ESPN predicts Drew Lock becomes Seahawks quarterback in Week 12

ESPN put out its prediction of weekly quarterback ratings for each game of 2022. Based on that, ESPN says Drew Lock will be the Seahawks QB in Week 12.

The reason ESPN says this? It is their expectation that the Seahawks will watch 11 weeks of Geno Smith being, at best, mediocre. In exactly zero games does the four-letter network foresee any Seattle quarterback eclipsing a quarterback rating of 100 or better.

In the prediction, ESPN does not give wins and losses totals but one could assume that if the Seahawks are changing quarterbacks a bit over midway through the season that the team is not winning games. Maybe Smith isn’t very good but if the team is winning, why change quarterbacks?

One of Smith’s games, according to ESPN, is the very first game when the Seahawks play former Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson. Smith will throw for a touchdown plus an interception.

Seahawks quarterback Geno Smith will be mediocre in 2022, per ESPN

And oddly enough, ESPN seems to really like Kirk Cousins who has several games with a quarterback rating over 100. Cousins probably isn’t that much better than Smith.

But Lock will take over in Week 12, per the projection. This will be the week after the Seahawks have a bye week so if the team was going to change quarterbacks for some other reason other than an injury, this is the week that would make sense.

ESPN thinks the highest quarterback rating Smith will have is 98.8 in Week 4 versus the Lions. This is a far better rating than Smith has in most of his games. But Lock is even worse from Week 12 on with no rating even reaching close to 90.

To be fair, though, ESPN doesn’t give out a lot of projected ratings above 100 consistently for most quarterbacks. Still, compared to most other teams, ESPN thinks the Seahawks are going to be very bad at quarterback in 2022.