No longer hissing, spitting and steaming, the figurative meteor that struck Seattle’s two pro football teams in the second week in January finally can be examined. Readers may recall that in the span of four days, the Seahawks fired coach Pete Carroll and Huskies coach Kalen DeBoer was poached by Alabama. The episodes were coincidental, but randomness is seldom a satisfactory explanation for aggrieved sports fans.
That was then, and this is the first week in September, when football returns. The case can be made that the football blast radius was larger than first estimated. Also gone missing from their Seattle coaching jobs are Mike Hopkins of Washington men’s hoops, Dave Hakstol of the Kraken and Scott Servais of the Mariners. Avoiding the damage — for now — are Brian Schmetzer of the Sounders and Noelle Quinn of the Storm. Both teams are having middling seasons. The 20-13 Storm clinched a WNBA playoff berth Friday. The Sounders (11-7-9) are in a five-team fight for the final four of eight MLS Western Conference playoff spots. If the jobs of Quinn and Schmetzer fail to survive this autumn, we can safely say the 2024 meteor was sports-radioactive.
The Seahawks under new coach Mike Macdonald open Sunday at home against the Denver Broncos, aka the Russell Wilson Survivors Bowl. Participants are expected to share stories and photos and show scars. The more dramatic story is over at Montlake, where the Huskies opened Saturday with a 35-3 thumping of Weber State of the Big Sky Conference. That may not seem like a big deal, but when last a Big Sky team showed up in Seattle, Montana beat the Huskies for the first time since not long after Lewis and Clark finished their continental sashay.
Saturday’s matchup featured one of the few recognizable traditions left in what was once called the “college” game — exploitation. Smaller-budget programs come to the home fields of big-budget teams for a ritual bludgeoning, in exchange for a game paycheck that is alleged to keep little athletics programs from going broke. The sweet sentiment causes me to mist up every time I write about it.
When last seen in Houston at the national championship game, the Huskies were being manhandled by a superior Michigan team, and coached by a guy who knew he had one foot in Dixie. We’ll likely never know how much the distraction impacted DeBoer’s concentration. We do know better than to believe him when he says he didn’t know what was coming following the retirement of Crimson Tide coaching legend Nick Saban. They have the same agent, Jimmy Sexton. Wink wink, nudge nudge.
The Weber State outcome established that Jedd Fisch, DeBoer’s successor, is a fast learner. Since his poaching from Arizona in January, he has learned the location of the office bathrooms, then the names of his assistant coaches, players, their agents and most of the 30-something tech bros around Puget Sound who aspire to be big men at Montlake by giving big money to teenagers. Despite the steepness of Fisch’s learning curve, the Huskies won handily, and are favored Saturday by 24 points to beat another needy smaller program, Eastern Michigan.
Fisch cleaned up nicely despite having only one starter back from the Huskies’ 14-1 team a year ago: LB Alphonzo Tuputala. Another starter from yesteryear, CB Elijah Jackson, was a reserve. Making their debuts as Huskies were 34 players, including nine freshmen. The magnum turnover in coach and player personnel created such a vacuum that the Huskies, who finished second in the final Associated Press poll after last season, were not included in the first top 25 poll of writers for the new season, an exclusion that had not happened in 51 years.
A case might be made that no other program nationally experienced as much roster/staff tumult as Washington, particularly with the inclusion of the top job, athletics director. Pat Chun is the third AD in a year, and he was poached from Washington State. The Cougars’ prime color of crimson can be found on the chapped behinds of every WSU fan.
The impetus for the chaos is, of course, money. Following the collapse of the Pac-12 Conference over the lack of competitive media-rights revenues, and following the NCAA’s long-overdue official decision to abandon the concept of amateurism — in order to settle multiple lawsuits — the intensity to invite with cash the coaches and players from successful programs has gone cosmic. Hence, the meteor analogy.
Some things remain hot, particularly if you are among the thousands of Comcast customers on the West Coast who were unable to watch the Huskies’ opener on TV. After all the argle bargle about needing to increase media exposure and thus revenues, a carriage-price dispute between the region’s largest distributor and the Big Ten Network (wholly owned by Fox Sports) kept the game in the TV darkness.
Every time college sports takes a step, it finds an iron rake.
Meanwhile, in Renton, the start for the other pro team seems comparatively sedate, despite ash-canning the most popular and successful coach in club history after a 9-8 season that included no playoffs. Mostly because the defense had fallen so precipitously despite Carroll’s credentials there, his surviving partner, John Schneider, spent big to hire the hottest prospect on D. Despite Macdonald being half Carroll’s age and having never been a head coach at any level, Schneider apparently could not get out of his mind the past season’s 37-3 clobbering upon the Seahawks last season by the Baltimore Ravens.
That’s where defensive coordinator Macdonald delivered what proved to be his dress rehearsal for the Seattle job. The Seahawks had six first downs, went 1 for 12 on third downs and finished with 151 yards, four sacks and two turnovers. But it was the Seattle defense that had the worst part of the day for a team that entered 5-2.
“We couldn’t tackle in the second half. We just didn’t tackle,” Carroll said. “It’s just basic plays and we didn’t get them on the ground. That’s the part I need to look at the most, that’s what I’m the most concerned about.”
Carroll’s failure to find answers helped cost him his job. Meanwhile, Macdonald’s defense had all the answers, becoming the first to lead the NFL in points allowed (16.5 per game), sacks (60) and takeaways (31). Seattle’s talent on defense doesn’t measure up to the 2023 Ravens, but Macdonald’s reputation as a young Jedi regarding disguise, deception and creativity could give the Seahawks something they haven’t had since 2017 — a defense that ranks in the top half of the league.
Maybe it’s the mild delirium that comes with warm September days, but it’s possible to imagine the Huskies and Seahawks emerging from the rubble to respectability. Few Seattle fans in January knew much about Fisch and Macdonald, just as skeptics were many when Carroll and DeBoer showed up. It all starts with finding the bathrooms.
So far, so good.
Speaking of new coaches, you’ll find new Kraken coach Dan Bylsma interesting. He won the Stanley Cup in his first half-season of NHL coaching (he was a midseason replacement). He also led expansion Coachella Valley, Seattle’s AHL team, to Game 7 OT of the finals in its first year and Game 6 OT of the finals in its second year before earning the Kraken gig. That’s a good CV.
My prediction is that Husky football will slowly die on the vine. It is a victim of a rushed effort to join the Big 10 which could and probably could be best characterized as penury relative to other Big 10 members; its physical/time zone location is not conducive to nationwide primetime media viewing, and that will be a drag on recruiting. There is a also a lot more competition now in the Pacific Northwest for sports entertainment dollars, and that competition will increase if and probably when the NBA appears again in Seattle. Witness last May’s Friday-night spring Husky game which apparently had few fans in the stands, albeit a sizable number attendees appeared to be UW students. Lastly, I am rather skeptical of anyone’s willingness to finance anything on a regular basis without some expectation of a return on that investment. I foresee a continually mediocre Husky football program hampered by “inclusion to the club” financial terms that resulted in less revenue than it’s established Big 10 peers. Yep, it’s all about the money, the Huskies started out in a rut that will potentially affect not only football but other Husky sports programs as well.