I’m convinced that Marshawn Lynch is irreplaceable. I know. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Running backs are a dime a dozen in the NFL. Overpaying for a ball carrier is flat-out silly. They’re like iPods, those running backs. The battery life is short, and there’s seemingly a new version out every other year. Why waste your money on an old one when a fresher, cheaper, sleeker model is ready to come off the line as we speak?
It’s foolish, really. Marshawn Lynch should be replaceable. There should be a thousand Marshawn Lynches out there. Maybe they’re still in college. Maybe they’re on some other team’s practice squad. Maybe they’re backing up a Hall of Famer somewhere. But they should be around.
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Once upon a time, there was this little show on ABC called Growing Pains. What a great effing show that was. Basically, it was the all-American situational comedy, or “sitcom,” as those of us who remember such shows fondly call them.
The premise of Growing Pains was simple. You had this family, the Seavers, and they grew as a unit, albeit painfully. Okay, maybe that’s an oversimplification of the title, but whatever.
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Life is imperfect. In every way, shape, and form, there is nothing ideal about what we do every day.
We make mistakes, we err, we’re judged by our flaws, and we overcome adversity that serves to remind us that we are only human. In the end, we reach an equally imperfect outcome and, ironically, are remembered in death for all the good we’ve done. We celebrate life only once its ended. While we’re breathing, however, we disregard such achievement, striving instead to find perfection.
Perfection. It is something that does not exist. Knowing full well we’ll never find it, we search for it anyway. All the while we remain blissfully ignorant to what it really is that we’re searching for.
Perfection is impossible. We demand the impossible from one another. We look for the impossible in our spare time. We do everything we can to become the best versions of ourselves, never thinking for a minute that the best versions of ourselves might not be that hard to attain. We’re never satisfied. We’re rarely pacified. We can’t accept failure. We reject disappointment. We are, in a word, foolish.
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The “Suck for Luck” campaign is a popular one with a simple premise: root for your NFL team to suck, so they may find themselves in better position to draft Stanford quarterback (and expected 2012 No. 1 overall draft pick) Andrew Luck. It’s a fad that’s sweeping the nation…or at least cities across the nation with mediocre-to-bad football teams.
Your 2011 Seattle Seahawks were once thought to be among the favorites in the Suck for Luck sweepstakes. Armed with two question-mark quarterbacks, a fragile offensive line, and the youngest roster in the league, there was no denying that all the pieces were in place for a sucky Luckfest.
Alas, five games into the new year, the Hawks may very well be better than anyone expected. With a 2-3 record under their belt, they are less sucky than nine other teams across the vast expanse of the NFL.
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*Editor’s note: Periodically, we will be presenting you work from accomplished scribes behind the guise of the mysterious Writer X. The idea here is that we give our talented journalists the freedom to say what they want about who they want without fear of retribution. Were they to pen these thoughts under their own names, they could face serious repercussions. Writer X, however, is perfectly immune to it all. Enjoy the candor.
“He knows the offense.”
That’s what we’ve heard over and over and f**king over.
Tarvaris Jackson was signed this offseason by Pete Carroll, John Schneider, and the Seattle Seahawks to replace Matt (sic; Matthew) Hasselbeck to be the new quarterback for a team coming off an absurd playoff berth and first round victory. Charlie Whitehurst, whom the team traded a third round pick for just a year prior and led the team to a must-win Week 17 victory over the St. Louis Rams, was left completely out of the equation.
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I love this city, but we have a problem.
As much as we’d all like to pretend we’re the best fans in the sports universe, we’re not. There are too many of us who let emotion get in the way of logic. We have a tendency to run to Facebook and Twitter and put our teams on blast with every move they make. We can’t discern good from bad, positive from negative. We lack knowledge. And it’s evident on a daily basis.
Matt Hasselbeck and Lofa Tatupu are just two of the latest examples of our little problem.
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Relationships are a fickle thing. One moment you’re convinced you’re in love. The next, you’re wondering where everything went wrong.
Breakups are never easy, of course. That goes without saying. You can’t leave a piece of your life behind without taking a minute to reflect on a shared past, however good or bad it may be.
Eventually, though, you recover. Your heart heals and your brain puts everything into perspective once again. You look back on that snapshot of your existence and start to sum it up in words instead of anguish. There’s a sense of closure, a matter-of-fact approach to what was once a firestorm of emotion.
And then you move on, wiser and prepared for whatever tomorrow brings.
This is where we are as Seattle sports fans, one day after it was revealed that Matt Hasselbeck, the face of the franchise for the past decade, would no longer be a Seahawk.
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Note the date. (March 24, 2011)
Note the time. (10:02 a.m. PT)
Yes, I’m a selfish whore.
Yes, this is petty.
Meh.
Because writing an actual article would be overkill, slash because I’m lazy, I give you a chronology of thirty (yes, 30) tweets I vomited onto The Twitter during the first round of the 2011 NFL Draft.
If you’d like more of this mindless chatter, feel free to follow @alexssn (that’s me) and stay up-to-date on all the things that no one really cares about.
Without further ado…
1. You know Jimmy Clausen just took out a huge insurance policy on his laptop. #NFLDraft #Panthers
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It’s time to believe.
Forget the insider analysis. Forget the hemming and hawing. Let’s just buy in. Like Pete Carroll asked us to do at the start of the year. Regardless of the outcome of this divisional playoff game on Sunday, let’s buy in right now. Why the hell not? Buying in feels great. I love it.
I’ll admit that I was lukewarm about the Seahawks during the regular season. You won’t hear any excuses from me about that. This ballclub was up and down like a manic crack addict. They won, they lost, they filled you with pride, they broke your heart, it was an absolute roller coaster ride.
But then things changed.
Over the past two weeks, the Seahawks became more than relevant again. They embodied the spirit of Seattle. They had their backs against the wall and they came out with fists flying, determined to take on the world if they had to, determined to keep fighting another day, determined to win at all costs.
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This is Seattle.
We’re not New York. Not Los Angeles. Not even Miami or Chicago. We’re America’s underdog. The forgotten metropolis. Crammed into the nosebleed section of the left coast. Where it rains a lot. Where coffee is constantly brewing. Where planes are made and apples are sliced. We’re overlooked and underappreciated.
The nation scoffs at us. They tend to forget that we even exist. When they mention us, it’s only to take jabs at the weather and the beverage of choice. Don’t act like you haven’t been gossiping behind our backs, America. We know how it is.
When it comes to sports, they treat us like a redheaded stepchild. They hijack our teams, tell us we aren’t supportive enough, put us amongst the worst sports cities in this great nation of ours, and occasionally slap the dreaded “mid-market” label upon us. The only mid-market we should be associated with is on the corner of First Avenue and Pike Street. We’re bigger than that. We’re better than that.
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My head hurts. I have bruises on my body in random places. My left elbow has been throbbing for two days. I need water. I’ve earned a total of 1,200 minutes of sleep in the past five nights. Memories of the last 120 hours are hazy, at best. I’ve been surviving off Visine and Winterfresh gum. I got beat by a girl. I’ve never seen or consumed this much alcohol. I got knocked down by a football.
In spite of all that, I’ve never felt better in my life. Never.
I survived the greatest trip of my very existence. I’m 26 years old. I just partied like I was 18…for five consecutive evenings. I witnessed in-person the University of Washington’s first bowl victory in a decade. I enjoyed the Husky men’s basketball team’s demolition of both Los Angeles-area schools. I sat in a bar with Seattle fans and watched our Seahawks win the NFC West and, against all odds, make the playoffs. From that standpoint alone, it was an amazing stretch of sunrises and sunsets.
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If social networking sites have proven anything to me over the course of the past few hours, it’s that you fickle Seattle sports fans are decidedly torn on who should be the Seahawks’ starting quarterback on December 26th, 2010.
Oh sure, there are some of you who are blindly optimistic about Matt Hasselbeck. God forbid anybody boo an underwhelming player. (By the way, don’t we have a right, as fans, to express our opinions on our team’s performance? Or do they not allow that anymore?)
We’ve all heard the excuses. It’s the O-line’s fault! It’s the receiving corps’ fault! It’s the coaching staff’s fault! Well, all or some of that may be true, but Hasselbeck is the one out there playing like crap. So point fingers if you must. But just know that the man isn’t performing. At the end of the day, performance is all that really matters. And if you don’t believe that he’s not performing, click here.
On the flip side, there are those of you who love Charlie Whitehurst so much that you’d like to see Hasselbeck sent out to sea on a sinking ship. He looks like Jesus, you say. Well yes, that’s fairly accurate. But really, that has nothing to do with football. And frankly, Whitehurst has only been so-so in his attempts at throwing things this year. If Whitehurst was actually Jesus, we’d be undefeated right now and he’d be almost as good as the all-99 player you just created in your own likeness on Madden.
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If the Charlie Whitehurst versus Matt Hasselbeck debate has taught us anything, it’s that a pretentious jackass is the worst kind of sports fan there is.
Since that fateful day when the Seahawks gave up a third-round pick for Whitehurst, a quarterback controversy has been brewing in Seattle. And fueling that controversy are a contingent of fanatics who don’t know their elbows from their asses.
On either side of the spectrum, you have the Hasselbeck Sucks squad battling the Whitehurst Is Terrible crew. The pro-Hasselbecks believe No. 8 is God. Once upon a time, he led our team to a Superbowl, plus he’s a pretty nice dude. Hence, he can commit no fallacy. The pro-Whitehursts realize that Hasselbeck is past his prime, but more than that they believe that if Whitehurst isn’t Zeus, he might as well be Jesus (looks notwithstanding).
Fact is, they’re both wrong.
Between Facebook, Twitter, mainstream media, and the sports blogosphere, I’ve seen enough written about Hasselbeck v. Whitehurst to last a lifetime. Unfortunately for society, most of it is complete crap.
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I’m convinced that Marshawn Lynch is irreplaceable. I know. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Running backs are a dime a dozen in the NFL. Overpaying for a ball carrier is flat-out silly. They’re like iPods, those running backs. The battery life is short, and there’s seemingly a new version out every other year. Why waste your money on an old one when a fresher, cheaper, sleeker model is ready to come off the line as we speak?
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