Halfway there: What we learned from the first half of the Seahawks season

I have to hand it to Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll. It’s rare for a coach to build a team that defies expectations in the absence of a perceived option at QB. It’s increasingly common for a team without a defined plan at QB to sell assets and stockpile talent until they find their QB.

Pete Carroll flies in the face of the “tanking” strategy. He has also managed to uproot Super Bowl champions and create new ones with teams many experts deemed lost causes. The 2022 team is certainly not a lost cause.

With this latest iteration of the Seattle Seahawks, Carroll has now created a second surprise contender with a QB that no one saw coming. Over the course of the first two months of the season, this team has learned how to block, how to move the ball with rhythm, how to cover receivers over the top, and how to stop the run, all in succession.

What we have learned from the Seahawks first half of 2022

All of a sudden, this team that even the most optimistic of fans had finishing the year with 7 or fewer wins looks like one of the three best teams in the NFC. Geno Smith has been an utter revelation, to the point that it has now been three months since I wrote an article that failed to mention him. There’s no other way to say it — he’s playing like he’s one of the five best QBs in the world, and I could simply make this a Geno Smith article and no one would have a problem with it.

But there are so many other factors that have gone into making this Seahawks team one of the fastest-rising squads in the league. Let’s focus on those.