5 Seahawks who have offered almost nothing to the team in 2021
By Lee Vowell
Offensive coordinator Shane Waldron
There are a lot of different ways of looking at Waldron. One is that he simply wasn’t prepared to run an NFL offense when he came over from the Rams this offense. Before coming to Seattle to be the offensive coordinator, Waldron was the passing game coordinator for the Rams and had never called plays before. Waldron’s playing calling this season has been extremely inconsistent.
A second way of looking at Waldron is he hasn’t been able to fully implement his style of offense because Pete Carroll won’t allow him to. I have no way of knowing if this is true. No reporter or fan does, to be honest. We can guess but we don’t know. But we can gather that Carroll wasn’t allowing former OC Brian Schottenheimer to call what he wanted without being micromanaged by Carroll so why would Waldron be able to do what he thought was right?
What we can see is that this Seahawks offense does not look like a Rams offense. A Rams offense utilizes running backs in the passing game and throws passes over the middle more than Seattle does. Los Angeles also runs with outside zone more than Seattle would dream of doing.
A third way of looking at Waldron is that Russell Wilson simply isn’t the quarterback needed to run his offense. Maybe Wilson can’t see well enough over the offensive line to see what’s open in the middle of the field. Geno Smith is 6’3″ and taller than Wilson but the Seahawks trusted Geno to do very little with the offense when Wilson was out.
Either way, Seattle is 22nd in the NFL with 20.1 points a game. And Seattle is 20th in yards-per-play at 5.4. Think this is due to Wilson being out for three games? It’s not. With Geno Smith at quarterback for three games, the Seahawks averaged 21.3 points a game. And in week 5 when the Seahawks scored 17 against the Rams, Geno was the quarterback for 10 of those points.
The offense was better with Schottenheimer (8th in points-per-game in 2020 at 28.7 and 9th in 2019 with 25.3 points-a-game) than it is with Waldron.