The '05 Seahawks vs. the '12 Seahawks

Any argument that the '12 Seahawks are better than their '05 predecessors should be neither made nor heard until this team equals (and hopefully exceeds) the latter's postseason accomplishments.

But as they try and do just that a couple of items to keep in mind.

THE 2012 SEAHAWKS ARE COMPLETE IN ALL THREE PHASES:

In total offensive production there is scarcely a comparison between the two. The '05 NFC Champions led the NFL all year on the strength of MVP Shaun Alexander racking up yards and touchdowns with Matt Hasselbeck making defenses pay with cruel efficiency when they sold out to stop Alexander.

This year's offense has not come close to matching the volume of that output. They weren't built to. Where they have compared to '05, especially in the 2nd half of the season, is in efficiency. Football Outsiders gives them a weighted DVOA of 31.2%, #1 in the NFL. The '05 offense finished with a 26.2% weighted DVOA, good for 4th in the NFL.

There is scarcely any comparison between the respective defenses. The '05 squad ranged from average to opportunistic, reflected in their dead-in-the-middle 16th defensive DVOA ranking. This year's team ranged from dominant to very good, ranking 4th in defensive DVOA. They also finish the season tops in the NFL and in franchise history in scoring defense.

The '05 teams special teams unit was satisfactory, ranking 20th with a DVOA of -.08%. This year's special teams unit is elite, ranking 3rd with a DVOA of 5.7%. Their respective coverage units rank in the top half of the league, Jon Ryan pins opposing offenses deep within their territory as a matter of course, and Leon Washington is a threat to turn every punt and kickoff into six points.

The 2012 Seahawks surpass the 2005 team in everything but total offensive proficiency, a chasm bridged by both unit's comparable efficiency ratings. On defense and special teams there is no comparison -- '12 clearly surpasses '05. All three units of this year's team rank among the top five in the NFL. The '05 offense is the only unit on that year's team that could make the same claim.

The 2012 Seahawks finished the season with a DVOA of 38.3% and a weighted DVOA of 46.6%, good not only for the top ranking in the NFL but the sixth best DVOA rating ever. The 2005 Seahawks finished with a meager-by-comparison team DVOA of 28.4% and weighted DVOA of 26.2%, the third and fourth best finishes that year respectively.

THE 2012 SEAHAWKS PLAYED A TOUGHER SCHEDULE:

Aside from the usual disrespect given to the Seahawks, the '05 squad's seamless run through the regular season was almost universally discounted because of the ease of their schedule. Their opponents had a .457 winning percentage. The 'Hawks beat the 11-5 Giants thanks in no small part to three missed game-winning field goals. They beat a 14-2 Colts squad that rested some of their starters (most importantly Peyton Manning) for a majority of the game.

The Seahawks' opponents this year had a winning percentage of .500 with wins against the 12-4 Patriots, the 11-5 Packers, the 10-6 Vikings, the 10-6 Bears (on the road), and the 11-4-1 49ers. They went 5-1 against teams that finished the season with a winning record and they owned the highest strength of victory in the NFL.

The main disparity between the two strength of schedules is the strength of the NFC West. None of the three other NFC West teams in 2005 finished with more than six wins. The 'Hawks basically picked on the handicapped, going 6-0 against divisional opponents.

In 2012 the NFC West was arguably the toughest division in football. The 49ers, a preseason favorite to make the Super Bowl, went 11-4-1 a year after going 13-3 on their way to the NFC Championship game. The 8-7-1 Rams showed exponential improvement under Jeff Fisher and finished with a 4-1-1 record against the division. The 5-11 Cardinals jumped out to a 4-0 start on the strength of a Top-10 defense before succumbing to historically porous quarterback play.

The difficulty in playing the NFC West was reflected in the Seahawks' 3-3 record, splitting the home-and-home season series with all three of their divisional opponents.

The 2012 Seahawks finished with a worse record than in '05, but they played a markedly tougher schedule and performed better against teams that finished with a winning record.

THE '05 SEAHAWKS WERE A VETERAN TEAM:

In 2005 the Seahawks entered their seventh year under Mike Holmgren and were at the very top of their win curve. Matt Hasselbeck entered the year as the teams' starting quarterback for the third consecutive season. Steve Hutchinson was entering his prime, offensive veterans Walter Jones, Shaun Alexander, Robbie Tobeck, Chris Gray, Mack Strong, Darrell Jackson, Joe Jurevicius, and Bobby Engram were on the outer fringes of theirs. Ditto Grant Wistrom, Chartric Darby, Bryce Fisher, Andre Dyson, Kelly Herndon, Marcus Trufant, Marquand Manuel and Michael Boulware on defense. Linebackers Lofa Tatupu and Leroy Hill would never again match the success they enjoyed that year in their rookie seasons.

The 2012 Seahawks were among the league's youngest. Obviously there was Russell Wilson, a rookie 3rd Round pick that started all sixteen games at quarterback. They ended the year with a third-year left tackle, fourth-year center, rookie right guard (a converted defensive tackle out of the seventh round), and a third year split-end.

Youth was especially prevalent on defense. Starting safeties Earl Thomas and Kam Chancellor were in their third years; starting cornerbacks Brandon Browner and Richard Sherman their second. At linebacker a rookie started 16 games at middle-linebacker, a second year player started fifteen games at strong-side linebacker, and sophomore Malcolm Smith earned a preponderance of the reps at weak-side linebacker by season's end. Rookies Bruce Irvin, Gregg Scruggs, and Jeremy Lane played meaningful roles as well.

The youth of this roster is surpassed only by its talent, reflected in the fact that they went 4-4 in the first-half of the season, 7-1 in the second. Struggling to find consistency in September and October, a young Seahawks team led by a rookie wunderkind at quarterback began impressing its will upon opponents in November and December. They now enter the playoffs having posted the third best regular season record in franchise history and are winners of five straight. Given no choice but to acknowledge what is happening, national analysts are universally declaring the Seahawks to be "the hottest team in football" and "the team nobody wants to play in the playoffs".

In comparing regular season performances, the 2012 'Hawks compare very favorably to '05, especially when considering their youth and strength of schedule. The regular season is not where legacies are made though.

The post-season is.

Seven years ago the 'Hawks proved their doubters wrong by besting the Redskins (that year's "hottest team" entering the playoffs) in the divisional round and by dominating the previously iron-hot Panthers in the NFC Championship. (I won't put any 12 through reoccurring pain by mentioning subsequent events.) In so doing they immortalized themselves in franchise history and in the hearts and minds of every 12th Man.

To reach equal and hopefully greater heights this Seahawks team will have a much steeper climb. They won't enjoy the benefit of a first-round bye or home-field advantage. They will have to win at least two, most likely three games on the road. They will ultimately have to beat teams with elite quarterbacks and rosters at the top of their win curves. Essentially, to surpass the 2005 Seahawks they will have to beat teams that fit the same profile of the 2005 Seahawks: Elite, veteran, in-their-prime rosters at the top of their win curves.

A daunting task, but this team has the talent and determination to not only earn the recognition they deserve, but seize it from the unwilling clutches of everyone across the country that has discounted them when they haven't been ignoring them altogether.

Do that and they surpass the '05 team without question.

Do that and they leave the football world sputtering and stumbling as they try to explain what they never took the time to foresee.

Do that and they become immortal.

GO 'HAWKS.

Against STL

Sunday against St. Louis presents another opportunity to demonstrate we have become the elite kind of team that prepares and plays at the same level week in, week out. As Hawkblogger points out, there are many potential traps set out this week that could very easily ensnare a lesser, talented-but-inconsistent team.

Avoid them. Prepare this week for the Rams like this week and this opponent are the only ones that matter -- because they are. Tune out the good feeling from spanking the 49ers. Ignore the national plaudits that have begun to come. Disregard any concern for who has to beat who, playoff seedings, and potential match-ups next week.

We are the only opponents the Rams have left. Relevant for the first time in years, they would love nothing more than to knock the "hottest team in football" down a peg. They would love to be the only opponent to knock the Seahawks off at CenturyLink Field. They would love to go undefeated against the NFC West, a division putatively owned by the 49ers and Seahawks.

This is their shot. The only game left. The only game that matters.

Treat them the same way, Seahawks. The one thing better than three consecutive dominating performances is four consecutive dominating performances. Avoid the traps. There is no one else but the St. Louis Rams. Beat them.

Sunday is another chance to excel. Take it. Be elite.

Go 1-0.

GO 'HAWKS.

This Fiscal Cliff & That Fiscal Cliff

The largest issue confronting the United States in the immediate and long-term is debt. The largest drivers of that debt are entitlements, especially Medicare, whose growth outpaces both that of the economy and of government revenues.

This is the "fiscal cliff" the republic faces, not the putative one being discussed currently.

The president is ignoring this. His proposal to raise taxes four percentage points on a minuscule segment of the tax-base will tackle our debt level in the same way a fat guy tackles his weight problem by getting a haircut. It is not an attempt to reduce the debt crisis. It is either political posturing, an attempt to impose some abstract notion of redistributive fairness on the wealthy, or some sort of amalgamation of the two.

Speaker Boehner is not going to get any meaningful reform of entitlements here because President Obama is making clear -- in deed, not word -- that he has no interest in pursuing meaningful reform. He and the Left will continue to "defend" entitlements until they collapse under their own weight.

The best the House GOP can do is to trade some insignificant hikes on an even smaller portion of the tax base than the president originally proposed in exchange for minor spending reductions and minor adjustments to the growth of Social Security and Medicare. These may not be a lot, but unlike the president's tax proposals, they are not nothing either. As Avik Roy argues, it is well past time that Republicans start "making small changes to entitlements today that pay big dividends in future decades."

Get some important concessions, make a little progress, and do not diminish your ability to make some more progress on another day.

"Not Really" Black

Rob Parker's comment today on ESPN's "First Take" that Robert Griffin III is "not really" black logically implies that the color of an individual's skin defines certain ways that person is supposed to think and act.

Not only does this kind of perspective exacerbate gratuitous stereotypes but it reflects the same kind of racial determinism (albeit from a different direction) that the abolitionist and civil rights movements strived decades to eradicate.

If America is to be a place where each is judged by their character and not their skin color, then Mr. Parker's view that someone must behave a certain way to be authentically black is no more permissible than the belief that blacks or anyone else are inferior because -- and only because -- of the color of their skin.

The Next Step

Elite teams go 1-0 week in, week out. Regardless of opponent, venue and the extraneous, they remain consistent. They tune out the noise, they focus on the task at hand, they win as a matter of course.

The Seahawks have not attained that level of consistency -- they have only begun to hint at it. Consecutive victories at Chicago and at home against Arizona are significant, especially the former. But this team has yet to string together three wins in a row. At best it has been two steps forward, one step back.

No more of that. No steps back. Keep making steps forward. You do that by winning on a neutral field in Toronto this Sunday against Buffalo. Lose that eminently winnable game and much, if not all of the good feeling and accomplishment from the last two weeks is erased. Win it and you have a three game winning streak (two on the road), a guaranteed winning season, a stranglehold on a playoff spot, and possibly a chance to play San Francisco for the division championship the following week on your home field.

We've proven that we can take care of the best and worst the NFL has to offer at home. We've proven that we can take the field on the road and beat one of the league's better teams against a plethora of adversity in Chicago.

What we need to prove -- and can prove on Sunday -- is that we are able to consistently win on the road against inferior opponents. That is a different beast altogether. The NFL's elite do it as a matter or course. Young, talented and inconsistent teams routinely struggle with it.

Sunday at Buffalo is our next, possibly last chance in 2012 to abdicate the latter characterization and assume the former.

It is the next step.

It is the hardest step.

GO 'HAWKS.

After the Indian Summer

It has become common, if not cliche for people to lament the partisanship in Washington and ask heaven and everything under it why both parties cannot just come together and find common ground. (It is gratifying, after all, for one to cloak themselves in moderation and maturity and to cast poxes on everyone else.)

As lamentable as this cacophony may be, it is the inevitable byproduct of being broke, and we are very broke.

The post-war surpluses that permitted the oft-elegized age of bipartisan comity are gone. In fact, the genesis of our present predicament is that much of that "surplus" was illusory -- it was borrowed. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and every other manner of federal spending were not paid for with surplus revenue but with the national credit card. Under this arrangement Democrats got their government spending and Republicans preserved their (relatively) low tax rates. Everyone was happy, the unsustainability of the equation a problem for another generation.

Alas, that generation is our generation. The Indian Summer of high spending and low taxing has come to an end and reality, along with the tab, has come. We have to pick one path or the other, a choice that brings to the fore the fundamentally different philosophies of both parties.

With such stakes at issue, no wonder consensus is hard to find. Someone must win and someone must lose. Both sides have dug into their respective trenches, hunkered down for a long, earth-scorching, zero-sum battle.

You may not like the disagreement in Washington, but you may as well get used to it.

The Fiscal Cliff

If House Republicans agree to President Obama's proposal -- tax hikes on the wealthy, no spending reductions -- the economy will slow. If they do not agree and the country careens off of the "fiscal cliff", the economy will slow. There is no incentive, in other words, to accede to the president's imperious dictation. It will neither improve economic growth nor put more than a modest dent in the federal deficit.

Neither is there a political incentive. Republicans have already signaled their willingness to increase revenue through eliminating loopholes and deductions in exchange for spending reductions and entitlement reform. The White House has refused to discuss anything other than rate increases and promises to only consider minor spending reductions after the new year. In effect it is asking Republicans to sacrifice their brand as the low tax party on the basis of fear that they will be blamed for the economic downturn that follows if we do go over the cliff.

There is good reason to believe that fear is unfounded. The House leadership has not only offered to negotiate but even indicated the grounds upon which they would be willing to make concessions. The president refuses to countenance anything but gratuitous tax hikes that will accomplish nothing beyond satisfying some stupefying sense of "fairness".

Should the paychecks and well-being of every single American be sacrificed on such an absurd, ideological altar there is every reason to believe they will assign the blame appropriately, not upon the head of John Boehner.

There is absolutely no compelling reason for House Republicans to allow the president to trample over them.

Paradigm Shift

Since the New Deal and the construction of the entitlement leviathan, conservatives have occasionally lamented that even when they control the branches of government they have been little more than "tax collectors for the welfare state."

That paradigm might soon be shifting -- shifting because the aforementioned leviathan is soon to collapse. Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid have trillions in unfunded liabilities within the near future, and no amount of taxation or "Quantitative Easing" will be able to make up that difference without first destroying the economy. We are witnessing as much right now in Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. France is not far behind.

Having promised the free provision of everything, the reckoning has come.
The American Left has refused to face this reality (just as the European Left did), but all too soon it will be all too real.

On that day, assuming the Democratic Party is still in power, the condition will modulate from Republicans being the tax collectors for the welfare state to Democrats being the imposers of austerity.

History delights in irony.

Kill Big Bird?

A country $15 trillion in debt that is unwilling to cut subsidies for luxuries like public television is a country that is unable to save itself -- a country that is seeing its future through the tear gas haze that covers the streets of Athens.

Caricatures, Confirmed & Destructed

Few things are more damaging in a debate than coming across true to form with a negative caricature. Conversely, few things are more beneficial than contradicting one.

The president's performance last night was listless, unfocused and ineffective. It was, in other words, a metaphor for his first term. After trillions in stimulus spending, dozens of financial regulations and a complete centralization of health care, growth is still anemic and unemployment/underemployment are high. If there is a defense for this beyond "this is the best we could have done," the president was unable to summon it last night. An absence of solutions was demonstrated by tired meandering.

Worse than that for the president was the energetic, knowledgeable and determined performance of his opponent -- a direct refutation of the out-of-touch, gaffe-prone caricature the president has spent so many months and millions painting.

This is the big takeaway from last night: the president's re-election campaign went all in on a strategy defining Romney a certain way and in an hour and a half he completely destructed that image. With a month to go Romney has now gotten himself back in the game with a largely untapped war chest with which to shape the race on his own terms.

Game on.

Bias, Maybe?

It says quite a bit about the American media's ideological predilections that for the second time in as many weeks (for as many reasons) they are declaring the Romney campaign dead for saying, in essence, Americans are too dependent on government and ignoring the president's breath-taking claim that America's debt is "not a short-term problem."

Fallen Conceit

The eruptions against American embassies in the Middle East this past week condemn what President Obama cannot and could not ever do as much as they condemn what he has done.

Following the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the postulate of the American Left was that our presence there coupled with the broader War on Terror policies of the Bush Administration fueled anti-Americanism in the Arab world.  As a corollary to this, it was Candidate Obama's contention in the '08 campaign that, because he had spent so much of his childhood in Indonesia and was the anti-Bush, he was "uniquely" qualified to rectify this.

Both were conceits, and hollow ones at that.  Anti-Americanism on the Arab Street did not begin or exist as a result of the American War on Terror or its presence in Iraq.  Anti-Americanism in the violent Islamist strain is a murderous diatribe against civilization itself, and as the leader of the civilized world the United States has always been its main target.  An assertive foreign policy does not change that.

Neither does its opposite, as it turns out.  President Obama has apologized for the role we have traditionally played in the region and in the world. He has ceded the field to the enemy in Iraq.  He was slow and indecisive with Egypt, led "from behind" on Libya, and has not led at all on Syria.  He has done nothing to retard Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons.

All to no effect.  American embassies are still attacked, the American flag is still burned, and Americans are still being murdered.

If these conflagarations do not demonstrate that the genesis of Islamic Jihad is within Islamic Jihad itself, nothing will.  An America afraid of its own shadow in the region and in the world will not mollify this -- it will only leave us more vulnerable to its explosive rage.

GOP 'Obstructionism'

Nancy Pelosi has penned an Op-Ed this morning repeating a meme the Democrats have grown comfortable using: The GOP Congress is obstructing the President's agenda and sacrificing America's economic well-being for its own political gain.

This trope is at one time two different things; both incomplete and false.

It is false because the Congress is only half-GOP. The Senate is in Democratic control and where jobs measures passed by the House as well as those submitted by the president have gone to die without so much as a vote.

The 'Obstructionist' claim is incomplete because it entirely ignores the fact that President Obama had super-majorities of his own party in both houses his first two years. To pass anything he wanted all he had to do was hold Democrats together.

This he did, passing the stimulus and Obamacare on strictly partly-line votes. Aside from Cap-&-Trade, this was the President's agenda. Not liking it, voters awarded the GOP it's best mid-term since the New Deal.

Apparently what they wanted was a little obstruction.

Tax or No?

"What's in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet."

Romeo and Juliet (II, ii, 1-2)

The sublime verse of Shakespeare comes as scant but welcome compensation to all of us who will endure the tedious semantical debate over whether Obamacare's individual mandate is actually a tax or not everyday until November 6th.

Whether it is or it isn't, Juliet's assertion is apposite here: By whatever name you want to call it (a "tax", "penalty", or "fee"), the fundamental issue is that the individual mandate -- and Obamacare, in general -- constitutes an additional expense on both individual Americans and businesses.

The contest over whether it is a "tax" or not is simply whether this fact is enveloped in a fatty layer of euphemism or not.

Political Money & the Wisconsin Recall

Liberals who beat their chests and gnashed their teeth about the dispositive role money played in the Wisconsin recall were not wrong – they just were not right in the manner they thought they were right.

Money, as it happens, was not the reason Gov. Walker survived and the Democratic-public-employee union nexus failed. The evidence was all but conclusive at least a month beforehand that the recall effort was going to fail. Out-of-state liberal interests – struggling to raise as much money as they had the last quadrennial – were understandably loathe to commit resources to a lost cause. Neither was President Obama – mired in an intense state of political vulnerability in his reelection campaign – willing to expend his own personal capital to a cause with little chance of success to recommend itself. Gov. Walker and his allies had and spent more money because they had a decided advantage going in. Groups and individuals throw their money at winners, not losers.

The financial disparity between the two sides was thus not a cause but a symptom.

The role money did in fact play in the Wisconsin recall was in its genesis, not its fate. Liberals who have and continue to declare that big money in politics is an evil that bested them willfully ignore the fact that the reason they pursued the recall in the first place was to preserve their own big money source: unions and, specifically, public-sector employee unions. These have been a cash cow for the Democratic Party for decades and Gov. Walker's reforms, which curtail the ability of these unions to fleece taxpayers for over-generous compensation and benefits, threaten that milk-source as never before.

In other words, the cycle of public-sector unions spending millions to elect Democrats, who then give public employees too much compensation, who then fill their unions' coffers with more money, who then spend that money to elect more Democrats, has been ended, or at least abridged, by the Wisconsin reforms.

That is what the recall was about and where big money actually came into play within it.

The Obamacare Decision

President Obama and the minority of Americans who support Obamacare can take heart that the Supreme Court declined to strike it down today.

That is all they can (or should at least) take heart in.

In denying that Obamacare is permissible under the federal government's Commerce Clause powers, as the administration argued, future expanses of federal power will be, at the very least, made problematic or, at most, headed off altogether. For the first time in decades (since the New Deal really), the Court has rejected Congress' and the President's attempt to sophistically use the Commerce Clause as an empty vessel justifying any and every expanse of the federal government's scope. For future enhancements of the welfare state, something else will be needed to achieve a pretense of constitutionality.

This is a longer-term effect of today's ruling though.

More immediate and more consequential is the finding that the Individual Mandate is justified – and only justified – as a tax pursuant to Congress' taxing and spending powers. Setting aside the constitutional merit of this conclusion, politically it is an endorsement of Obamacare that in all likelihood will be its ultimate demise.

President Obama ran for office promising not to raise taxes. (He also promised a "net spending cut", which the ACA most definitively is not). When Obamacare was being debated he and his surrogates insisted the Individual Mandate was not a tax. Yet the only reason it lives – for now – is as a tax.

Running for reelection then, his signature legislative achievement – already a deeply unpopular expanse of federal power into health-care – has now also been labeled a tax – one of the largest tax increases in American history, no less.

Already struggling to keep even with his opponent and desperate to shift focus away from his record, that much more weight has now been thrown onto the president's back. A deeply unpopular law – the source of the Democratic Party's worst midterm in a century – is now also a massive tax increase. As of today, it is also the paramount issue in this campaign.

Privately the president and his reelection team are all too aware of this. (Conspicuous in his remarks after the decision was a plea that it was now time to "move forward", i.e. to not talk about it anymore.) One cannot help but wonder if, after reading the Chief Justice's opinion, they did not feel much like one of those old Looney Toons characters that has just been handed a gift-wrapped "present" of five sticks of dynamite.

Though it lives past today, after today the likelihood of Obama and Obamacare both being replaced in and immediately after the election are measurably greater.

Greece as Destiny

Unaltered on our current path, we can see the future that awaits us in the social, economic and political disintegration spreading through Greece and, slowly but surely, much of the rest of Europe.

Our problem will be that, unlike Greece, who are we to turn to for a bailout when that day of reckoning comes?

'Spiking the Football'

Not only is President Obama's OBL ad blatantly hypocritical -- having so righteously stressed the importance of not "spiking the football" after his death -- and absurd (who wouldn't have given the order to take out bin Laden?), but it raises a question that not many will ask and whose answer is obvious: What would be the political fallout if a Republican president had questioned his Democratic opponent in that way? I get a headache just thinking about the hyperventilating outrage about questioned patriotism and using national security for political gain.

Oil Exploration

As the Left counters demands for more domestic oil exploration and production with, among other points, the length of time it will take to come online, it's important to keep two things in mind. One, oil production will come online much more quickly than any "alternative" energies the Left dreams of and two, when conservatives called for oil exploration in ANWR the Left said it would take ten years to come online... That was ten years ago.

GOP Turnout

While turnout in Iowa & New Hampshire slightly exceeded levels set four years ago, it was not as high as party luminaries were expecting/hoping.

This may be because Republican enthusiasm this cycle is not as high as first thought. Or, it just may be that the figure that most excites Republicans has not yet appeared on a ballot.

When he does, I suspect GOP turnout will cease to be an issue.

Bain & Romney

Being attacked over his tenure at Bain is a blessing for Romney.

For one, in a Republican primary being criticized for a successful business tenure is unlikely to sting. Republicans are not envious nor anti-capitalist. They prize business acumen and believe that government would be much more effective if run like a business.

If anything, a campaign narrative centered around Romney's Bain experience emphasizes his largest conservative bona fides and pushes him even closer to the nomination.

While this is happening, Romney also gets some free-time to develop an effective narrative of his experience at Bain and how it recommends him as a presidential candidate in the general election. It is no secret that Bain will be the focus of President Obama's purely negative re-election campaign, and so the earlier Romney develops a message on it the better.

Plus, the more Bain is the topic now the less it will be relevant when it comes time for Obama and the Left to attack it.