Geno Smith never wavered in the face of a downward trend that saw his NFL career nearly end. On Monday, he was rewarded for his persistence.
If you listened to Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider at the scouting combine last week, you probably knew it was coming.
That said, if you know Geno Smith’s history, and even if you watched his remarkable 2022 season, in which he won Comeback Player of the Year, you might still be surprised by Monday’s news that Smith inked a new three-year, $105 million contract to be Seattle’s franchise quarterback.
Because none of this was guaranteed. After the Seahawks traded Russell Wilson to the Broncos in March, and got quarterback Drew Lock in return along with two other players and a windfall of draft picks, all Smith was told was that he would have the opportunity to compete with Lock for the starting job in the 2022 preseason.
That was it. No guarantees for a guy who had disappointed, and been disappointed, along every stop in his NFL journey before this one.
But Smith took it by the horns, won the job, and radically outperformed everybody’s expectations but his own in a season where he completed 424 of 607 passes for 4,535 yards, 32 touchdowns, 12 interceptions, and a passer rating of 100.8. He finished ninth in Football Outsiders’ season-cumulative DYAR metric among qualifying quarterbacks, and 12th in FO’s per-play DVOA metric, having never finished higher than 30th in either one before.
Selected in the second round of the 2013 draft out of West Virginia, Smith had two passable seasons as Gang Green’s starter before everything started to fall apart.
In August, 2015, Smith was involved in an altercation with Jets defensive end IK Enemkpali, which prevented Smith from starting the season. Ryan Fitzpatrick started that season strong, so new head coach Todd Bowles decided to keep Fitzpatrick in that role, even when Smith returned.
Smith didn’t get his next legitimate chance to start for the Jets until Week 7 of the 2016 season against the Baltimore Ravens. He suffered a torn ACL in that game, was lost for the rest of the season, and that was the end of his time with the Jets.
Smith signed with the New York Giants before the 2017 season, and outside of a weird time when he replaced Eli Manning as the team’s starter for a short time (this made him the first Black quarterback to start for the Giants, and it meant that every NFL team had finally had a Black starting quarterback at any time in their histories), he was seemingly doomed forever to the role of backup. That extended through his time with the San Diego Chargers in 2018, when he completed one pass on four attempts for eight yards.
Smith then signed with the Seahawks before the 2019 season, and competed with Paxton Lynch for the job of backup behind Russell Wilson. He was actually released and re-signed at one point, and didn’t take a single snap with Seattle that season. He completed four of five passes for 33 yards in the 2020 season, and finally got his first chances as a starter when Wilson suffered a finger injury in 2021. Then, he completed 65 of 95 passes for 702 yards, five touchdowns, one interception, and a passer rating of 103.0.
Behind the scenes, Smith had become an entirely different and better quarterback, with no guarantee that it would ever pay off.
But at the end of that season, he had firmly established himself as the leader of the team. Smith knew it, all the players knew it, and Carroll and Schneider knew it. The only question was, what to do now — take a risk on the open market and let Smith test the waters, or lock him up to the contract he had finally earned?
The answer, just as it was last week at the combine, was crystal clear.
“It’s a great story now,” Carroll said, when asked why so many other quarterbacks who have the bad side of Smith’s story never see the good side. “There’s other guys that can do the same thing. They get lost and they’re out of the league, and you don’t see him again, there’s so many quarterbacks. We look at the success rate of the quarterbacks coming in and the first rounders and all of that. It’s a startling realization of how many guys don’t make it. Who’s to say? You know, some of those guys make it through Year 4 or 5 or 6 and they hang with the club, you knew that they had enough ability, but you just couldn’t see it come to life, that maybe we have given up on guys too soon. Some of that is themselves too. They have to maintain that connection to the belief in themselves.
“Geno was a remarkable illustration of that. He never wavered. And he expected to win the job, he expected to make the comp, he expected to be successful, he expected to be where he is right now. That’s all part of it. That’s the mental side he brought. I’m not saying everybody’s gonna be like Geno. But that opportunity is certainly there. I think It’s important.”
It is important, and now, Smith has earned his just reward for proving every single doubter wrong.
