Commentary: 2024 marked a mediocre transition year in Seattle Sports

The pressure to win – and win now – is higher than ever in this market, likely to the growing saturation of teams. 2024's transition year will hopefully lead to better results in 2025.

SEATTLE - While it’s disappointing the Seahawks have essentially been eliminated from playoff contention before the final week of the regular season, it’s kind of nice it comes before New Year's Day.

Because we can kind of clump it in with the somewhat mediocre year of sports we witnessed on a local level.

It’s not to say we didn’t have some fantastic moments, but it wasn’t exactly a championship kind of year for most of our local teams. The Huskies made the national championship game in January, but lost to Michigan. The Seawolves reached the Major League Rugby title game in August, but lost to New England. At least we had the Husky men’s rowing team winning their 20th national title in school history, because without old faithful, big trophies were hard to come by this year.

2024 was a year of transition. A time for change – hopefully for the better.

Then again, now is a good time to give a Mariners offseason free agent update….

…And that concludes our Mariners offseason free agent update.

But take a look: Not only did the Mariners make a managerial change, the Kraken hired a new head coach. The Seahawks parted ways with Pete Carroll in favor of Mike Macdonald. The Huskies hired Jedd Fisch after Kalen DeBoer abandoned the Dawgs, and now the Cougs have Jimmy Rogers after Jake Dickert recently did the same. The Huskies and Cougs also have new men’s basketball coaches, too.

There’s actually an irony that Noelle Quinn – the one whose staff was investigated for harassment and bullying – is one of very few WNBA coaches who wasn’t replaced this offseason.

But my overall takeaway is this: The pressure to win – and win now – is higher than ever. There’s very little patience for mediocrity in this market, and that might be due to the growing saturation that’ll only increase when the Sonics inevitably come to town in a couple of years – and yes, I still believe they will.

I truly believe there is a fear of irrelevance that’s driving the decisions of most of our local teams. And if we’re being honest, we see some cracks in the armor – from home field advantage no longer really being a thing for the Seahawks, to slowly declining attendance at Sounders matches, to a Mariners fan base that is as vocal as ever against an ownership group that seems to not care about spending what it takes to legitimately compete for a title.

And if there’s not enough of a money grab with our pro teams, add the pressure on alumni bases to fund NIL programs at UW and Washington State, so they can even try to compete with other schools around the country. A brave new world that’s brought a brand-new element to the business side at every D1 program in our area.

The point is this: 2025 is an opportunity to see the results of this transition year that brought some fun moments, but lacked a good amount of the buzz and championships this city deserves.

Come Wednesday, we’ve got another fresh start. Here’s hoping it’s our best year yet.