Agree with all of this. Which only makes my point more emphatically - it is factually easier to brute force your way into contention in baseball than it is football. And yet Paul Allen did it 6 times in 10 years after taking over the Seahawks. Stanton has had 11 years and has coughed up one measly post season appearance.Walla Walla Dawg II wrote: ↑Thu Sep 17, 2026 8:12 pmSorry but comparing the payroll of Football to Baseball isn't a great idea.
Football has a salary cap, so the top talent is [basically] spread around. No team can have a 200m offense and 200m defense.
Baseball with no salary cap..... there is a reason the Dodgers are one of the top 3 teams.
Dodgers: 430Million
Marlins: 84 million
Note:
Our Mariners couldn't beat either.
As you point out, it is significantly harder to buy a championship in football than in baseball because the NFL enforces a strict hard salary cap that legally blocks wealthy owners from outspending their competitors on player salaries. Success in the NFL cannot be made with a checkbook; it requires elite drafting, masterful cap manipulation, and finding a franchise quarterback. Wealthy owners can use cash flow to structure aggressive signing bonuses, but they are ultimately bound by the same financial ceiling as every other team, making a Super Bowl incredibly difficult to engineer through money alone.
Where Allen did get creative was with his coach. Carroll was one of the most transformative coaches of the last 2 decades - his mantra was "always win" and he transformed his team from fear and military-style discipline toward an energy driven, positive, and player-centric philosophy. Te result was the Legion of Boom. We are stuck with 54% as our mantra, and doing a little circle dance with our feet on the rare occasion that we win a game.
The last serious manager we had was Sweet Lou, and that guy was a visionary. Even if Stanton won't go buy superstar players, he could at least get a serious frickin manager. The blame of much of this year's collapse falls squarely on the shoulders of Dan Wilson - he had talent to spare and he squandered it.
I write all of this not to lecture anyone - just that I think a lot about this shit, and once I start writing my brain takes over. My point is simply that the current fleet of owners, GMs and coaches are not driven by the same desire to win that other teams - in baseball or in other sports - are. For the first time in a long time I am actually completely disinterested in the offseason because I feel like whatever minor moves the Mariners make won't move the needle because the higher ups don't care about winning, and they structure their roster accordingly.
