The best hot take I’ve got on the twenty-twenty-three NFL offseason is a screamer. And its logical quality matches the geographical identity of what is often considered the very, very deepest of deep upper left fields in the entire league. Y’all ready for this one? The Seattle Seahawks should consider taking a run at signing free agent Lamar Jackson instead of bringing back their nascent star quarterback, Geno Smith.
Let’s play a lighting round of several would-you-rather’s to begin. Would you rather have a twenty nineteen NFL MVP or a twenty-twenty-three flag football Pro Bowl MVP? Would you rather have a twenty sixteen Heisman Trophy-winning twenty-six-year-old quarterback not even remotely close to touching the ceiling of his true talent or a quarterback coming off the best season of his life but who is perhaps rapidly approaching what’s historically been all of elite quarterbacking talent’s first serious precipitous decline in the middle thirties age range?
Signing Geno Smith, thirty-three years old this October, to anything other than a one or two-year-long lower mid-level still-gotta-prove-your-worth-Josh-Allen-kind-of-money contract is actually a fantastic example of the greatest rose-colored lens’d sunk cost fallacy we’ve ever seen for any Seattle signal-caller since believing Russell Wilson still had it in him to take the 2021 Hawks to the playoffs after emergency finger surgery in Los Angeles. The problem here is most experts believe Geno will command a contract worth at least forty million dollars for two years when this capital could better contribute elsewhere. Like overhauling an atrociously apathetic defense or finding a better long-term QB solution. Granted, Geno is currently a Seattle favorite. But just because he balled out against the Rams twice and took the Hawks to the playoffs does not discredit nor distract from the fact that Geno made countless poor decisions reading the defense on the road in Kansas City; or what abysmal fair Hawks nation was forced to suffer through for the entirety of the second half in the playoffs against San Francisco; or else what went wrong when Geno and company lost to not one or two but the entirety of the absolutely worst division by combined record in the NFL this last season, the NFC South. Great quarterbacks win games even when the rest of their team plays terribly.
On the other hand, signing Lamar Jackson is risky but genius. Say we say, Hell Yeah, to this elaborate scheme, and the Hawks do what might be unthinkable to naysayers, and Seattle pulls the trigger and then shells out something like Patrick Mahomes-level big bucks for Jackson. Thus giving into Jackson’s demands for all of the guaranteed contract money the Baltimore Ravens are rumored not to want to promise Jackson. Some NFL insiders say the Ravens and Jackson are still close to roughly one hundred million dollars apart during their ongoing negotiations. But say, for argument’s sake, Seattle does acquiesce to Jackson’s wish for profound financial security, and not least because Seattle possesses an abundance of available salary cap space. This? It’d be nothing short of revolutionary. And ironically revolutionary for the seventy-one-year-old Pete Carroll. Do you want to know why? Maybe you already know what I’m on about. If you don’t? Imagine this: a Lamar Jackson-led Hawks would represent the last great version of the run-first Pete Carroll offense – a Super Bowl-winning offense, defying their Super Bowl odds.
Can you imagine how unstoppable a run-first Pete Carrol offense would look once it set out in a star-studded and stacked triple-option threat a la the Air Force Academy’s three-in-the-backfield triple-option with Jackson beside Kenneth Walker III and DeeJay Dallas for an entire series of hurry-up offense at any point during any game against any team? Everyone else watching and I would make the same face as Dallas did when he posed like the Seattle Kraken speed demon Brandon Tanev has two years in a row – both cheekily electing to pose hysterically wide-eyed for their player portrait photographs. You’d love to have the problem of bloodshot eyes and premature forehead wrinkling from making that exact same face too often. I know I would. So, yes. Sign Lamar Jackson. Yesterday. Sign me up. You have all my consent. Tell Geno thank you. But this hypothetical Jackson signing would be the splashiest thing to hit Seattle football since the Legion of Boom.
