that can draw the ratings like Peyton Manning. Remember two years ago when ESPN started a channel dedicated exclusively to Manning’s neck bones?  They thought it could have been Percy Harvin, but it’s becoming apparent that he may very well be constructed out of toothpicks and wood glue, and with his history of injuries, the medicinal marijuana card he’s going to get may cause wide-spread shortages of the “chronic” throughout the Pacific Northwest.  Look for Harvin to be generating most of his income as a side-show attraction with Rob Gronkowski at  WWE events as early as 2016.

Then there’s Russell Wilson. Wilson is very athletic, but he just doesn’t seem to have the stroke needed to become a superstar in this league. We’ll expound on this in a bit, but suffice it to say even though he will be playing in a game that hundreds of quarterbacks better than him never did, even if he wins, nobody is going to give a shit.

That leaves Marshawn Lynch.

Below we’re going to show you a picture from the inside of an athletic store in a shopping mall in Western Illinois.   Although this area is not particularly a hotbed for vans of sports teams in the Pacific Northwest, it will prove a point that we have regarding the way running backs are viewed when it comes to level of excitement.

Now, there are a couple of things that you might notice about that picture.  First of all, Lynch’s jersey is the only one left on the wall,  and as you can see there is still a wide selection to  choose from. The second thing that you’ve probably noticed is that all of the other jerseys have been sold, likely to a Bears fan that is not drunk enough to swipe his credit card for a bright orange Jay Cutler rag, but still drunk enough to think that $140 is a fair asking price for a stitched piece of cloth bearing the name of the world’s least concerned diabetic athlete.

So, what did we learn from this exercise? We’ve learned that even great running backs don’t get a whole lot of airtime anymore, especially if they are on bad teams.  But even if they are on a Super Bowl team; they can still not be the focus of an offense that doesn’t have an impressive set of wide receivers. When he’s healthy, Adrian Peterson may be the greatest athlete in the game today, but that doesn’t mean for one second that anyone is going to care as long as Christian Ponder and Josh Freeman are on his team and involved in something that isn’t a suicide pact.  That’s also the case with Lynch because he should be insanely popular by now. He should be one of the biggest stars in the league.  Instead, a lot of fans simply view him as a bruiser that relies on power as opposed to quickness.

Hurting, not helping…

Not to mention, Lynch is probably not being helped by his association with a candy that produces the weirdest commercials since those  short-lived Frosted Flakes ads in which Tony the Tiger was inexplicably wearing a strap-on.

3) The Russell Wilson problem.

To make a long story short, Russell Wilson might not be all that he’s cracked up to be.

It’s not going to be easy to take a pot-shot at a guy who seems like a decent dude and handles himself with a lot of grace and un-Sherman-like behavior (another thing we will come back to later). But we are going to do it anyway.  The Seahawks finished the regular season ranked 26th in passing, with Wilson only averaging 202 yards per game in the air. In most of those games, a lot of those stats are inflated due to the fact that most of that yardage came on one or two large passing plays from scrimmage. So, what does that tell you? It tells you that his mid-range game consists of guys like Derrick Coleman, largely because Percy Harvin can’t stay healthy longer than a re-run of “Who’s the Boss?”

No…not that Derrick Coleman.

In the NFC Championship game, we also lost a little bit of faith in Wilson due to his lack of understanding of where the pocket is located and what the rules are when it comes to intentional grounding.  If the ball doesn’t get back to the line of scrimmage, it’s a “spot foul” penalty.  This means it might be time for Wilson to go back and get his fake Master’s degree (just like Richard Sherman sort of did or didn’t do).

4) The real reason Richard Sherman is a dick. 

Speaking of which, truth be told, Richard Sherman is a major non-issue.  The same bullshit nature of mainstream sports media that led to the invention of this blog is exactly the same reason why the average ESPN watcher thinks Sherman is a “Ron Jeremy with a Viagra-infused penis pump”-level dick.  Naturally all that is based on that post-NFC Championship game interview with Erin Andrews.  That take is more stale than the croutons in a Golden Corral salad bar, and Meehan already tackled the overreaction to that story.

Then there’s the fact that hating on a guy who walks around all day talking about how he has haters everywhere and saying shit like “U mad, bro?” only gives him what he wants.  In other words, the whole post-game interview obfuscates the real reason why Sherman is a dick. He’s not a dick for calling out a douch-nozzle like Michael Crabtree; Sherman is a dick  because he’s trying to hard to be an internet meme, and nobody should strive for that.

There’s no excuse for pandering to a level of satire than can be mastered by 14-year-olds. Unless you are a blogger…

5) Champ Bailey doesn’t play for the Seahawks.

This one is all about Meehan, who just happens to have a huge man-crush on Champ Bailey. Don’t even try to fucking judge him for that; all male sports fans have man-crushes. Lord knows J-Dub has had his share.

Anyway, Bailey has been in the league for fifteen years, and he’s been on some teams that were a better definition of the term “garbage” than the one offered by an unabridged version of Webster’s Dictionary.  One would think simply having to pretend like he was cool with answering questions about Tim Tebow without bursting into uncontrollable laughter would be more than enough reason to root for the guy, but you have to be completely heartless to not love the size of the smile on his face when they interviewed him after the AFC Championship game. He’s a guy who has really hung around, stuck to his training regimen, and finally gotten the post-season resume that he has worked so hard to achieve.

Here’s why the whole Champ Bailey thing matters to more than just misty-eyed lovers like  Meehan. Back in Super Bowl XXXI, future Hall-Of-Fame quarterback Brett Favre led the Green Bay Packers to a 35-21 victory over the New England Patriots. Desmond Howard was named Super Bowl MVP for his game-changing special-teams performance. Having said all that, everybody knows that the Lombardi Trophy is one of the greatest team prizes in sports, but many don’t know that one of the greatest accolades for players is to be given the game ball from the Super Bowl.  Given what you just read, you will never guess who was awarded the game ball from Super Bowl XXXI.

Give yourself a pat on the back if you said Don Beebe.  Beebe was a member of those Buffalo Bills teams that went to four straight Super Bowls and found a way to come up short every time. He lost four Super Bowls with the Bills, and yet he’s more  famous as the guy who should have died for bouncing directly off his brain and stripping Leon Lett of a sure Super Bowl touchdown.

What a lot of people forget is that Beebe ended his career with the Packers, and just happened to do so during the year Green Bay went all the way. Originally, the game ball had been handed to Brett Favre, but Favre found Beebe and gave him it to him.

Meehan would love to see the same thing happen to Bailey. He’s a twelve-time Pro Bowler, has recorded 925 tackles and 52 interceptions in his career, but most importantly has done the whole thing with a tremendous amount of respect and grace and has never been in trouble once. If anything, it would kind of be cool to see him pick off a couple passes; that is if Seattle decides to throw the ball more than twice.

However, if you are the kind of person who hates this sort of “feel-good” story, skip the Super Bowl and spend your Sunday kicking handicapped babies and puppies.