Whoever came up with the phrase “good things come to those who wait” likely never watched much professional sports in their lifetime. The sports world, and particularly the ever-volatile and fast-paced NFL world, is one of the most impatient and unkind places one can find themselves in. You were a highly-rated draft prospect but you haven’t delivered much during your rookie contract? You’re a bust. You were hired as a head coach but you haven’t been able to quickly turn your team around? You’re fired. You haven’t established yourself as a starting-caliber quarterback after a few years in the league? You’re a career backup.
That last question-and-response was supposed to describe Geno Smith. Once a prized quarterback talent when playing his college ball at West Virginia, Smith was drafted by the New York Jets in the second round of the 2013 draft. His elite athleticism but spotty accuracy showed up on tape throughout his four years with Gang Green, as he showed flashes of elite potential here and there but ultimately threw 28 touchdowns against 36 interceptions. Worse still, he suffered a broken jaw in his third season during an altercation with his own teammate over an unpaid debt, causing him to eventually lose his starting job. He never truly gained that job back, as he tore his ACL in his lone start in 2016, his final game with the team that drafted him.
Smith spent the next five years serving as an insurance policy. He was a backup to Eli Manning with the Giants, then to Philip Rivers with the Chargers, and then for Russell Wilson with the Seahawks. Serving as a backup to Hall-of-Fame caliber quarterbacks, all of whom were famous for rarely missing games, wasn’t the most glamorous of careers. Former Colts offensive coordinator Tom Moore once famously responded when asked why Peyton Manning’s backups weren’t getting many practice snaps, “Fellas, if 18 goes down we're fucked, and we don't practice fucked”. When the fact that you even playing a snap in a live game is synonymous with your team being screwed, that's probably not a good place to be in.
Smith became an afterthought in professional football as a result. An “oh yeah, I remember him!” type of player. An “it’s a shame, I really thought he’d be good” player, even. We knew exactly who Geno Smith was. Until we realized we didn’t know him at all.
Geno Smith has excelled for the Seahawks in his first starting job since 2014. Image from: Lindsey Wasson/Getty Images.
After Wilson forced his way out of Seattle, a downright miserable power vacuum was left at the quarterback position. Smith and Drew Lock, acquired in the Wilson trade with Denver, continually one-upped each other in the preseason, but in a negative sense (one-downed?). Geno finished three preseason games without throwing a single touchdown, but Lock’s continued colossal collapses saw the veteran seize the starting job anyway.
All Geno Smith has done since becoming Seattle’s starter is play like one of the truly elite quarterbacks in the league, and propel a team many expected to be one of the absolute cellar-dwellers of the NFL to become true playoff contenders. No, really. And although career resuscitations this late for a quarterback aren’t totally unprecedented -- Steve Young and Rich Gannon became quality starters after turning 30, for instance -- they are exceedingly uncommon, which inevitably begs the question for Seahawks fans everywhere: is this fool’s gold, or is Geno for real?
The answer to that question will determine how Seattle chooses to proceed when they reach a major crossroads at the end of this season, a decision point that could send this franchise into wildly different directions for years to come. And we might just have that answer already.
Seattle’s offense last year was not good. New offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, though reportedly hand-picked by Wilson himself, failed to establish a system that meshed head coach Pete Carroll’s old-school desires with Wilson’s propensity for off-schedule plays, rollouts, and deep shots. They started off good enough, ranking 10th in offensive EPA/play in Weeks 1-5, but dropped off rapidly after Wilson’s injury. From Week 6 and onwards, the team was 14th in offensive EPA/play, but was mostly buoyed by a run-heavy system: they ranked 2nd in rushing EPA/play, but 19th in dropback EPA/play, per RBSDM. They looked and played like an offense without any rhythm or confidence.
Smith was serviceable in four appearances for the injured Wilson in 2021, though certainly looked like a career backup. He did complete 68.4% of his passes and posted a 103.0 passer rating, but went 1-3 in his four starts, averaged only 175.5 passing yards per game, and threw just five touchdowns.
This season, however, Waldron’s scheme has improved massively, and Smith looks much more comfortable in it than Wilson ever did. It’s commonly believed now that Wilson had perhaps too much sway in how the team and the offense was run, and perhaps his absence allowed Waldron to be more free-thinking and creative. We’ve seen some of that creativity this year, perhaps the most seen in a Carroll-coached team in many years: there’s been three tight-end sets, diamond-alignment backfields, and aggressiveness and creativity on fourth downs, just to name a few new revelations.
Offensive coordinator Shane Waldron and Smith have gotten the best out of each other this season. Image from: Ted S. Warren/AP Photo
I might have even let out an audible gasp when watching one of those fourth-down looks from Seattle in their most recent win over the six-win Giants. The pre-snap motion and the unorthodox setup with Tyler Lockett in the backfield schemed the speedy Lockett open against a Giants defense that was showing blitz for an easy pitch-and-catch play, as shown below:
This play was a breath of fresh air, and isn’t particularly an outlier in this young season. Waldron is frequently finding intelligent ways to make plays happen, and involving the team’s best receivers, Lockett and D.K. Metcalf. The über-athletic and talented Metcalf had a frustrating 2021 following a sensational sophomore season, and at times it just seemed like Waldron and the Seahawks had no idea how to use him properly. I often found myself watching games and scratching my head as to why they refused to throw him the ball more. It seems like such a simple formula -- find ways to put the ball in your best players’ hands and reap the rewards -- and Waldron has finally started to figure out that formula this year.
The NFL is famously a “copycat league”; when teams find something that works, everyone else scrambles to become a cheap imitation. No team has cracked the code for how to run a modern offense in the past half-decade than Andy Reid’s Kansas City Chiefs. Endlessly genius plays mixed with tempo and aggressive downfield looks have turned Patrick Mahomes’ squad into world-beaters year-in and year-out, and they continue to be the class of the league this year even despite losing Tyreek Hill. On Sunday, the Seahawks converted another fourth down on the same drive as the previously-shown play, and it’s nearly identical to a concept the Chiefs love to run with Mahomes and Travis Kelce:
Smith looks like he was always meant to run Waldron’s system. He consistently gets the football out on-schedule and with accuracy, but still has enough veteran savvy and courage to go off-script for positive plays. He delivers the ball with varying arm angles and in different locations depending on his receiver’s leverage against their defender with consistency. Smith also still has those elite athletic tools that were so sought-after as a college prospect, and when putting all of that together he looks every bit the part of the modern NFL quarterback. It can be hard to trust when this sort of transformation happens almost overnight (hey, Josh Allen did the same thing, and look at him now!), but Geno is passing the eye test with aplomb. I mean, just look at this:
But Smith isn’t just looking the part-- he’s got the data on his side as well. He leads the league in completion percentage, ranks 8th in raw passing yards and 8th in net yards per passing attempt, while also sporting the league’s 9th-best TD% and 4th-best INT%. The advanced metrics are even more astonishing, however, as he currently ranks 4th in RBSDM’s EPA+CPOE composite behind only Tua Tagovailoa, Mahomes, and Allen, and leads the league in CPOE comfortably (his 8.3 mark is well ahead of Tagovailoa’s second-best 4.8) despite averaging 8.3 yards for his average depth of target beyond the line of scrimmage, tied with Allen for 10th-best among all passers this year. Geno exists essentially in a class of his own in RBSDM’s Quarterback Efficiency graph:
Shovel passes aren’t the only lesson that Smith and Waldron have learned from the Chiefs, though. Since losing Hill in a trade to the Dolphins and given the league’s widespread adoption of Cover 2 defensive alignments to take away the deep ball and stifle offenses, Kansas City has cracked the code yet again. Rather than focusing on the more difficult deep shots, they’re picking apart two-high zone defenses at their weak point, the medium to medium-deep area of the field, like shown below:
Mahomes has been deadly efficient in this area of the field, and while Geno and the Seahawks’ offense is considerably more limited than Reid and Eric Bieniemy’s system, they’ve shown an urgency to attack that area of the field as well:
Waldron has a few tricks up his sleeve to scheme up openings in that area of the field, including “dig” routes, a deep in-cutting route best run by speedy receivers with a quick first step to fool defenders into thinking they’ll run a go route. In the first clip of the second video below, Smith does a great job of progressing past his first read to find the open man on such a dig route for a big gain:
Smith and the Seahawks offense have also benefited from major personnel upgrades to go along with their clever tactical tweaks. General Manager John Schneider hadn’t had a strong draft in a while since his legendary run from 2010-2012 which included Kam Chancellor, Earl Thomas, Richard Sherman, Bobby Wagner, Russell Wilson, Golden Tate, K.J. Wright, Bruce Irvin, and Russell Okung, among others-- essentially their entire core that took the team to back-to-back Super Bowls. Schneider badly needed to hit on this draft to save his job, and he did exactly that.
Seattle drafted two offensive tackles, Charles Cross and Abraham Lucas, and both have not only established themselves as every-game starters, but as one of the best tackle tandems in the entire league-- Lucas and Cross rank 14th and 22nd in pass block win rate, respectively, across all qualifying offensive tackles, per ESPN Analytics/Next Gen Stats. Kenneth Walker III, behind this improved line, has also staked his claim as one of the most dynamic running backs in the league, averaging 5.4 yards per carry on the season. He’s also averaging over 100 yards per game in his last four outings and has found the end zone in every one of those four games. His play gives the balance the Seattle offense needs in order to take some pressure off of Geno and open up more opportunities in the aforementioned intermediate areas of the field, as defenses need to commit more defenders into the box to respect the run game.
Rookie RB Kenneth Walker III has excelled behind an improved offensive line. Image from: Steph Chambers/Getty Images.
Though this article is about Seattle's offense, it’s still worth mentioning Schneider also hit on the defensive side of the ball in the draft, too. Cornerback Tariq Woolen is an early front-runner for Defensive Rookie of the Year showing rare ball-hawking skills to go along with a top-tier athletic profile at the position, and other rookies Boye Mafe and Coby Bryant have been quality contributors as well. These additions have put the Seahawks' rebuild well ahead of schedule, and it may be time to talk about this team as one that fancies themselves to become Lombardi contenders right now.
Geno Smith is on a contract year at age 32, and is delivering just the first high-quality season of his near-decade-long NFL career, which will leave Schneider with a quandary this summer. This upcoming draft boasts two highly-touted quarterback prospects at the top in Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud and Alabama’s Bryce Young. Do you want to trust Smith in a breakout season on the wrong end of 30 with this emerging young core, or do you draft a QB with MVP potential to grow along with the team?
The Seahawks need to decide whether or not to extend Geno Smith at the end of this season. Image from: Stephen Brashear/AP Photo.
It’s worth noting that Seattle owns Denver’s first-round pick this year as part of the Russell Wilson trade, a pick that currently sits at 10th overall as the Broncos have struggled this year. That pick plus Seattle’s own first-round pick, packaged with a couple more assets, could very well be enough to move up into the range to grab Stroud or Young. But at this point, given what Geno has shown this team, I say that would be an unwise decision.
Super Bowl teams are built on youth, depth, and elite quarterback play. This team sorely needs more depth and talent, especially on defense, to ascend to real contention, but that’s a stage that isn’t impossible to reach within the next two seasons. If Seattle can sign Smith to a team-friendly deal, perhaps a cheaper contract loaded with incentives based on his continued quality of play, they can focus on fixing their more pressing deficiencies with their nine draft selections in 2023 (including two first-rounders and two second-rounders), and can use the rest of their sixth-highest cap space figure to fill out the roster as needed.
Absolutely nothing about Smith’s play this year smells of regression waiting to happen. He’s got the advanced metrics backing up his raw numbers, and in fact may actually be due for some positive regression in the form of higher passing touchdown numbers, has elite athleticism to be a game-changer in his own right, and can get the ball out in many different trajectories to throw off defenses. He’s legitimately ticking off every box of the ideal modern quarterback prototype, and he deserves to be considered in at least the near-elite tier of passers at this point. If you can re-sign him on the cheap, why on earth wouldn’t you?
Geno Smith is living proof that it’s never too late to change your own narrative, even in such an unforgiving industry like professional football. All the years of ridicule and then of learning behind NFL greats have given him the perfect balance of a chip-on-his-shoulder attitude and veteran poise and discipline. Sprinkle in the inherent talent that was always there, and Smith is finally becoming the quarterback he was always meant to be.
That last question-and-response was supposed to describe Geno Smith. Once a prized quarterback talent when playing his college ball at West Virginia, Smith was drafted by the New York Jets in the second round of the 2013 draft. His elite athleticism but spotty accuracy showed up on tape throughout his four years with Gang Green, as he showed flashes of elite potential here and there but ultimately threw 28 touchdowns against 36 interceptions. Worse still, he suffered a broken jaw in his third season during an altercation with his own teammate over an unpaid debt, causing him to eventually lose his starting job. He never truly gained that job back, as he tore his ACL in his lone start in 2016, his final game with the team that drafted him.
Smith spent the next five years serving as an insurance policy. He was a backup to Eli Manning with the Giants, then to Philip Rivers with the Chargers, and then for Russell Wilson with the Seahawks. Serving as a backup to Hall-of-Fame caliber quarterbacks, all of whom were famous for rarely missing games, wasn’t the most glamorous of careers. Former Colts offensive coordinator Tom Moore once famously responded when asked why Peyton Manning’s backups weren’t getting many practice snaps, “Fellas, if 18 goes down we're fucked, and we don't practice fucked”. When the fact that you even playing a snap in a live game is synonymous with your team being screwed, that's probably not a good place to be in.
Smith became an afterthought in professional football as a result. An “oh yeah, I remember him!” type of player. An “it’s a shame, I really thought he’d be good” player, even. We knew exactly who Geno Smith was. Until we realized we didn’t know him at all.
Geno Smith has excelled for the Seahawks in his first starting job since 2014. Image from: Lindsey Wasson/Getty Images.
After Wilson forced his way out of Seattle, a downright miserable power vacuum was left at the quarterback position. Smith and Drew Lock, acquired in the Wilson trade with Denver, continually one-upped each other in the preseason, but in a negative sense (one-downed?). Geno finished three preseason games without throwing a single touchdown, but Lock’s continued colossal collapses saw the veteran seize the starting job anyway.
All Geno Smith has done since becoming Seattle’s starter is play like one of the truly elite quarterbacks in the league, and propel a team many expected to be one of the absolute cellar-dwellers of the NFL to become true playoff contenders. No, really. And although career resuscitations this late for a quarterback aren’t totally unprecedented -- Steve Young and Rich Gannon became quality starters after turning 30, for instance -- they are exceedingly uncommon, which inevitably begs the question for Seahawks fans everywhere: is this fool’s gold, or is Geno for real?
The answer to that question will determine how Seattle chooses to proceed when they reach a major crossroads at the end of this season, a decision point that could send this franchise into wildly different directions for years to come. And we might just have that answer already.
Seattle’s offense last year was not good. New offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, though reportedly hand-picked by Wilson himself, failed to establish a system that meshed head coach Pete Carroll’s old-school desires with Wilson’s propensity for off-schedule plays, rollouts, and deep shots. They started off good enough, ranking 10th in offensive EPA/play in Weeks 1-5, but dropped off rapidly after Wilson’s injury. From Week 6 and onwards, the team was 14th in offensive EPA/play, but was mostly buoyed by a run-heavy system: they ranked 2nd in rushing EPA/play, but 19th in dropback EPA/play, per RBSDM. They looked and played like an offense without any rhythm or confidence.
Smith was serviceable in four appearances for the injured Wilson in 2021, though certainly looked like a career backup. He did complete 68.4% of his passes and posted a 103.0 passer rating, but went 1-3 in his four starts, averaged only 175.5 passing yards per game, and threw just five touchdowns.
This season, however, Waldron’s scheme has improved massively, and Smith looks much more comfortable in it than Wilson ever did. It’s commonly believed now that Wilson had perhaps too much sway in how the team and the offense was run, and perhaps his absence allowed Waldron to be more free-thinking and creative. We’ve seen some of that creativity this year, perhaps the most seen in a Carroll-coached team in many years: there’s been three tight-end sets, diamond-alignment backfields, and aggressiveness and creativity on fourth downs, just to name a few new revelations.
Offensive coordinator Shane Waldron and Smith have gotten the best out of each other this season. Image from: Ted S. Warren/AP Photo
I might have even let out an audible gasp when watching one of those fourth-down looks from Seattle in their most recent win over the six-win Giants. The pre-snap motion and the unorthodox setup with Tyler Lockett in the backfield schemed the speedy Lockett open against a Giants defense that was showing blitz for an easy pitch-and-catch play, as shown below:
Seahawks had two 4th down conversions on their first touchdown drive against the Giants. The first one was to Lockett; gotta love this play design, the Giants defense is out of sorts pre-snap, leaving Tyler wide open coming out of the backfield. Easy conversion and great call. pic.twitter.com/ToH7lUU2bJ
— Stan "the Soy Boy" Taylor 🏳️⚧️ (@GoodGuyAtSports) November 2, 2022
This play was a breath of fresh air, and isn’t particularly an outlier in this young season. Waldron is frequently finding intelligent ways to make plays happen, and involving the team’s best receivers, Lockett and D.K. Metcalf. The über-athletic and talented Metcalf had a frustrating 2021 following a sensational sophomore season, and at times it just seemed like Waldron and the Seahawks had no idea how to use him properly. I often found myself watching games and scratching my head as to why they refused to throw him the ball more. It seems like such a simple formula -- find ways to put the ball in your best players’ hands and reap the rewards -- and Waldron has finally started to figure out that formula this year.
The NFL is famously a “copycat league”; when teams find something that works, everyone else scrambles to become a cheap imitation. No team has cracked the code for how to run a modern offense in the past half-decade than Andy Reid’s Kansas City Chiefs. Endlessly genius plays mixed with tempo and aggressive downfield looks have turned Patrick Mahomes’ squad into world-beaters year-in and year-out, and they continue to be the class of the league this year even despite losing Tyreek Hill. On Sunday, the Seahawks converted another fourth down on the same drive as the previously-shown play, and it’s nearly identical to a concept the Chiefs love to run with Mahomes and Travis Kelce:
Seahawks' second 4th down conversion went to Dissly on the shovel pass. Again, awesome play design and execution to give the offense the upper hand in a high-leverage situation. Hawks scored two plays later. pic.twitter.com/kGHM1wu2Jl
— Stan "the Soy Boy" Taylor 🏳️⚧️ (@GoodGuyAtSports) November 2, 2022
.@PatrickMahomes shovels to @TKelce for the @Chiefs TD! #KCvsTEN
— NFL (@NFL) November 10, 2019
📺: CBS
📱: NFL app // Yahoo Sports app
Watch free on mobile: https://t.co/414bcK9I5b pic.twitter.com/5fGGwAZBFz
Smith looks like he was always meant to run Waldron’s system. He consistently gets the football out on-schedule and with accuracy, but still has enough veteran savvy and courage to go off-script for positive plays. He delivers the ball with varying arm angles and in different locations depending on his receiver’s leverage against their defender with consistency. Smith also still has those elite athletic tools that were so sought-after as a college prospect, and when putting all of that together he looks every bit the part of the modern NFL quarterback. It can be hard to trust when this sort of transformation happens almost overnight (hey, Josh Allen did the same thing, and look at him now!), but Geno is passing the eye test with aplomb. I mean, just look at this:
GENO SMITH STILL AIN’T WRITE BACK
— PFF (@PFF) October 9, 2022
pic.twitter.com/jC0EI1eqeo
But Smith isn’t just looking the part-- he’s got the data on his side as well. He leads the league in completion percentage, ranks 8th in raw passing yards and 8th in net yards per passing attempt, while also sporting the league’s 9th-best TD% and 4th-best INT%. The advanced metrics are even more astonishing, however, as he currently ranks 4th in RBSDM’s EPA+CPOE composite behind only Tua Tagovailoa, Mahomes, and Allen, and leads the league in CPOE comfortably (his 8.3 mark is well ahead of Tagovailoa’s second-best 4.8) despite averaging 8.3 yards for his average depth of target beyond the line of scrimmage, tied with Allen for 10th-best among all passers this year. Geno exists essentially in a class of his own in RBSDM’s Quarterback Efficiency graph:
Shovel passes aren’t the only lesson that Smith and Waldron have learned from the Chiefs, though. Since losing Hill in a trade to the Dolphins and given the league’s widespread adoption of Cover 2 defensive alignments to take away the deep ball and stifle offenses, Kansas City has cracked the code yet again. Rather than focusing on the more difficult deep shots, they’re picking apart two-high zone defenses at their weak point, the medium to medium-deep area of the field, like shown below:
Mahomes has been deadly efficient in this area of the field, and while Geno and the Seahawks’ offense is considerably more limited than Reid and Eric Bieniemy’s system, they’ve shown an urgency to attack that area of the field as well:
Waldron has a few tricks up his sleeve to scheme up openings in that area of the field, including “dig” routes, a deep in-cutting route best run by speedy receivers with a quick first step to fool defenders into thinking they’ll run a go route. In the first clip of the second video below, Smith does a great job of progressing past his first read to find the open man on such a dig route for a big gain:
Smith has been one of the better QBs in the NFL operating out of Empty this season. With a nice mix of taking the easy ones + pushing when needed (he ranks 3rd in Empty aDOT).
— Nate Tice (@Nate_Tice) October 24, 2022
He plays calm and is willing to progress (the first clip of hanging and working to his Dig is great). pic.twitter.com/rMM0SQIGAb
Smith and the Seahawks offense have also benefited from major personnel upgrades to go along with their clever tactical tweaks. General Manager John Schneider hadn’t had a strong draft in a while since his legendary run from 2010-2012 which included Kam Chancellor, Earl Thomas, Richard Sherman, Bobby Wagner, Russell Wilson, Golden Tate, K.J. Wright, Bruce Irvin, and Russell Okung, among others-- essentially their entire core that took the team to back-to-back Super Bowls. Schneider badly needed to hit on this draft to save his job, and he did exactly that.
Seattle drafted two offensive tackles, Charles Cross and Abraham Lucas, and both have not only established themselves as every-game starters, but as one of the best tackle tandems in the entire league-- Lucas and Cross rank 14th and 22nd in pass block win rate, respectively, across all qualifying offensive tackles, per ESPN Analytics/Next Gen Stats. Kenneth Walker III, behind this improved line, has also staked his claim as one of the most dynamic running backs in the league, averaging 5.4 yards per carry on the season. He’s also averaging over 100 yards per game in his last four outings and has found the end zone in every one of those four games. His play gives the balance the Seattle offense needs in order to take some pressure off of Geno and open up more opportunities in the aforementioned intermediate areas of the field, as defenses need to commit more defenders into the box to respect the run game.
Rookie RB Kenneth Walker III has excelled behind an improved offensive line. Image from: Steph Chambers/Getty Images.
Though this article is about Seattle's offense, it’s still worth mentioning Schneider also hit on the defensive side of the ball in the draft, too. Cornerback Tariq Woolen is an early front-runner for Defensive Rookie of the Year showing rare ball-hawking skills to go along with a top-tier athletic profile at the position, and other rookies Boye Mafe and Coby Bryant have been quality contributors as well. These additions have put the Seahawks' rebuild well ahead of schedule, and it may be time to talk about this team as one that fancies themselves to become Lombardi contenders right now.
Geno Smith is on a contract year at age 32, and is delivering just the first high-quality season of his near-decade-long NFL career, which will leave Schneider with a quandary this summer. This upcoming draft boasts two highly-touted quarterback prospects at the top in Ohio State’s C.J. Stroud and Alabama’s Bryce Young. Do you want to trust Smith in a breakout season on the wrong end of 30 with this emerging young core, or do you draft a QB with MVP potential to grow along with the team?
The Seahawks need to decide whether or not to extend Geno Smith at the end of this season. Image from: Stephen Brashear/AP Photo.
It’s worth noting that Seattle owns Denver’s first-round pick this year as part of the Russell Wilson trade, a pick that currently sits at 10th overall as the Broncos have struggled this year. That pick plus Seattle’s own first-round pick, packaged with a couple more assets, could very well be enough to move up into the range to grab Stroud or Young. But at this point, given what Geno has shown this team, I say that would be an unwise decision.
Super Bowl teams are built on youth, depth, and elite quarterback play. This team sorely needs more depth and talent, especially on defense, to ascend to real contention, but that’s a stage that isn’t impossible to reach within the next two seasons. If Seattle can sign Smith to a team-friendly deal, perhaps a cheaper contract loaded with incentives based on his continued quality of play, they can focus on fixing their more pressing deficiencies with their nine draft selections in 2023 (including two first-rounders and two second-rounders), and can use the rest of their sixth-highest cap space figure to fill out the roster as needed.
Absolutely nothing about Smith’s play this year smells of regression waiting to happen. He’s got the advanced metrics backing up his raw numbers, and in fact may actually be due for some positive regression in the form of higher passing touchdown numbers, has elite athleticism to be a game-changer in his own right, and can get the ball out in many different trajectories to throw off defenses. He’s legitimately ticking off every box of the ideal modern quarterback prototype, and he deserves to be considered in at least the near-elite tier of passers at this point. If you can re-sign him on the cheap, why on earth wouldn’t you?
Geno Smith is living proof that it’s never too late to change your own narrative, even in such an unforgiving industry like professional football. All the years of ridicule and then of learning behind NFL greats have given him the perfect balance of a chip-on-his-shoulder attitude and veteran poise and discipline. Sprinkle in the inherent talent that was always there, and Smith is finally becoming the quarterback he was always meant to be.
The world may have written Geno off, but he never wrote back, and the future of Seattle sports is all the better for it. Perhaps even in the most fast-paced and judgmental environments, patience is a virtue after all. ■
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