The Shape of Things To Come or My Left Side Used to Be My Good Side But Now It Has a Big Hole In It

My wife and I don't own a television because we're Pretentious Left-Wing Assholes (PLWAs for short) so upon arriving at my parents' house for a visit this weekend, I immediately flopped down on the couch to get my fix. Luckily for me, my father has just upgraded his cable package to include the brand-new NFL Network which showed not only the completely meaningless pre-season game of my own local NFL team (the NFC Champion Seattle Seahawks [if you squint hard enough "NFC Champion" almost looks like "NFL Champion"; go ahead, try]) but also the totally inconsequential pre-season games of every fucking team in the league. Yesterday I watched no fewer than seven NFL pre-season contests, some running concurrently.

Super-orgasmic level of bliss, thy name is the NFL Network on a lazy mid-August weekend.

Within this veritable orgy of football viewing, however (and god, how nice it is to be able to say "football" and have everybody know just the exact sport you're talking about again. The World Cup is over. Long live the NFL.), there was one moment that might escape the attention of even the most avid and observant NFL aficionado, and I would like to bring it to your attention here.

People say that pre-season games don't matter, and that's true insofar as they don't count in the standings. But you can learn a lot about what to expect and that's invaluable, either if you are about to enter a fantasy football league (and if so, for god's sake, get a fucking life) or if you're like me and hopelessly devoted to your regional team and want to know just how firmly to brace yourself for disappointment this year. And one play illustrated that I should lower my expectations a great deal, and very quickly.

The ESPN Play-by-play recap sums it up thusly: In the second quarter...

3rd and 1 at SEA 43
(9:38) M.Morris left guard to SEA 43 for no gain (A.Elam, C.Canty).

And brothers and sisters, would that it would end there. I wish. That would make life so much easier in so many ways. But if you watched the Seahawks last year you know that, on 3rd and 1 there is no way a runner carrying the ball should have been stopped going to the left side because he would be running behind Walter Jones and Steve Hutchinson, the best Offensive Tackle and Offensive Guard in all of football, respectively. But in the offseason, true believers, a funny thing happened on the way to defending the NFC Championship. Shaun Alexander, the flash, the pomp, the show, was re-signed for buckets full of money. And Steve Hutchinson, the horse who Alexander figuratively rode to his record-setting number of rushing touchdowns in a season, was allowed to sign with the Minnesota Vikings.

The NFL is a funny thing. Americans wager the GDP of a small nation every weekend on the comings and goings of American football and yet, because of the salary cap, the draft and any number of other artificial conditions put in place to keep parity between the teams at all costs, there is a razor thin margin between success and failure. Victory and defeat. And you have to have a ridiculously intelligent person making the decisions about whom to let go and whom to keep in order to succeed for longer than one season at a time. To sustain that success you have to be very smart, very crafty, more than a little Machiavellian and, above all else, lucky.

We should have kept Hutch. Did Alexander have a lot of success last year? Yes, he did. And do you know why? Because he was a mediocre back running behind the best left side of an offensive line in all of football. My twenty-six year old slow-as-hell ass could run for 850 yards a season behind Hutch and Jones. Because they're that good. Furthermore, the left side of an offensive line protects your quarterback's blind side if your quarterback happens to be right handed which ours, strangely enough, is. So, with Hutch leaving, I predict a big hole in the Left Offensive Guard position, I predict a less-than-productive and injury-riddled year for Alexander and I predict an injury-shortened year for Matt Hasselbeck. All of these things will conspire to leave us at 7-9 come the end of the year and on the outside looking in at the playoff picture.

You might think that's a pretty dire assessment for losing one player. Alright then, here's another: we lost Tom Rouen. Who's Tom Rouen? Certainly not as well known a name as T.O.! But what Tom Rouen did for us was two things: he was a 45.4 yard-a-kick punter and he held for field goal attempts. And now he, like Hutchinson, is gone. That may not seem significant to you. It may seem middling and like we could do without him. But I will tell you this: the only two factors of the game Rouen affected were field positioning and the kicking game. And if you don't think those two factors win games then you're one of the following:

a.) a fantasy football freak,
b.) a moron who knows nothing about football,
or, by far the most likely
c.) all of the above, since the first two so commonly go hand-in-hand.

So, at the end of the year when someone is doing a post-mortem on how the Seattle Seahawks could have sunk so low in the 2006-2007 season (presumed headline: "From Super Bowl to Cellar in One Year") and the talking heads are telling you about the salary cap and league parity and how difficult it is to sustain success in this league, and how injuries "just happen" and they're "nobody's fault" and how the rash of injuries to skilled back-field players was just "bad luck," I want you to know that the Seahawks could have kept doing what they were doing. They could have made some tough decisions, took a little bit of a beating in the press for a couple of months and then walked right back into this season as contenders once again. They could have let the "stars" go, kept the thankless workmen who made this team what it was and gone deep into the playoffs on a star-making turn by Maurice Morris, a mediocre running back once again made great by running behind a dominant offensive line. If the Seahawks wanted to be unstoppable on 3rd and short for one more year they just had to make the tough decisions and make them in the right way.

But they didn't.