The Seahawks Have Three, Which Means They Probably Don't Have One

Hey, Seahawk Fan.

You do realize that your coach, Pete Carroll, has no clue, right?

Leaving behind the fact that he hasn't declared Vai Taua the starter at RB yet (seriously, Pete, get on the ball, the man's an Internet sensation), we come to the matter of the QB situation. Seattle has got three options in 2012, and I guarantee you one thing... you're going to see all of them, and it's not going to end well for you.

Door Number One is the unpalatable holdover, the always entertaining Tarvaris Jacskon. Fresh off his best season as a pro, in that he actually looked like a QB for small chunks of it, TJax is what he always has been -- an athletic mess with questionable footwork, bad ball security, injury issues and enough moves and arm strength to make people think they can make more out of him than, well, what he is. In an ideal world. Jax plays a lot of low contact football (did you ever think you were going to miss the Euro NFL league? Jax does), stays in a stable organization for five years, then suddenly emerges to have a Tony Romo-style impact on some organization that gives him a shot as a relatively untested 28-year-old. Instead, he was force-fed snaps by the suicidal Brad Childress in Minny, then moved on with the power of regime change. The problem is that 60% completion percentage and a 14/13 TD to INT ratio on 6.9 yards per attempt isn't really that much to hang your head on... and remember. that's probably his best year, last year in Seattle, where the QB rating was 79.2. For his career, it's 77.7 38-35, with a side order of 23 (!) fumbles and not nearly enough rushing yards to make things palatable.

Jax is now 29, probably not getting any better, and inspires no one. If you want him on your bench as a sparkplug / change of pace / emergency mover, so be it; heaven knows that Backup QB in the NFL is not exactly teeming with riches as a group. But if this guy is your starter, you have one of the worst six QBs in the game, and you don't win with that. Not even in the NFC West.

Door Number Two is prized free agent pickup Matt Flynn, 27 years old and with about four full games of PT on his record since getting taken in 2008 by the Packers, in the second round from LSU. He made his money on a handful of monster games over the years, when the Packers didn't look like they were losing that much from stepping down from Aaron Rodgers, at least not in the yards passed category. The career line of 92.8 9/5 is certainly appealing, even if he doesn't seem to have much in the way of wheels. He's also going to miss the Packers' OL and WR/TE targets like crazy; it's a long, long way down from Greg Jennings to Sidney Rice, and that doesn' t even begin to get into the chasm between Jordy Nelson and um, Doug Baldwin, I guess. There's every possibility that Flynn is this year's Matt Cassel / Kevin Kolb style pinata of system-inflated QB, but at least if he's your starter, you could delude yourself into thinking he's your guy.

Third and final is Russell Wilson, the third rounder from NC State and Wisconsin who the coaches can't stop praising, and all I've got to say there is... please. Rookie QBs struggle as a rule, and those who everyone passed on a couple of times really struggle. I get that Wilson has big numbers from his four years (and that also might be a red flag), but in that final year, he had the ridiculous running numbers of Montee Ball to keep everything as comfy as possible, and he still couldn't get it done in multiple conference road games. I suppose there's a case to be made for him, but in general, NFL teams do not let the next great QB slip this far, and when they do, it's certainly not a plug and play situation from a major Division 1 school. In a good organization, Wilson is your developmental guy, #3 only, and maybe even on the practice squad.

In Seattle, they are hyping him as if he's a possible starter. No, seriously.

Let's spell this out: if you have a QB fight in training camp, it's rarely going to resolve in a way that doesn't come back later. That's why it doesn't really matter who "wins" the job in JetLand, because we all know that Tebowmania will come around the mid-point of the year, when the team is desperate and needs a spark. What's going to happen here is Flynn will earn the job, struggle and/or get hurt, and then it will be TJ's for a month or two... at which point they will be long gone from playoff contention in the sneakily good West, and it will be about selling tickets more than winning games.

If it were my team, I'd have given Flynn the job the second they signed him. I'd keep my mouth shut about Wilson, and I'd talk up Jackson's development in the hope that I find another GM dumb enough to take him on. That's certainly what Seahawks Fan wants to have happen, along with a division crown and playoff drive.

Instead, they are going to make lifelong backups deal with who has the better numbers against disinterested vanilla defenses. 5-11 awaits...