3 observations about Geno Smith Week 16 and his future with Seahawks

What do the Seahawks do with Geno?

This leads me to the issue of what to do with Geno Smith after the season. He is a free agent and can go wherever he wants unless the Seahawks put the franchise tag on him and pay him north of $30 million in 2023. Early in the season, this seemed like a no-brainer decision and made sense to try to get Smith to sign an extension for a few years maybe.

But since Smith’s incredibly brilliant start to the year, he has cooled off. From weeks 1 through 13, Smith had a passer rating of 108.7 and a TD-to-interception ratio of 22-6. His average yards per attempt was a stellar 8.08. But in the last three games, Smith’s passer rating is 83.9 (which be 29th in the NFL if stretched over the entire season), his TD-to-interception rate is 5-3 and he is averaging just 5.98 yards per attempt.

Part of the issue might be that Smith has gotten little recent help from the play-calling or the running game (until Week 16). The Seahawks offensive line hasn’t been as good in recent weeks either. But Smith drives the car and isn’t driving it nearly as well as he was.

But is Smith really the quarterback we saw in most of the first half of the season or is he the quarterback of the last few weeks? He hasn’t been awful but he certainly hasn’t played like a quarterback who can lead a team to a deep playoff run. Maybe Seattle should take a quarterback high in the 2023 NFL draft.