I feel completely different this season. I spend a good part of the week looking forward to seeing the Seahawks and what they'll do, what they'll have learned, how they'll have developed, each week.
In 2011, I was just happy to have found ways (pirate streams, mostly) to watch Seahawks games here in Brazil.
In 2012, I was excited about the direction of the Seahawks, and the team exceeded my expectations. I really enjoyed watching Seahawks playoff games - an exciting win against Washington, marred only by the Shitahans ruining RGIII by sending him back out to play on the worst field in the league against the hardest-hitting defense in the league after his knee was already injured, and the exciting game against the Falcons with the infuriating first half, the thrilling comeback, and the stupid ending.
2013 was the greatest Seahawks season ever, and I enjoyed it very much. The Seahawks-49ers rivalry got really interesting, and "the tip" made me very happy. And then my 37-year wait for a Super Bowl title finally ended. I wished my dad, who had supported me so much through the decades when I was the only Seahawks fan I knew, had lived to see the Seahawks finally win a Lombardi. It was pretty cool to be able to share the moment with my mom, who was a major NFL fan. She watched the game at her home in Maine while I watched it in the room I was renting near the University of São Paulo and we talked, via both written messages and voice calls, throughout the game.
In the 2014 season, I found I believed in the team in a way I never had before. During that comeback in the NFC Championship Game, I never stopped believing they'd pull it out. Of course, I also thought they were going to pull out a second consecutive title in the Super Bowl.
The first half of the 2015 season was frustrating, but the coaching staff did an amazing job of making major adjustments during the Seahawks' exactly-in-the-middle-of-the-season bye, and the second half of the season was awesome. Similarly, the team appeared not to be awake for the first half of that divisional-round game against Carolina, and the second half was much better, but not quite enough.
After that, I watched the Seahawks decline as the exciting core of the 2012-2014 teams got expensive, and as the debate raged over whether Carroll was holding back Wilson or Wilson's limitations and pricey contract were making it harder for the Seahawks to win titles. A very solid majority held the former position, but the tide has turned on that recently.
2017 was a frustrating season. I suspected I might have been successfully converting my mom into a Seahawks fan when she said during the Giants game that she got annoyed, turned off the TV, and organized the contents of a kitchen cabinet before going back to the game. I too got annoyed by what I saw from the Seahawks that season (except in the opener, when I was more annoyed by the bull$#!+ from the refs, especially ejecting Lane for getting punched by that dirty cheater Davante Adams and taking away Naz Jones's pick-six of Rodgers).
2018 brought a little extra excitement for me, because I was finally able to sign up for NFL Game Pass and watch Seahawks games with much-better video quality than I had been getting on pirate streams, and without having to be at the home of somebody who had (Brazilian) ESPN. Still, the Seahawks' frustrating phase continued.
2019 was the first season in which I was actually able to watch all of every Seahawks game, plus I went to my first Seahawks home game after having been a fan for 43 years (I had been to Seahawks games in Foxborough in 1984 and '86), but the frustrating phase continued. One cool thing about that season is that my Brazilian "adoptive family" started watching Seahawks games and rooting for the Seahawks. My goddaughter's grandmother and my goddaughter's mother's adolescent cousin stayed up to watch the game in Santa Clara in which the Seahawks wrested away the lead in the NFC West in Clowney's big game, and they were making noise as if it were their beloved soccer team (Corinthians) battling for the lead in the Brazilian league, even though that game went on well into the wee hours of the morning. Brazil was on daylight savings time then, and the USA was back on standard time, so the time difference between here and PST was six hours, so the game started after 11 PM for us and ended almost four hours later.
In 2020, I was completely isolated and only leaving the apartment roughly once a week to buy groceries and pick up stuff I'd ordered via internet. I got kicked out of
Field Gulls in late October, just before the game in Seattle against the Santa Clara team, for referring to the Santa Clara team's QB as Janeane Garofalo, which was reported as sexism, and for referring to the Santa Clara team as the Gold Diggers, which was reported as "personal attacks." My intent in referring to the QB as Janeane Garofalo wasn't sexist, but I understand how it could be seen that way, and if it had been just that, I probably would have served the suspension and requested reactivation of my profile on
Field Gulls. But they had recently converted
Field Gulls to an awful, awful amateurish user interface that made the discussions significantly harder to follow and took away functionality to which I had become accustomed, and the idea that calling the Santa Clara team "the Gold Diggers" was a personal attack, plus the fact that the dumbass moderators had accepted that, made me realize I didn't want to be there anymore. So a few days later, I went looking for some other online Seahawks-fan community, and I found .NET. That was a positive, and the Seahawks found a way to get to 12-4 and win the division, but the wildcard-round game against the Rams utterly sucked.
The 2021 season was really frustrating, and it was hard to see a way out. My S.O. came to live with me, and she adopted the Seahawks. It should have been fun to watch games with her, but the Seahawks were so frustrating that I really didn't enjoy the season much.
When the Seahawks actually traded Wilson in the offseason, the mediots piled on. It was portrayed as a giant mistake for the Seahawks and a huge win for the Broncos. I now love that predictions of the Broncos putting up 40 or 50 points on the Seahawks in the opener were not uncommon, but at the time, believing the standard talking-head-mediot consensus, I didn't love it at all, and I thought the Seahawks didn't get enough for Wilson, and the huge dead-money hole in the Seahawks' salary-cap situation would make it virtually impossible for the Seahawks to field a team capable of even non-shameful performance this season.
The offseason ended up being better than I expected after that. The Seahawks had what appeared then (and appears even more so now!) to be a great draft. During training camp and the preseason,
@keasley45 and
@Maelstrom787 pointed out that Geno Smith's performance replacing Wilson last season and in the preseason suggested he might not actually be one of the worst QBs in the NFL. They were accused of thinking Smith was a great QB, which was not their position at all. I found their arguments interesting and somewhat convincing. In any case, I was excited to see what the staff could do this season with the players they had, and with no expectations of the Seahawks contending even for a wildcard spot, figured I'd try to enjoy seeing the team develop.
Well, Geno Smith and the Seahawks as a team have exceeded my expectations. The defense hasn't, of course, but specific defensive players (Nwosu and the rookies) have, and I can see the Seahawks building something for the not-too-distant future. And this season, it's been fun to watch Seahawks games in a way it hadn't for some time. Sure, there had been fun moments like that game in Santa Clara in 2019 (the Clowney game). But I'm feeling much less anxiety about the team and enjoying the good things, like this season's wins and close losses, plus the development of the new players and the team as a whole. And of course Smith's spectacularly beyond-everyone's-expectations performance so far. I had told my S.O. a few times during the offseason that this season would be a tough one, because the team would be starting to rebuild after losing the QB around whom the team had been built over the last several seasons. But I've enjoyed the games, even the losses, and there have been some really great moments. My S.O. has recently picked up an exclamation in English: "touchdown, bitches!" Where could she possibly have learned that?!
