It’s dope to play for a chance to play for a title

This is what Seattle expects.

(Credit: Seahawks)

The Seattle Seahawks are not my favorite football team. They’re quite the opposite.

Though, the first time I did see my favorite team play in person was here in Seattle against the Hawks. It was an NFC Championship—like today.

I paid more than I’d ever paid for a ticket to a game (still a small fraction of the get-in price today) and had, no exaggeration, a bottom-five experience in my entire life.

I’m sure, however, Hawks fans would not mind if today were a little less dramatic than that one, albeit with the same outcome.

For whatever reason, the semifinals in major professional sports often seem the pinnacle of what constitutes the real deal, the actual grind, in the wearying march of fandom.

Even going to the World Series or Super Bowl is incredible—it’s so special. The whole world is focused on you, or at least most of this sports-watching sphere in the case of baseball, and it escapes the orbit of what is normal.

In football, they spend two weeks talking about just the one game. A whole extra week, just for talk, for revelry. So indulgent.

It rules when it’s the team you’ve rooted for your whole life.

I loved how, in the hype video from earlier this week, the Hawks showed Mike Macdonald’s speech in his first team meeting—and, specifically, how he had players craft a mental mural of what the NFC Championship game would look and feel like.

This is the real final, the battle against the rivals you’ve been playing for years—and aiming to rise above. To vanquish.

It’s also what Seattle expects, and reasonably so. This city may not be New York City or Los Angeles but it’s not Kansas City or Cincinnati, either.

We expect our teams to be regularly contending for at least a chance to play for a title. What we saw from the M’s and Hawks this year is what our world-class city deserves.

I often say, or at least used to, “don’t football the baseball.”

You can’t do it. And there’s a history of Mariners fans, myself included, defensively guarding against football-obsessed baseball casuals trying to make someone on the Mariners the quarterback or a series in May be a must-win tone-setter or -changer.

But there is something to the Seahawks better understanding—and, as a result, meeting—the standards the city sets.

Economically, this isn’t the West Coast version of Milwaukee or Minneapolis—two wonderful towns, still, couple of my favorites—but instead the Pacific Northwest version of San Francisco.

Load-bearing parts of the modern world were built right here between the Cascades and the Olympics.

Seattle is what it is because of its people—our talent and our labor. Our investment, too. Both collectively with taxpayer funding for first-class facilities and individually with the ever-rising ticket prices to watch our teams play in them.

Even if you were the biggest homer, someone with ‘12’ in all of your online display names, you weren’t blowing up group chats saying this year’s NFC Championship Game would be played in our fine city.

But here Seattle is—and here the Hawks are.

I think DVOA is great and if it loved my team with two games from a parade, I’d hold it up like the bible, too. But if you had a dozen people list the top 10 teams of the 21st century I don’t know if the 2025 Seahawks come up five times combined.

Nevertheless, when the other three teams remaining are these uninspiring crop of legendary-QB-in-his-prime-less combatants, the Hawks made sure they were the fourth. And they don’t accept less, not for too long.

Moving on from Pete was, while understandable, not something every team would do—not when they did. And when they did happened to be the exact cycle to land one of the best coaches in the NFL.

Mikey Mac got some defensive coordinators promoted and paid. Hell, the Head Coach of the Miami Dolphins was last seen coordinating a defense that allowed 25 fourth-quarter points to the Packers’ biggest rival in a playoff game.

Speaking of deciding to move on at the exact right time, whew, Sam Darnold.

At the most important and demanding position in professional sports, the Hawks made a move that, while more-than-reasonable now, was positively shat upon at and following its inception.

There’ll be a lot of talk about the 12 Flag Raiser tomorrow and how it’ll probably be Jody Allen. You know me, I dislike owners and the über-wealthy tech industrialists as much as the next comrade—but stuff like this, the decisions above, are why I don’t mind an owner getting a little shine here.

All of this, the results, the final product and the experiences they deliver, they’re on the owner. Are they what produces it? God no.

But they, well, own it. That’s how it works.

Go ahead Jody, wave the flag. Everyone was ready to hate you and many still might but your ball club is favored by a touchdown in the NFCCG.

The last time we heard from Seattle Mariners ownership, it was in a full-page ad in The Seattle Times with a letter signed by John Stanton.

Via @shawn_karmil

/pinch and zoom

The Northwest deserves a World Series. I know we are going to get there. This is the beginning of a special era of Mariners Baseball. There is work to do to take that final step. That work starts now.

There’s still work to be done, work in the winter, to take that final step.

It may have started with Josh Naylor—but there’s more to be done.

Seattle expects there to be American League Championship Series games played just across the street from Lumen in October.

And this year, we want more than just playing in them.

Go M’s.

---

Editor’s note: Abolish ICE. Demand nothing but the most—drastic, meaningful and material action—from your electeds.

Pramila Jayapal, Adam Smith, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Bob Ferguson, Katie Wilson…

Delete the entire apparatus and throw these white supremacist chuds in jail.