by: Chris Sullivan
My wording, not theirs; I was taking a look at the Football Outsiderstoday, scouting for our next victims (well, the Packers, anyway), and I noticed something interesting but not altogether shocking: the Seahawks are very inconsistent this year.
Check out the graph below to take a look at the "Variance Ratings" they put together:
| Rank | Team | Variance |
| 1 | Indianapolis Colts | 0.3% |
| 2 | Jacksonville Jaguars | 2.4% |
| 3 | Detroit Lions | 2.6% |
| 4 | Baltimore Ravens | 2.8% |
| 5 | Houston Texans | 3.4% |
| 13 | St Louis Rams | 8.4% |
| 16 | Green Bay Packers | 12.4% |
| 17 | San Francisco 49ers | 12.8% |
| 26 | Arizona Cardinals | 23.8% |
| 28 | New England Patriots | 27.3% |
| 29 | Kansas City Chiefs | 28.7% |
| 30 | Atlanta Falcons | 32.9% |
| 31 | Seattle Seahawks | 41.8% |
| 32 | Miami Dolphins | 44.3% |
Right there at the bottom, that's us! The Seahawks are not only playing poorly, they appear to be a team who doesn't know who the hell they are, statistically speaking. Now, don't get the wrong idea, being invariant is not necessarily a good thing--the Colts, Lions and Texans are three of the top five teams here, but none are off to great starts.
I think more than anything this reiterates what I think we've all been saying since Sunday: we just don't know who this team is. They don't appear to be who we thought they were (We Let'em off the Hook!!), but I think we are all holding out hope that they can be a good, if not great, team that could get hot at the right time a la Eli and the G-Men last year. What is more disconcerting to me is that unlike the Dolphins, who stunk it up then pulled off two big victories and are now sort of "on a roll," our variance is, uh, a bit more varied.
We got blown out by a good team in Buffalo. We then lost a close one at home to a poor-to-middling team in San Francisco, demolished an awful team (the Rams), and got blown out again on the road against a good-to-great team in the Giants. We're not on a streak, and we don't appear to even be functioning much on any of the three sides as cohesive units, let alone a cohesive team.
If we want to dream about getting to Tampa in early 2009, the Seahawks better figure out who they are, and they had better do it before Sunday. If the same team that has shown up the last four games shows up at Qwest, we may need to institutionalize the whole team. END POST
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