Seahawks tape study: Run blocking mistakes doomed offense vs Lions

The Seattle Seahawks were barely able to escape with a 13-10 win over the 0-4 Detroit Lions on Monday. Seattle’s offense simply couldn’t get anything going against a less-than stellar Detroit defense. Anyone who watched the game can tell you that the reason for Seattle’s struggles was the play of their offensive line.

The book on Tom Cable lines are that they are generally poor as pass blocking, but they are great run blocking units. That simply isn’t the case right now. While the pass blocking remains poor, the run blocking was far worse.

Going through the tape, it is painful to see just how bad this group is playing. Here are the worst of the worst run blocking plays from Monday. Unfortunately, there are a lot of them.

Warning: The vines included here are disturbing for anyone who likes competent blocking.

Nowak, Gilliam and Okung all completely miss on the first run of the game.

The entire left side failed here, plus Sweezy wasn’t able to sustain his block. Gilliam’s and Coleman are able to save the play and get Rawls to the corner.

Okung and Britt cannot even win a combo block at the point of attack here. When your double-team fails, the run has no chance.

The entire left side is one big failure. A traffic cone would be more effective than Britt.

This next run fails in large part because Coleman gets stopped in the hole. Gilliam’s does a great job of blocking Sweezy though, so there’s no hope of a cutback lane for Rawls.

Justin Brill is a professional guard. It is extremely tough to tell.

Another fun block by Justin Britt. Using the term “block” here is fairly generous.

All of the above plays are just from the first half. They aren’t even all of the failed run blocks either. Those are just the most spectacular fails.

In the second half, things don’t improve much. The results were better because of the Lions lost so many of their front-seven players to injury. Rawls was able to use the one or two decent blocks and turn them into positive yards.

That doesn’t mean that there were painfully hilarious mistakes though. For instance, this hook-slide by Gilliam defies explanation.

Everything about this next play is gross. Okung should have been called for an illegal block. He’s lucky that this didn’t add to Detroit’s long list of injuries.

All told, there were only 3 runs in which all five members of the offense line completed their blocking assignments. One was blown up by an unblocked DB on the back side that probably should have been picked up by Jimmy Graham.

The other two were an easy 10 yard gain, and the final running play of the game that went for six yards. When the linemen actually do their jobs correctly, good things happen.

Sadly, the linemen rarely ever do their jobs correctly.

Next: Rational Thoughts on Seattle win over Detroit

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