Look, I'm not on the same mentality as Fade. I am optimistic. But doesn't Detroit have the worst defense in the league? I mean, our offense did what a good offense should do against a bottom feeding defense, so that is a very good sign and we should be happy and optimistic about it. But I'm not about to get too excited. Just how I feel.
The Seahawks offense did better against the Lions defense than the Lions' other three opponents did.
I'll put the results here, but instead of doing it in the order of the Lions' games, I'll do it in ascending apparent quality of the teams, which also happens to be ascending order of how well the offenses did against the Lions.
The Commanders are bad, but they have a QB who costs $28.3M on the cap this season. They put up 396 total yards and 27 points against the Lions.
The Vikings are considered a possible playoff team and have a QB who takes up $31.4M of the cap this season. They put up 416 yards and 28 points against the Lions.
The Eagles may be the best team in the NFC right now, and they have a QB on a rookie contract who is in the MVP discussion early in the season. They put up 455 yards of offense and 38 points (including one defensive TD) against the Lions.
Now let's compare that to what the Seahawks did against the Lions.
The Seahawks put up
555 total yards of offense and
48 points against the Lions (including one defensive TD), a full hundred yards and ten points more than the Eagles did.
So while the Lions are clearly a bad defensive team, the Seahawks' offense was much better against that bad defense than any of the Lions' other opponents have been so far.
As others have noted here, the Seahawks did not punt even once in the whole game and came close to scoring even more, but there was a missed FG.
For
any NFL offense against
any NFL defense, the Seahawks' offensive output from Sunday is a pretty amazing result. And for a team with a QB considered as bad as Smith was considered before the season started, and with two rookie offensive tackles and a new center, it's just an astounding result. I can honestly say that while I knew the Lions were not good defensively, I did not think the Seahawks would have 555 yards of offense and score 48 points.
I still think the Seahawks won't get to eight wins this season, but the offense in general and Smith in particular have been surprisingly good so far. And it looks like maybe Pete Carroll
wasn't holding back the offense in the last few seasons.