Seattle Seahawks fans seem divided on quarterback Geno Smith. One thing appears certain, and that is that he is still going to be the team's quarterback in 2025. This is likely a good thing as there is no one available this offseason, whether it be in free agency or the NFL draft, that would definitely be an upgrade over Smith.
But how good is he really? We know he is extremely accurate, and not all of his passes are less than 10 yards. Smith throws one of the best deep balls in the NFL and can do so with great velocity. But then he makes wretched mistakes in the red zone and costs his team games.
Even making the playoffs, or having a chance to do so, can be equally applied to Smith in terms of his ability to lead the team to the postseason, and his inconsistency leading Seattle to missing the playoffs. For instance, his interceptions against the Los Angeles Rams in Week 9 might have ultimately cost the Seahawks a chance to win the NFC West.
Recent ranking of every starting quarterback in the NFL has Seattle Seahawks QB1 Geno Smith pretty high on the list
Of course, Seattle might be nowhere near the position to win the division if Smith is not the quarterback. Some point to his high interception total this past season (15, second-most in the league), but his interception percentage per pass only ranked as 14th-worst. He threw the fourth-most passes in the NFL.
Is he a top-half-of-the-league QB, however? NFL.com's Nick Shook believes so. He recently ranked every quarterback who started a game in the league this year, and there were 59 of them, from worst to first. The top ones are fairly easy to guess, with Lamar Jackson, Josh Allen, and Joe Burrow ranking one through three. But Seahawks quarterback Smith came in, fittingly, at number 12.
Shook says of Smith, "He's a veteran with an incredibly accurate arm, who's capable of making big-time throws with zero fear...(but) those successes led Smith to trust himself too much, resulting in some crushing (and costly) mistakes."
Smith's ranking is better than what he did last year when he was 19. In 2022, he was 9. The fact is that for most of the time Geno Smith has been Seattle's QB1, he has been a good, but not great quarterback. Can he lead the team to the playoffs? Sure. He did so in 2022.
The argument that Smith is a bad quarterback is a poor one. There are also no consistently bad statistics to back up the argument, either. In fact, Smith's statistics lean to the opposite argument.
Whether he can lead the Seahawks to a deep run in the playoffs is a different discussion. As great as Lamar Jackson has been, there could be an argument that he is not a Super Bowl-caliber quarterback either. The reality is that Smith needs a better team around him, and not that he is the reason Seattle has missed the playoffs in each of the last two years.
