Seahawks coaches set defense up to fail

Steven Terrell was never going to be able to replace Earl Thomas, and it was a mistake for the Seattle Seahawks to ask him to.

Losing Earl Thomas to a broken leg crushed the Seattle Seahawks’ championship dreams this season. The dominant defense fell apart, and the offense was never going to be able to pick up the slack. It wasn’t just a talent issue though, the coaches set the defense up to fail.

Ok, hear me out on this before you rush to the comments section to call me crazy. (I may be crazy, but you need to read through this before you tell me.)

Seattle’s defense was obviously a shadow of its former self after Earl Thomas was injured. A drop off has to be expected when arguably the best defensive player in the NFL is replaced by a special teams guy.

This wasn’t a drop off. That was a catastrophic implosion. Seattle went from having the best defense in the league to being barely average.

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How can one player make that much of a difference? Well, because it’s Earl Thomas. Everything the Seahawks do on defense is based on Earl’s skill set on the back end. Without him, none of their coverage concepts work.

That wasn’t true for Kam Chancellor. Kam is great, but the Seahawks were able to put together some great performances with Kelcie McCray in there. It also wasn’t true for Michael Bennett. While the defense wasn’t as good without him, they were able to scheme up pressure while Bennett was out.

Unfortunately, the Seahawks weren’t able to scheme around the loss the Earl Thomas. That’s because their entire coverage scheme is built around Earl’s ability to cover massive amounts of territory.

Steven Terrell is fast, but he doesn’t have Earl’s instincts, ball skills, and tackling ability. Speed simply isn’t enough if you cannot use that speed to put yourself in position to make a play. It doesn’t help if you fail to make plays when you are in position.

It is hard to be mad at Terrell for not being Earl. There’s only one Earl Thomas. If we’re going to be mad, be mad at the coaches for asking Terrell to be something he’s not.

Good coaching involves adjusting the scheme to fit the talents of the players they have. There was no adjustment made when the team switched from Thomas to Terrell. The team simply threw Terrell out there and asked him to do things he wasn’t capable of doing.

That’s setting Terrell up to fail. Given that Seattle coverage scheme is built around their FS, it was also setting up the entire defense to fail.

I don’t know what the correct answer is here. Pulling Kam out of the box to play cover 2 seems like a terrible idea, but that is what most teams would have done. What I do know is that what the Seahawks did also wasn’t the right answer.

Perhaps the team should have pulled Jeremy Lane out for another safety, like Kelcie McCray. This would have allowed them to play cover 2 while leaving Kam in the box where he belongs.

That might have been the best use of Seattle’s roster talent, but it also introduces other problems. Communication is different in cover 2. Alignments and responsibilities are different. It would be taking a lot of guys out of their comfort zone on passing downs.

Next: Takeaways from the end of the 2016 season

Perhaps there is no right answer, but I feel like what was done wasn’t the least-wrong answer. The Seahawks were able to overcome when their other defensive stars missed time, but not here. The coaching decisions this time set the defense up to fail.