Seahawks get early Christmas gift from the Rams. Truly, it was a gift

The Seattle Seahawks dream of the playoffs was snuffed out, just as Scrooge extinguished the Ghost of Christmas Past. The question is: will Seattle learn from their visitation, or suffer the fate of the unrepentant Marley? And if Cooper Kupp isn’t a Dickensian name, I’ll forego my Christmas pudding.

Bear with me, 12s. I’m about to stretch some metaphors to the breaking point. But Christmas is a season of miracles, right? There aren’t enough miracles to turn the 2021 Seahawks into a playoff team, sadly. Hopefully, there’s enough holiday magic for what I’m about to say make sense. I’ll simply repeat the title: The Seahawks got an early Christmas gift from the Rams.

So how exactly can a loyal member of the 12s say that the most discouraging loss of the year was a gift? Especially a loss to one of our most bitter rivals, the stinking Lambs? Even with a win, the Seahawks chances of making the postseason would have risen to a remarkable six percent. This is according to the excellent source of all things mathy, fivethirtyeight.com.

As it stands, the loss leaves Seattle with less than one-tenth of one percent of a chance to play after the regular season. Basically, every other team in the NFC has to lose their last three games. Since most games usually feature a winner and a loser, that’s not gonna happen.

So how is a Seahawks loss a gift?

For the answer to that question, we’ll return to those wonderful creations of Charles John Huffam Dickens, Esq. Of course, I’m referring to the characters of A Christmas Carol, the greatest legacy of the literary giant. Dickens was a child of extreme poverty himself. When he wrote of the impoverished lives of the common people of London, he wrote from his own heartfelt pain. Take a quick sojourn to The Charles Dickens Page for more information than you ever imagined you’d know about the great author.

But this is about football, a sport of which the good Mr. Dickens wrote not as much as a jot. That’s probably because it wasn’t first played until about six months before he died. And frankly, that game was a far cry from what we consider to be football today. So, what the Dickens am I talking about? Sorry, but you knew it was coming at some point.

The former law clerk didn’t write about football, per se, but he certainly knew his way around the nature of hope. And up until Tuesday night, the Seahawks still had hope for this season. In this, every single of them was the opposite of Ebeneezer Scrooge. Scrooge had given up all hope, had given up on humanity itself. The Seahawks, from Russell Wilson and Bobby Wagner to Josh Jones and Cody Thompson, all had held the hope they could make the playoffs. They believed in themselves, and that they could redeem this dismal season.

But the Seahawks are now as dead as a doornail. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come from this season (apologies to Dickens). As many have said, if the Hawks learn nothing from this year, it will be disastrous for this organization. The Hawks have a lot of issues to resolve on both offense and defense. A late-season rally, as satisfying as it would be, would likely convince the organization that the troubles we’ve seen this year were just a blip. As Jody Allen reportedly said, the problems on this team are endemic and not exclusive to this season. The Rams gave Seattle the most precious gift of all: the gift of redemption and renewal. Let’s hope that like Scrooge, they learn from the apparitions of the past and present, and avoid that grim future foretold Tuesday night. No one wants to root for the Seattle Marleys.