Jimmy Graham is awesome
Jimmy Graham is awesome By Mike Morris (Flickr) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The Seahawks provided a hell of a distraction from Tuesday’s election with another stressful, controversial football game, because that’s what they do every damn week. This time the game was of the stressful winning variety, as Seattle beat the Buffalo Bills 31-25 while taking another six weeks off my life. Let’s run down what happened with what little time I have left on Earth.


• Sentient sex android Russell Wilson was spectacular, putting together one of the best games of his career on Monday. Despite playing behind an offensive line consisting of a basketball player, two sad cats, a desk fan and the DVD boxset of seasons 1-3 of "Scrubs," Wilson was 20/26 with two passing touchdowns and another touchdown on the ground. He looked healthyish for the first time since week one, which is good enough for Wilson to be in the conversation for best quarterback in the NFL.

• Wilson was helped out by Jimmy Graham putting together another improbably spectacular performance at tight end. Despite having his knee explode less than a year ago, Jimmy Graham made two truly ludicrous one-handed touchdown catches and a host of other big plays. Jimmy Graham keeps making my preseason prediction that he wouldn’t contribute until week 10 look stupid, something he won’t get to do anymore starting next week, as next week is week 10 of the NFL season. Take that, Jimmy Graham!

• Richard Sherman had a weird controversial call at the end of the first half that was kind of his fault. He was offside on a field goal attempt, made contact with the kicker with his body as he got the ball with his hand, creating a weird roughing the kicker scenario that went uncalled. The end result of some other weird mistakes by the officiating was the Bills missing an easy field goal. Sucks for Buffalo, Seattle got lucky, Richard was at the center of some light controversy. Whatever. Fine, this happens.

After the game though, Deadspin sent out a video of Richard leveling a receiver on the final game of the play. Note that he did so legally, because Deadspin did not note that. But you know who did note it? Richard himself.


Richard Sherman is smart and good, and I’m glad he’s on the Seahawks.

• You know who else is good? Doug Baldwin. Also, Cliff Avril who now has built 9 houses for Haiti. Those are two good dudes.

So that’s all the good stuff… for a game the Seahawks won, a lot of what they did was bad, so I’m gonna be a Negative Nancy for a few bullet points.

• Let’s start with Jermaine Kearse who had a huge game-changing drop, and continued to struggle to separate on his routes. Kearse is a luxury that the team could afford if Garry Gilliam were providing good tackle play on the cheap. But if Gilliam’s not good (which, to be clear, he isn’t right now… he’s the aforementioned Scrubs DVDs)? Kearse becomes a luxury we can’t afford. His skillset works when Wilson has time, which Wilson doesn’t have right now. And his salary cap hit could be put to better use. This bums me out because Kearse has made some huge plays, but I wish we had managed his situation differently.

• The Seahawks running game is terrrrrrible. Christine Michael is running badly behind a bad offensive line. Michael and C.J. Prosise combined to gain 10 yards on 8 rushes. Not good! Russell Wilson was moving pretty well and it still wasn’t opening up any running lanes inside. Not good!

• The Seahawks have bad tackling weeks from time to time. Almost every player on the Seahawks defense missed a big tackle (only DeShawn Shead and Jarran Reed didn’t stick out for missing a tackle amongst the base defense). With Michael Bennett out, the defense could not afford to be sloppy. But they were anyway. This was not ideal and the Bills ran roughshod over the Seahawks, converting on 12 of 17 third downs mostly because they stayed on schedule with the running game.

But a win is a win. Even if they are mostly slight favorites, the Seahawks have very few easy games left on their schedule (arguably just their late season game with the 49ers qualifies as easy) so every win is crucial. This one puts the Seahawks up two full games in the division before they head out to Boston to play the New England Trump Endorsers. But with this win that game is no longer a must-win… it’s just an “it would be cool if the Seahawks won it” win.