Seattle’s offensive struggles aren’t just a one game aberration

The issues the Seattle Seahawks have on offense aren’t going to go away until the team recognizes the issue and works to correct it.

The Seattle Seahawks embarrassed themselves offensively last Sunday. They scored only six points while setting all sorts of new benchmarks for offensive ineptness along the way.

While it is easy to write off the struggles as just a one-time bad game, doing so would be inaccurate. Sunday’s performance was bad, and was the culmination of problems that have been evident all season.

The Seahawks have failed to score more than 12 points in three of their six games. To put it another way, the offense has been terrible in half of the team’s games this year.

Sure, Seattle is 1-1-1 in those games, but that has much more to do with their dominant defense than anything the offense managed to do. In all three of those games, the offense was anemic at best.

In Seattle’s other three games, the offense was surprisingly good. They scored 26 against Atlanta and 27 against the Jets. They also ran up the score on San Francisco.

So then, what is the difference between the three games in which the offense played well vs the three in which it doesn’t? It is pretty clear that the difference is in the personnel of the defense on the other side oft he ball.

All three of the teams the Seahawks have played well against lack above average edge rushers. Any strength those defenses have along the line is in the interior. With Ifedi, Britt and Glow in the middle of Seattle’s O-line, they managed to prevent those interior defenders from taking over the game.

In the three poor performances, the opposing team featured elite edge rushers. Miami has Cameron Wake. The Rams have Robert Quinn and William Hayes. Arizona has Chandler Jones and Markus Golden.

All of this makes sense once you realize that Seattle’s major weakness is their offensive tackles. Gary Gilliam has not played well this season, and Bradley Sowell has been perhaps the worst offensive linemen in the entire NFL.

If there was ever a time for the Seahawks to make a significant roster move mid-season, this would be it. There are no players on Seattle’s roster that can fix this problem. It is also an unacceptable decision for the team to simply ignore it and hope it goes away.

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One thing that we can count on is that the Seahawks won’t be able to make a run through the playoffs without having to face at least one elite edge rusher. They must find a way to fix this, or a championship caliber defense will be wasted by Tom Cable’s stubbornness.