49ers Are The Hot Team Now Super Bowl Favorites

Can you name your top ten favorite NFL teams?

Seahawks!I grew up in Seattle. I live in Seattle. I began as a football fan at age of 8 (I am a UW Husky fan as well, duh) when the Seahawks arrived as an expansion team in 1976.They were terrible.But we loved them. Just like Seattleites, our players were castaways who were living in a city where the rest of the country forgot about them. I mean, if you ever read any novels from the 1970s and 1980s, saying a character “moved to Seattle to start a new life” was like saying they went to the moon. It was a trope.We had this big, hideous stadium which was too ugly for football but also housed the poor Mariners!They became part of the community, and became our home-grown heroes (even though we drafted them from all over).We even had one of the greatest receivers in history on our team for over a decade.Then we got a new coach and almost went to the Superbowl (but didn’t)!We had the best safety that ever played the game, whose career was cut short before he could make it unquestioned.While other fans claim glory, I, as a Seahawks fan, claim humility.We had another Hall of Famer:. . . and went 4–12.Then, Paul Allen bought the team. Everything changed. We hired a winner:. . . and they became winners. Including getting a franchise quarterbacka stud running backand a couple of incredible offensive linemenand we lost the Superbowl in a cheesy way, in a hostile stadium, with a third-string safety.(ugh)Then, when everything seemed lost, and the team was led by this windbagPaul Allen does an about-face and hires these guysand they go and get and develop these guysthis guyand this guyand they won it alland lost it alland beat up a lot of people in the processand then it started to unravelso Pete went to townand now they have these guysand the cycle begins again.I love my team because of their play now, and the history behind it.Go Hawks!

What is your least favorite thing about your favorite sports team?

Favorite team: the New England PatriotsLeast favorite thing: SpyGate hatersGo to any Little League field in the country more than halfway through the season and you'll see kids stealing signs (I played, we all knew the other team's steal base, take, swing, choke up signs). What the Patriots did was use a camera to record the signs, which is a bit more accurate and efficient than using TV footage and scouts notes.What they didn't do was record the Rams' walkthrough prior to Super Bowl XXXVI, and even Mike Martz has come out and said this wasn't possible due to the stadium and team security since the practice was at the Super Dome. This would be actual spying, but even the writer from Boston Herald has admitted he made it up.I judge stealing signals through the lens of what I wouldn't want my kid doing. Sure stealing signals is amoral, but I dare you to watch almost any baseball game where there's a man on second base and tell me he isn't trying to broadcast tips to the hitter (which is at least part of why you'll see the best defensive catchers call more brief mound meetings with the runner on, or why they cover their mouths to talk to avoid lip readers). I don't even think it compares to using steroids - it is both cheating and a terrible health risk to all of the kids following their examples. And BountyGate paying each other to INJURE other players? Not even close, stealing signs in plain sight doesn't even remotely compare in my mind to using harmful substances or purposely encouraging dirty hits on opposing players (spearing or going for the knees).I honestly don't view the whole thing of video taping signals in plain sight instead of having scouts wrote them down or pulling them from HD game footage as being any worse than the Super Bowl winning 49ers and Broncos spending above the salary cap. Bad but not nearly as ridiculous as the haters would imply.I'll be back with links. Facts don't support the haters' arguments.Close second: Boston Pink Hat Nation, or how I almost got banned from my dad's Patriots season tickets for standing up and cheering the defense on 3rd down (fuck the corporate seats)On the plus side, we'll find out who the real Celtics fans are now.

Does the Seattle Seahawks' chances to return to a Super Bowl diminish now that they've signed Russell Wilson to a mega contract?

Conventional wisdom is that the Seahawks have only succeeded in the past couple of seasons when Wilson puts them on his back. So it’s fairly clear the team needed to keep him around or burn the whole franchise down - fire John Schneider and Pete Carroll, tank for a few seasons, and start afresh with a hot new QB prospect.As a 49ers fan…I haven’t heard all of the contract details, but the challenge is that teams seem to be over-committing to QBs. Since it’s a salary cap league, that means fewer dollars to pay any other player, which makes it hard to win.USA Today studied this topic last year and concluded that there’s a statistically meaningless correlation between the percentage of cap hit paid to starting QBs and winning games.“[There’s] no correlation between a quarterback’s salary and how many games he wins, so whatever benefit a team gets from paying the quarterback premium is not showing up on the scoreboard.”(NFL teams are paying quarterbacks way too much money and here's the proof)They posted another chart going back to the creation of the salary cap in 1994.“The record for the highest cap hit percentage remains Steve Young’s 13.1% in that first season, when teams were still getting used to building rosters under a budget. Only four quarterbacks have ever won a Super Bowl while accounting for at least 11% of their team’s cap room: Young, Peyton Manning (twice), Tom Brady and Eli Manning.”The confounding factor, though, is Wilson’s play style, which gets the Seahawks out of jams! Again: he carries the team! So he’s probably the exception.Let’s put it this way: the Seahawks definitely weren’t going to the Super Bowl anytime soon without him. Now that they’ve got him locked up for a while, they can spend their (somewhat diminished) resources elsewhere, and they have a shot.But there’s simply no world where they’d keep him without backing up the Brinks truck.