TheRealDTM
New member
(note: had to do a blog post for a sports economics course, finished it up and was pretty happy with it, figured you guys would appreciate it as much as anyone. Please let me know what you think but go easy I wrote it in about an hour)
Loud.
That’s probably the first word you think of when picturing the Seattle Seahawks, a ferocious group of young talent with a penchant for trash talk. The Seahawks have took the league (literally) by force, finishing a storybook season with the team’s first Lombardi trophy. But how did this brash group of kids get off the island of misfit toys and end up on the throne in the big apple? Drawing upon what I learned in Scorecasting and throughout class this year I’ll attempt to explain.
Remember this guy? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7fjDS0jKiE , oh wait no I mean this guy http://youtu.be/sHANqEF3s6M?t=23s . This is week 3 of the 2009 season, Jim Mora Jr.’s Seahawks just suffered a 25-19 heartbreaker on (off) the leg of then kicker Orlando Mare. A close loss against a difficult opponent, a teaching moment perhaps, but not today. Mr. Mora is in a mood. On a downward slope since a gut-wrenching superbowl loss in 2005, this year was supposed to be different. Free agent pickups like the heralded WR T. J Houshmandzadeh and DT Colin Cole were supposed to help first year head coach Jim Mora Jr. make a statement. They did, just not the right one.
After sitting behind Holmgren in the 2008 season Mora got his hands on the keys and everything looked peachy, “His first official press conference as the new Seahawks head coach was given on January 13, 2009, where he enthusiastically shared his vision of bringing a Super Bowl championship to Seattle and having a championship parade from the Space Needle to the 'Hawks stadium, Qwest Field” (Wikipedia). Replacing a sports legend in Mike Holmgren, who admittedly had his best years in Green Bay, Mora was a local boy who moved to Seattle when he was 13, attended a Bellevue high school and played for the Huskies, this was supposed to our coach, a Seattle coach. He wasn’t.
After starting the season off with a win the team went on to lose 5 of its next 6 games. Along the way Mora dropped some great media nuggets like, “we need thugs on this team”. The team (thugless in Seattle) would win only 3 of its next 9 games, including a four week stretch to end the season where the Seahawks were outscored 37 to -about a billion. And that was the end of that. Less than a calendar year after being hired by his hometown/childhood team Jim Mora Jr. was let go.
And then it happened. No, not HIM, not from the sandy shores of USC with a California Cool smile, not from Richmond Virginia with a 3rd round sized chip on his shoulder, from the frozen tundra of Lambeau came the Seahawks savoir. More Samwise Gamgee than Gordon Gecko, John Schneider came from Green Bay, like Holmgren before him, to change the shape of Seahawks football.
Ok. We have to go back, real quick.
On a Saturday morning in January 2010, when it was still “warmer in Seattle than Miami,” (http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2010/01/i ... miami.html) team owner Paul Allen, obviously disappointed with Mora Jr., was looking to make a splash. As if he had thrown a rock down the California Coast until it came to a NCAA sanction sized stop, seemingly out of nowhere Pete Carroll, head coach at USC, visitor of Compton at midnight and a national champion was hired as the head coach of the Seahawks. Jim Mora wanted thugs, thugs want Pete Carroll. A week later, as one of the few coaches prestigious enough to have total football control, Pete Carroll made the best decision of his life; he hired John Schneider. Yep the coach hired the GM, only in Seattle.
The dynamic duo, one born in 1951 that acts 29, the other is 41 and carries himself as if it were 1950. Pete Carroll and John Schneider wasted no time in fixing the junker they had been left with, the only way they could. Gut it and start over. Like they were watching Moneyball on fastforward with Korean subtitles, PC/JS completed an unheard of 500+ player transactions from 2010-2011. Constantly churning the roster, some may say they were throwing “it” at the wall and seeing what stuck, a wiser man would say they were just getting a feeling for the market inefficiencies they were about to exploit. A 6’3 corner from Stanford that played wide receiver? A 5’10 (and I’m being nice) QB? Did they get the Cs and Qs mixed up? No, no they did not. From trading for a not-so-quiet-back-then troublemaking beast like Lynch to taking a 6’3 speed end out of West Virginia that no one had heard of in the first round, PC/JS’ decisions seemed odd, they were bucking conventional wisdom, and if Scorecasting taught me anything it’s that conventional likes to buck back. So they took their lumps, they let the media talk, took their failing draft grades in stride and never took their eye off the prize.
These days? They still don’t have to do much talking, they let Richard Sherman take care of that. Lynch? Oh just a ho-hum beastquake and multiple probowls. That 5-3 QB? 5’11 and superbowl champion. In superbowl XLVIII Pete and John unveiled their formula and showed the world just how scary a team can be when it pays its probowl quarterback less than $300,000 a year. When you replace a 1st round pick with a 7th rounder and he becomes Superbowl MVP. Don’t say they got lucky, Pete and John actively recognized where the league was undervaluing certain players (or overvaluing certain stereotypes). By taking the unconventional path Pete, John and the gang are world champions, and there’s 31 teams down below trying to figure out how to follow.
http://a.espncdn.com/photo/2014/0131/nf ... ap_600.jpg
http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/ ... 4s5ttt.jpg
experts still aren't certain if he wears shoes
Loud.
That’s probably the first word you think of when picturing the Seattle Seahawks, a ferocious group of young talent with a penchant for trash talk. The Seahawks have took the league (literally) by force, finishing a storybook season with the team’s first Lombardi trophy. But how did this brash group of kids get off the island of misfit toys and end up on the throne in the big apple? Drawing upon what I learned in Scorecasting and throughout class this year I’ll attempt to explain.
Remember this guy? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7fjDS0jKiE , oh wait no I mean this guy http://youtu.be/sHANqEF3s6M?t=23s . This is week 3 of the 2009 season, Jim Mora Jr.’s Seahawks just suffered a 25-19 heartbreaker on (off) the leg of then kicker Orlando Mare. A close loss against a difficult opponent, a teaching moment perhaps, but not today. Mr. Mora is in a mood. On a downward slope since a gut-wrenching superbowl loss in 2005, this year was supposed to be different. Free agent pickups like the heralded WR T. J Houshmandzadeh and DT Colin Cole were supposed to help first year head coach Jim Mora Jr. make a statement. They did, just not the right one.
After sitting behind Holmgren in the 2008 season Mora got his hands on the keys and everything looked peachy, “His first official press conference as the new Seahawks head coach was given on January 13, 2009, where he enthusiastically shared his vision of bringing a Super Bowl championship to Seattle and having a championship parade from the Space Needle to the 'Hawks stadium, Qwest Field” (Wikipedia). Replacing a sports legend in Mike Holmgren, who admittedly had his best years in Green Bay, Mora was a local boy who moved to Seattle when he was 13, attended a Bellevue high school and played for the Huskies, this was supposed to our coach, a Seattle coach. He wasn’t.
After starting the season off with a win the team went on to lose 5 of its next 6 games. Along the way Mora dropped some great media nuggets like, “we need thugs on this team”. The team (thugless in Seattle) would win only 3 of its next 9 games, including a four week stretch to end the season where the Seahawks were outscored 37 to -about a billion. And that was the end of that. Less than a calendar year after being hired by his hometown/childhood team Jim Mora Jr. was let go.
And then it happened. No, not HIM, not from the sandy shores of USC with a California Cool smile, not from Richmond Virginia with a 3rd round sized chip on his shoulder, from the frozen tundra of Lambeau came the Seahawks savoir. More Samwise Gamgee than Gordon Gecko, John Schneider came from Green Bay, like Holmgren before him, to change the shape of Seahawks football.
Ok. We have to go back, real quick.
On a Saturday morning in January 2010, when it was still “warmer in Seattle than Miami,” (http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2010/01/i ... miami.html) team owner Paul Allen, obviously disappointed with Mora Jr., was looking to make a splash. As if he had thrown a rock down the California Coast until it came to a NCAA sanction sized stop, seemingly out of nowhere Pete Carroll, head coach at USC, visitor of Compton at midnight and a national champion was hired as the head coach of the Seahawks. Jim Mora wanted thugs, thugs want Pete Carroll. A week later, as one of the few coaches prestigious enough to have total football control, Pete Carroll made the best decision of his life; he hired John Schneider. Yep the coach hired the GM, only in Seattle.
The dynamic duo, one born in 1951 that acts 29, the other is 41 and carries himself as if it were 1950. Pete Carroll and John Schneider wasted no time in fixing the junker they had been left with, the only way they could. Gut it and start over. Like they were watching Moneyball on fastforward with Korean subtitles, PC/JS completed an unheard of 500+ player transactions from 2010-2011. Constantly churning the roster, some may say they were throwing “it” at the wall and seeing what stuck, a wiser man would say they were just getting a feeling for the market inefficiencies they were about to exploit. A 6’3 corner from Stanford that played wide receiver? A 5’10 (and I’m being nice) QB? Did they get the Cs and Qs mixed up? No, no they did not. From trading for a not-so-quiet-back-then troublemaking beast like Lynch to taking a 6’3 speed end out of West Virginia that no one had heard of in the first round, PC/JS’ decisions seemed odd, they were bucking conventional wisdom, and if Scorecasting taught me anything it’s that conventional likes to buck back. So they took their lumps, they let the media talk, took their failing draft grades in stride and never took their eye off the prize.
These days? They still don’t have to do much talking, they let Richard Sherman take care of that. Lynch? Oh just a ho-hum beastquake and multiple probowls. That 5-3 QB? 5’11 and superbowl champion. In superbowl XLVIII Pete and John unveiled their formula and showed the world just how scary a team can be when it pays its probowl quarterback less than $300,000 a year. When you replace a 1st round pick with a 7th rounder and he becomes Superbowl MVP. Don’t say they got lucky, Pete and John actively recognized where the league was undervaluing certain players (or overvaluing certain stereotypes). By taking the unconventional path Pete, John and the gang are world champions, and there’s 31 teams down below trying to figure out how to follow.
http://a.espncdn.com/photo/2014/0131/nf ... ap_600.jpg
http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs71/f/2012/ ... 4s5ttt.jpg
experts still aren't certain if he wears shoes
