The success that the Seattle Seahawks have achieved over the past four NFL seasons is difficult to overstate. They have made the playoffs each of the past four years. They have won a playoff game each of those four years. They have made two Super Bowls. They won the franchise's first Super Bowl. These four years also represent the primes of four likely Hall of Fame players (Russell Wilson, Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, and Marshawn Lynch). They have ranked first in Football Outsiders' catchall statistical metric DVOA (defense-adjusted value over average) each of the past four seasons.
The National Football League, unlike other American professional sports organizations, abhors continued success. The league, through the draft and the salary cap, is designed to create parity. Even posting back-to-back great seasons is an exceptional accomplishment in the NFL, one that usually requires both a highly touted quarterback and an elite head coach. That the Seahawks have accomplished what they have with a third-round draft pick as quarterback and Pete Carroll, whose potential to excel as a head coach in the NFL was masked by two mediocre previous NFL head coaching stints, is unbelievable.
The only thing the NFL despises more than parity as an institution is joy. This is a league that fines players for wearing colorful shoes. It's a league where coaches can get away with cutting players for having sex during training camp. Where the only team that has achieved more than the Seahawks over the past 15 years is the New England Patriots, which is presided over by the unflappably dour Bill Belichick. Belichick's father was the coach at the US Naval Academy, and Belichick brings that level of militarism to his team. By contrast, the Seahawks mirror Pete Carroll's West Coast chill not by mimicking him but by allowing their players' personalities, from Wilson's dorkiness to Lynch's coolness to Thomas's obsession, to shine through.
This is a blend of success and style that cannot happen by accident. The most obvious source of the Seahawks' recent success, aside from the largesse of owner Paul Allen, is the philosophy of Pete Carroll. At its pithiest, Carroll's philosophy is "Win Forever." That's the name of his book and slightly cultish motivational organization. It's a philosophy that is obsessed with both being gritty and having fun—but most importantly is that it is an all-encompassing philosophy that guides Carroll's actions with a singular purpose. And in four years, Carroll has set a trajectory for the Seahawks that makes winning forever feel like an inevitability rather than an impossibility.
Given the enormity of the Seahawks' recent success, it's worth considering as we preview the upcoming season: Is it possible to truly win forever?
Well, no. Of course winning forever is impossible.
Obviously.
Let's set aside the NFL rules that promote parity and make winning forever incredibly difficult. Over a long enough timeline, the NFL ceases to exist, the rules of American football are forgotten, and humanity, including Pete Carroll, dies out. The concept of winning may cease to exist as humanity reaches the singularity or dies out leaving the universe a cold unpopulated place. You cannot win forever.
Obviously.
Or put in terms that make sense to my half-remembered understanding of 10th grade physics: Football teams are a system, and systems are subject to entropy. As work is used to maintain the system, energy is lost in the form of heat. I'm pretty sure this is the second law of thermodynamics. Systems (if closed) move inexorably toward disorder.
This is especially true of an NFL roster. Players age, get injured, break down physically, slow down. Guys get old, get bored. They feud and fight. The human body cannot forestall the inevitable, and football only hastens the end. Winning for a while is hard enough. Winning forever? Come on.
The Seahawks were not Seattle's biggest sports draw when I was a kid. There may have even been a period in the 1990s when they were the city's fourth biggest draw behind the massive success of the University of Washington's football program, the unflappable coolness of Ken Griffey Jr. and the burgeoning Mariners organization, and the peak George Karl Sonics powered by Gary Payton and Shawn Kemp.
During this era, the Seahawks missed out on drafting local quarterback prodigy Drew Bledsoe, and instead spent the period between Dave Krieg's and Matt Hasselbeck's quarterbacking tenures cycling through players who ranged from poor (Dan McGwire) to okay but past their prime (Warren Moon and Trent Dilfer). The Seahawks during this era were not good and not winners.
The idea that the Seahawks would win forever? Crazy. Winning at all seemed impossible. This was a team that suffered a loss so obviously unjustified (against Vinny Testaverde and the New York Jets) that it led the NFL to implement instant replay.
This is all to say, things change. The Seahawks haven't won forever—they spent my whole childhood losing. But again, looking at the team now, even though I know how quickly things change in sports, I can't help but think: "Yup, this is gonna be another winning season, with another awesome team. And that'll be true the next season, and the season after that, and..."
Two sections ago, I said Pete Carroll will die. There is, of course, another possibility—which is that he won't. A theory: Pete Carroll cannot be killed.
A cinematic or literary sense of immortality has a leaden gravitas associated with it. When I think of immortals, the images that come to mind are wizened old men with scraggly beards warning about the dangers of getting what you wished for or soulless vampires bored with their own hedonism. Our literary heritage is a series of fables telling us that if we get what we ask for, everything will go to shit. All the better to survive our shitty lives, knowing that even if things were as good as they could be, they would still be bad.
Pete Carroll stares in the face of that brand of fatalism, then goes "whatever" and struts away.
Player Michael Bennett recently described Pete Carroll as equal parts Benjamin Button and Willy Wonka. And yeah, sure, I see it. He runs a magical candy factory where he can take a third round quarterback and fifth round cornerback and turn them into Hall of Famers. He moves as if powered by a perpetual motion machine. Pete Carroll is the NFL's oldest head coach, yet he seems to have more energy than the rest of his brethren put together.
I once took a series of pictures of Pete Carroll running along the sideline at CenturyLink Field to greet some friends of his. In the first six shots I took, Carroll was out of focus and everyone else was in focus. Then in the seventh shot, it was Carroll in focus and everyone around him was blurry. This inconsistency is partially due to my being a terrible photographer. But also, something is special about the aura Carroll exudes.
Look, Pete Carroll probably can be killed. Do not try to kill Pete Carroll to prove this theory wrong. Seriously, don't. But if you were to make a list of likely immortals, wouldn't the NFL head coach who seems to age backward be up at the top of that list? Can't you picture Carroll strutting alone on a postapocalyptic plain, decked out for Thunderdome, chewing gum, fist-pumping at nothing in particular?
An NFL team is not a closed system and so is not bound by the laws of thermodynamics, even in a hastily drawn analogy. Each team has access to the league's talent pool as a whole, and, more importantly, a constant hose of talent coming through the high school and college ranks. Aside from winning forever being impossible, the Seahawks biggest struggle with maintaining their avowed philosophy already happened back in 2013 and 2014.
Here is the Seahawks draft haul from those two years (including players acquired using picks from those drafts): Percy Harvin, Jimmy Graham, Paul Richardson, Justin Britt, Christine Michael, Jordan Hill, Chris Harper, Cassius Marsh, Kevin Norwood, Kevin Pierre-Louis, Jimmy Staten, Jesse Williams, Tharold Simon, Luke Willson, Spencer Ware, Garrett Scott, Eric Pinkins, Ryan Seymour, Ty Powell, Jared Smith, Michael Bowie, and Kiero Small.
Harvin retired. Graham is coming back from a serious injury. Richardson is a depth receiver. Michael is a backup running back. Britt is the team's center but is on his third position in as many years. Hill, Willson, Marsh, Pierre-Louis, Pinkins, and Simon are all around, but none are playing exceptionally well. Thus far, it does not look like there's a single Pro Bowl talent in this crop.
Given the entropy that any NFL roster suffers through, the Seahawks inability to restock their roster in back-to-back seasons is a malignancy lurking at the heart of the team's construction. In order to win forever, you can't miss too many shots. The Seahawks spent two years making the Super Bowl while hurting themselves in the draft. If the team fails to win forever, it will be these draft classes that doomed the squad.
The Seahawks play in Seattle, which is in Washington State, which continues to have the most regressive tax policy in the United States. When people ask me about living in Washington, it rarely takes me long to rant about the 2010 income-tax initiative that failed by a catastrophic margin, even though it would have only taxed income earned over $200,000 a year at what was—by national standards at the time—a very low level. It would have generated $2 billion annually that could have created the sort of infrastructure that would have made the growth the region is experiencing more sustainable in the future.
The blind and endless optimism of the tech economy that leads to Washington State voters consistently voting against a tax that will affect them only if they do extraordinarily well is the same sort of blind optimism that is required to center your entire life's philosophy on winning forever. Pete Carroll may be a Californian by birth and temperament, but his philosophy could not fit more perfectly in a city than it does in Seattle.
This is nominally a season preview, and it should end with some predictions.
• Russell Wilson cements his status as a top-five quarterback, leaning on Doug Baldwin and the emergence of Tyler Lockett who qualifies for the Pro Bowl again. Wilson's performance is neither depressed nor enhanced by his presumably reactivated sex life.
• Tight end Jimmy Graham comes back in week five and is pretty good. Before he returns, tight end Luke Willson makes three incredible plays and has three hideous drops.
• The offensive line is not the worst in the league, which, given how good everyone else on the roster is, means the Seahawks continue Russell Wilson's extraordinary career long run of never getting blown out.
• Running back Thomas Rawls comes back in week one and is great, but misses a couple games, in which Christine Michael steps up and is awesome.
• Richard Sherman is the best defensive back in the league, again, and still winds up being underrated and is left off the league's All Pro team.
• Earl Thomas is the best free safety in the league again. Both he and Richard Sherman are considered Hall of Fame locks by the end of the season.
• The Seahawks run defense takes half a step backward from last season but is still really good.
• The team never settles their current issues at long snapper for some reason.
• The Seahawks lose a game to the Rams in infuriating fashion, and a player from the 2013 draft class will a make a crucial mistake to allow that to happen.
• The Seahawks blow out a fellow title contender with such ferocity that the entire fan base knows that this is the year we get that second ring.
• The Seahawks go 12–4 and narrowly win their division over the Arizona Cardinals.
• The Seahawks get a bye in the first round of the playoffs.
• The Seahawks win in the divisional round of the playoffs.
• The Seahawks make the Super Bowl, narrowly defeating the Arizona Cardinals at CenturyLink Field.
• The Seahawks win the Super Bowl.
• Pete Carroll never dies.
• Physics is disproven.
• Washington State never taxes income.
• The Seahawks win forever.
More: Building a New Beast Mode
