Seahawks soar, the Huskies bore

You know what would have been great?

If the Seahawks could have given one of the touchdowns they scored on Sunday to the Huskies.

Just one. That’s all it would have taken.

A little pay-day loan, and Washington might have been able to sneak out of Madison, Wisc., with a victory.

The Seahawks scored so many points – 38 of them in the first half – that they didn’t quite know what to do with themselves in the second half, which resulted in a couple of turnovers that soiled the fringes of what was the football equivalent of a parade.

But the Huskies. Oh the Huskies and that (supposedly) sterling offense. They got into that November weather up in Wisconsin, some sort of wintry mix that was falling from the sky, and the only touchdown the Huskies managed to score came after a blocked punt put the ball at the Wisconsin 1.

It was ugly. So ugly, I need to take a little detour get back to the weekend’s football games in a bit.

I first received “The Best of American Sports Writing” as a Christmas gift from my mom.

I think it was 1992, which was my senior year at Aptos High School. I’m not certain, though. I do recall that our cat, a calico named Benny, perforated one corner of the paperback cover. This was something he would occasionally do, using his incisors to bit a series of holes in a thick piece of paper. Usually, it was cardboard, but in this case, it was the corner of my book.

The gift started something of an annual tradition. You see, this was a yearly anthology, and my mom would get me a copy for my birthday (if it was out by then) or for Christmas except on those occasions when I saw the book in a bookstore in which case I’d have to warn her that I’d already bought my copy.

To call it a bible is too much. It was something of a measuring stick, though, of the kind of sports writing that I admired and the kind of sports writing I sought to do: long, magazine-style stories. I set having one of my stories chosen for the anthology as something of a career goal as a journalist, and I came close.

Stories that I wrote for The Seattle Times in 2010 and 2011 were listed as Honorable Mention in the anthology, meaning the series editor has forwarded them for consideration but they had ultimately not been picked. I do consider those to be two of the better stories I’ve written.

Over the past 10 years, the series stopped holding the same sway over me. Some of that was my professional switch as I went from writing about sports to (mostly) talking about them. Some of that is the change of the industry, which now brokers primarily in articles and profiles as opposed to stories and at the risk of sounding insufferably self-absorbed I’ll now explain the difference.

• An article is meant to convey information. It can be entertaining. It can be well-written, but the primary purpose is to communicate specific facts or information about a person, team or event.

• A profile is a slice of life portrait usually of an individual though it can also be of a team. Generally, the writer is given time and/or access with the subject(s) and tries to give you an idea of what that feels and looks like.

A story is something else. A story is meant to be read in its entirety from beginning to end. In order to accomplish this, the writer is afforded some leeway in order to build suspense, to keep the reader interested. The writer can withhold information. They can build toward a plot twist. They can build to a climax in order to deliver a payoff.

This is certainly not allowed in an article. A reporter does not spend 11 paragraphs enumerating the attributes and success of a specific player only to reveal—SURPRISE!!!—he’s out this week with a sprained ankle.

Stories don’t have to be tied to current events the way articles are. They don’t have to be focused on a person-of-interest in the same way that profiles generally are.

The vast majority of things that I’ve written professionally are articles. I have also written a number of profiles. I have written only a few longform, narrative stories.

That is what I consider to be the highest form of sports writing, though, which brings me back to “The Best American Sports Writing.” That specific series ran from 1991 through 2020. In 2021, it moved to a different printing press, which publishes it as “The Year’s Best Sports Writing” and for the first time in several years I bought the new edition.

I thought of my mom when I did this, reflecting back to all the ways in which she encouraged my interest in both writing and in sports. Then I read the introduction from Hanif Abdurraqib, who is this year’s guest editor and I felt my soul stir just a bit.

Now, I love Hanif Abdurraqib’s. He is a poet and an author, and it was my brother who first turned me onto him when he gave me the book “They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us.” He also wrote a great book about the rap group Tribe Called Quest and most recently “There’s Always This Year” which is a memoir about fandom.

Here is a passage from Nif’s intro to the sports-writing anthology:

It is a beautiful description of how we wind up reading about things we—ourselves—are not specifically interested, but somehow become fascinated by.

I’m grateful to be reminded of both the power of a good story, and what it takes to write them. For the first time in many years I found myself motivated by the idea of writing a story that would be worthy of an anthology like that.

It is possible to work up a level of concern over the way the Seahawks’ offense played in the 44-22 victory over Arizona.

There were those three turnovers that Seattle committed deep in its own half of the field, which provided the only hint of suspense in Sunday’s game. The fact that quarterback Sam Darnold was involved in all three means that I am technically allowed to express concern over his tendency to turn it over.

I can do it, though. Not with a clean conscience. The first of those three turnovers came on a botched exchange with the backup center, Olu Oluwatimi. As Seattle’s offense returned to the sidelines after the fumble, it sure looked like Oluwatimi tapped his chest to indicate it was his fault. The second turnover came off a pass that was tipped at the line of scrimmage, and the third occurred when a Cardinals defensive lineman clobbered the ball out of Darnold’s hand as he attempted to pass it.

Could Darnold stand to be more careful with the ball? Certainly. I just don’t think those three turnovers are canaries in the coal mine, either.

When a team scores a touchdown on each of its first three possessions as Seattle’s offense did, and the defense scores a touchdown on two of the opponent’s first three possession as Seattle’s defense did, you should be careful about reading too much into anything that happens after that.

I don’t care that Arizona outgained Seattle in the second half.

Seattle didn’t “almost” blow this game. Even after that third turnover, as the Cardinals drove inside the Seattle 10 with less than 5 minutes in the third quarter, the Seahawks were still leading by 23 points.

This one was over before the game reached halftime, setting the table for a showdown against the Rams not just for the division lead, but with playoff seeding potentially at stake.

The punter led Wisconsin in passing yards.

The freaking punter.

Sean West’s 24-yard completion on a fake punt in the third quarter matched the total yards gained on the 17 passes that Wisconsin’s three actual quarterbacks threw.

And yet the Huskies lost this game.

Not only that, they deserved to lose this game. At least the offense did, and while this has resulted in a fair amount of displeasure being directed toward the guy who’s in charge of that offense (the head coach), I’m interested to see how they respond.

This Washington team has a long way to go before anyone should start thinking it’s a championship contender in its conference let alone in the country. What’s surprising is that it looks like the offense has the most work to do.