It may be hard to admit for some, but the Seattle Seahawks Pete Carroll era is done. Maybe even the Wilson era, but that could still yet to be determine. At the very least Carroll is more than likely done after the end of this season.
The Seahawks have accomplished a lot since 2009 when Pete came onboard. A team of scrappy no-names trying to find an identity, to becoming one of the most feared teams in the NFL from 2012-2015 thanks in part to the blossoming of the Legion of Boom, a stagnant but marginally successful period and then since around 2018-2019 a decline and now the bottom gave out in 2021.
There's a lot to be happy and proud of the last 12 (nice) years for the Seahawks team and fans, but I think it's time to rip the band-aid off.
Seattle is not a good team in 2021. They're not even okay. The team is having one of its worst seasons in recent memory and it's not a surprise nor is it a one-off bad season. The chinks in the armor one can say started to appear after a certain pass in a certain game back in 2014. For others it was 2017 after the soft reboot of the roster and the dismantling of the LOB. At the very least for the last 3-4 years there has been noticeable decline of every facet of the team from coaching, scheming, players, and identity. Certain positions have been ignored only to be patched at the last second, expensive contracts to players, signing of no-name Free Agents on the cheap, spending draft picks to fill stop gap players like a fresh face kid out of bootcamp dropping bills at a strip club, a lot of draft misses, coaching nepotism, or what I think is one of the most egregious is the 2021 Draft and only walking in with 3 picks (because you used the rest of your capital on rental players). That alone is unacceptable.
Look I don't want to bash Pete or Schneider or Wilson here, who does deserve a lot of criticism for his piss poor play, but there are plenty of other threads to do that. My thing here for this post is, in the last decade the Seahawks have been a lot of fun to watch. A lot of plays, players, and games will be remembered not just by fans but by the NFL as a whole because of the impact the team made in that time.
The truth now is that the team must start fresh. There is no going back. The memories of past Super Bowl wins, losses, 10+ seasons is irrelevant in the here and now and every coaching regime eventually hits their expiration date (unless you're Belicheck, but he's immortal). We can’t keep dragging our feet and think that for some reason we’re so different that Pete or whoever is so infallible when every team has to change at some point or another.
Many years ago, I had a dvd collection of all Super Bowls 1-40 and the collection highlighted the seasons and the SB themselves, there is a line that described the 49ers in the late 90's early 00's, "The sun finally set on the San Francisco 49ers Dynasty", to me that line is relevant to the Seahawks now. The sun set on the team, but night doesn't last forever and even though it can be cold and scary in the dark the sun rises again.
