This is where the Seattle Seahawks ranked in an ESPN offseason ranking.

ESPN is at it again. This time, Mike Clay honored us with his own hype for his own ranking, using some unknown criteria and an oddly worded setup:

It has been a difficult year, so I will not bury the lede: they put the Seattle Seahawks 30th out of 32 teams.

However, the first thing to focus on is the tweet. How, in a professional sports warfare with 16 verifiable and immutable contests with which to judge the effectiveness of each team, can Mike Clay claim to have ranked teams from “most improved” to “least improved”?

Are you telling me that the 32 teams have improved, simply that some have improved less? Amazing. Give it a few more years and we can deliver 16-0 to the entire league. (And you thought John Gilbert’s titles were bad.)

Still, assuming the soccer intellect pool meant that some teams improved tremendously while other teams fell back, the Seahawks would certainly find themselves in the latter by scoring the third-worst offseason.

Here is the text of the piece:

What’s missing

ESPN omitted crucial pieces for the Seattle offseason that cast doubt on the amount of research (probably very little) that was done on this piece.

• They have included Cedric Ogbuehi, who is, at best, the third strongest lineman added to the team this year. Both BJ Finney and Brandon Shell have better opportunities to start, impact and improve the positions left behind.
• Not signing Antonio Brown should be worth at least five points on this scale, and it’s a shame that this important factor has been left out.
• This image of John Ursua is noticeably absent:

That’s a great off-season addition if I’ve ever seen it.

What is wrong

• Quinton Dunbar’s arrest is not a fair summons to downgrade the Seahawks out of season, plain and simple. It’s still a very positive value swap at the moment, and Dunbar can still proceed as allowed in training camp. Seattle did not get worse by acquiring Dunbar, yet.

• The key losses are intriguing. Mychal Kendricks is not on the list, Jadeveon Clowney is not on the list, and I daresay Josh Gordon is not on the list. Instead, OT3 / TE17 George Fant and renowned Frank Clark-puncher Germain Ifedi are this year’s massive outings? It’s worth considering losing an initial right tackle, except they’ve already replaced him with a guy who seems pretty similar on paper with far fewer penalties.

What is right

• They like Jarran Reed, so that’s great I guess.

• Greg Olsen, Bruce Irvin and Quinton Dunbar are probably the three biggest additions to the team this offseason. Which, and no one should hear this for the first time here, is not great. Many fans would give away most of the team’s 15 offensive linemen for that list to be Jadeveon Clowney, Jamal Adams, and that’s it.

• It’s a pretty bland offseason, so I don’t suppose anyone expected analysts to give the Seahawks the Top 10 Brands or anything like that. More particularly, the team continues to fail to address the positions of greatest need according to the game-by-game eye test. We have already covered how Russell Wilson could be covering even more holes than people think. Not getting help on both lines is frustrating. That is, not doing it in a way that evokes confidence is frustrating; technically signs half of the league’s backup offensive linemen it is One way to approach the line.

What is nice

The Los Angeles Rams were number 32 on the glorious team. Those that least improved. Which is still incredibly stupid and I won’t forgive ESPN for saying it that way. But the Rams, who have now gone from three points in the Super Bowl to a 9-7 record that left them out of the playoffs, have now made the least improvement of all NFL teams.

Maybe they shouldn’t have wasted so much energy drawing this yellow croissant and trying to explain why no one will be in their games:

Sometimes, it is the small victories that bring the greatest pleasure.

Greetings, Seahawks third least improved. Way of not being the rams.