Welcome Matt: Will the rebuilding Seahawks remain BC's team without Russell Wilson?

All eyes on Seattle as Russell Wilson and the Denver Broncos kickoff the new NFL season against the Seahawks on Monday.

It’s the most expensive ticket of opening weekend, and Seahawks fans will be at fever pitch, jeering their former franchise quarterback.

Then the game will end and that will be that for Seahawks football in 2022, right?

The climax in Week 1. All downhill from there?

After a decade of competitiveness and two Super Bowl appearances, Seattle is rebuilding this season.

They’ve got some young players who will have to hold down spots along the offensive line and in the secondary, and the quarterback will be journeyman Geno Smith who beat out journeyman Drew Lock in training camp.

Our poll question: will British Columbia support a rebuilding Seahawks team? In other words, are we Seahawks fans or are we 12s?

Going down to Seattle for Hawks games has been all the rage, even in miserable weather conditions, and I suspect the Sunday lineups at the border will be shorter this season.

And that’s to be expected. It’s a big effort to get to games given the traffic, and they’re all readily available in the cozy comforts of a home theatre.

But I, for one, don’t expect we’ll see a mass exodus of support or allegiance from B.C., even if Vancouver is an event town that hasn’t supported its domestic teams when they’ve hit hard times.

This last decade of Seahawks football has been intoxicating and rooted the team into our sporting DNA like never before. A Super Bowl, a second near-championship, thrilling wins, and some of the best players in the 40-plus year history of the franchise, guys like Marshawn Lynch and Richard Sherman, who became household names across America.

Seattle used to be the Pacific Northwest outpost for the league, but the last 10 years have branded the organization and made it more nationally (and continentally) relevant.

They’re about fun, emotion, competition, social justice, and noise… lots and lots of noise. They’ve created a community that people want to be apart of.

Look, there will always be Packers, Steelers, Cowboys fans within our province, the big NFL brands travel well. But over the last decade, and I’ll bet through the trying times ahead, the Pete Carroll Seahawks have established a bond with the territory to their north.

If it wasn’t before, this is clearly BC’s team now.