Wednesday, August 21, 2013

Hope, Hype and the Super Bowl (AKA Put a Sock in it, John Morgan)

John Morgan is once again blogging Seahawks. Recently, as I extricated myself from the cobwebs of summer, I found he had posted this. It's basically telling fans what they should be thinking right now: to wit, the Seahawks will win at some point in the Pete Carroll era, but there's no way to predict whether it will be this year. And therefore, we should not invest too much hope in 2013. Or something.

I agree with the underlying idea. Lombardi trophies are hard to predict: they're basically won by the playoff team with the best turn of luck that year. Fine and good.

Of course, Morgan fails to offer any concrete prediction of his own. And there's little to his actual prognostication besides some POW story and the observation that Russell Wilson gets almost-sacked a lot. (He probably posted a fuller analysis somewhere else, I can't be bothered to look right now.) But it's fair and defensible to say that projections can only go as far as the playoffs, and hope the ball bounces your way after that. It almost did for Seattle last year.

What I really take exception to is the article's attempt to define hope. Or structure it, or reevaluate it, or constrain it like veal, whatever.