Seahawks vs Vikings: Overachiever and underachiever of the game
The Seahawks regressed from playing one bad quarter in a week two loss to an entire bad half of football in week three. And boy, do we have underachievers. Miraculously, there was an overachiever.
To put it mildly, the Seahawks aren’t a very good team right now. I want to emphasize two elements of that sentence; “team” and “now”. The problems with the Hawks predominantly lie in teamwork. Time and again, we’ve seen far too much confusion on coverages.
As Gregg Bell wrote in The News Tribune, “the defense was absolutely malfunctioning“. Many players are saying the defensive schemes are a huge issue. Corner D.J. Reed, in particular, called out the defensive alignments and calls as – let’s say problematic. To his credit, Reed also said of his own play:
"“The man-to-mans though, like the man I gave up to (Justin) Jefferson (for a touchdown pass from Kirk Cousins that gave Minnesota the lead for good at 21-17), though, that’s on me. When I am in man to man, there is nobody to blame but myself. I had bad eye discipline. …“That’s on me. I take that to the chin.”"
Seahawks standouts and not-so-standouts from week 3
Reed is one of our many candidates for underachiever of the week. His counterpart on the other side of the field, Tre Flowers, is an all-too-obvious pick here. “Pick” was a deliberate choice, in that he hasn’t had one yet this year, and didn’t have a single interception in all of 2020. He’s only had three INTs in a career that now spans 45 games. You know 12s, maybe our own Geoff Shull is right; move Jamal Adams to linebacker and slide Flowers to safety. It couldn’t be any worse than what the Seahawks looked like in the second half versus the Vikings.
Let’s just cut to the chase, shall we? The Seahawks underachiever for game three has to be defensive coordinator Ken Norton Jr. Now, I’m hardly the only one calling for a change. As our site expert Lee Vowell wrote, how the Hawks fired Schotty and kept Norton is a bit of a mystery.
A quick Google search showed at least a dozen articles detailing why his tenure with Seattle should be over. Yes, you have to have a replacement, and once the season has started, it isn’t that easy. That’s a topic for another time. But there’s no doubt in my mind that Norton was the underachiever of this game. Truly, he’s the underachiever of the season so far.
The overachiever was easy for me. That has to be running back Chris Carson. He had 80 yards rushing and a touchdown on just 12 carries. Carson got only 14 touches for the entire game. That’s not the crazy part, 12s. You know what’s really nuts? The Seahawks called his number just three times in the entire second half.
That’s right, the Hawks best back had 74 yards rushing and a score in the first half, then handed off to him just twice after that. Ummm… can anyone explain that, please? I’d say managing 80 yards and a TD, all in basically one half, is a major overachievement.
dark. Next. Three takeaways from the Hawks week three loss
Okay, right now the Seahawks have a lot of questions to answer. As does each and every loyal 12, we at 12thManRising have some answers. Not all of them will be great – certainly not mine – but I do still have faith that the people that matter – Pete Carroll and John Schneider – will come up with the right answers. I just hope it’s soon.