The Seahawks are off to a terrible start at 3-6. Several players have underperformed. But which players might be the most to blame for Seattle’s bad season?
Let’s take a look at just how bad the Seahawks season has gone so far. First of all, they started 1-0 so they are 2-6 since week one. Then they were 2-2 meaning they are 1-4 since week 4. And we can’t blame all of this on the three-game absence of Russell Wilson as in his last two starts Seattle is 0-2 and scored a total of 7 points in 7 quarters with him as the quarterback.
Many people thought before the season that the Philadelphia Eagles would be terrible, yet the Eagles have a better record than the Seahawks do right now. The Eagles are 4-6. And only one team in the NFC has a worse record than Seattle and that is the 0-8-1 Lions who managed a tie with the Steelers and Pittsburgh beat Seattle in week 5.
Yes, Pittsburgh was without Ben Roethlisberger but this is the Lions we are talking about.
5 pieces of the Seahawks that have offered no positivity so far in 2021
Seattle is in last place in the NFC West and after the 49ers demolished the Rams in week 10, Seattle looks far worse than any other NFC West team even with Russell Wilson. There are so many issues now that the offense actually needs to catch up to the defense to make this a decent team. Who could have guessed that before the season started?
But which players or parts of the team are the worst offenders in this bad Seattle start?
Running back Rashaad Penny
Besides being injured for most of his career, Rashaad Penny has been extremely unproductive in 2021. He has played in 3 games (as many as he played in 2020) and has carried the ball 16 times for just 25 yards with a long of 5. That’s terrible for any running back but for a first round pick, he is becoming one of the biggest busts in franchise history.
The low point in 2021 for Penny may have come in week 10 when, he though healthy, the Seahawks decided to not give him one single snap against the Packers. Alex Collins got 10 carries and Travis Homer had one. Not getting a carry is bad but Seattle not even trusting him with a snap? That’s nearly unbelievable.
Penny had a fifth-year option before the season that Seattle wisely did not pick up. The hope was that once he was able to play this year after overcoming one of the million injuries he’s had in his 3-plus year NFL career, he would be part of a one-two punch with Chris Carson. But Carson has been hurt for most of the year now too and Seattle has relied on Collins.
Penny will be gone after this season (or at least he better be) but his presence will be felt for some time with the Seahawks because a wasted first round pick costs the team millions and hurts the team’s depth for years. And after not getting one snap in week 10, there is no hope that Penny is going to help at all this season.
Defensive lineman L.J. Collier
Something happened with Collier and the Seahawks coaching staff that we may never know about. I am only guessing here but how else does one explain Collier, a first round pick in 2019, go from starting every game in 2020 and playing decently – 3 sacks, 7 quarterback hits, 4 tackles for loss – to being a healthy scratch in 6 of Seattle’s 9 games so far in 2021?
It isn’t like Collier plays badly when he is on the field. In 60 defensive snaps this year (or basically a full game on average), Collier has 4 tackles and 2 quarterback hits. So clearly the Seattle coaching staff is seeing something from Collier they don’t like. But what is it?
Collier, like Penny, is turning out to be a complete waste of a first round pick. First of all, even if he was playing every game his numbers don’t support high-round status. He produced in 2020 more like a third round pick. There were rumbles in 2019 when Seattle chose Collier that they chose him too high.
But the problem is this year that the Seahawks are choosing not to include Colier after choosing to start him every game last year. It’s confounding. Actually, week 10 was the first week in 2021 that Collier played and didn’t get a hit on the quarterback so what gives? Maybe one day we will know but either way Seattle is basically stuck with Collier through 2022 because releasing him will nearly cost as much in dead cap than they are paying him ($3.4 in salary, $2.5 in dead cap).
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.
The entire offensive line
The Seahawks offensive line was supposed to be better this year, right? It’s worse. Much worse. Seattle averages 5.4 yards a play (20th in the NFL) and that is digressing compared to 2020 – 5.8 yards per play (12th) – and 2019 – 5.7 yards per play (11th). And I have already mentioned how Seattle is scoring fewer points this year. The offensive line bears a lot of responsibility for this.
And the bad statistics don’t end with yards-per-play and points scored. Both the run game and pass game are worse this season. In 2019, Seattle was 9th in the league with an average of 4.6 yards a carry. In 2020, Seattle was 7th at 4.8. But this year, the Seahawks are 19th at 4.2.
Seattle’s quarterbacks are actually getting sacked more this year too. In both 2019 and 2020, Seattle gave up 48 sacks, both top-ten worst in the NFL. So far in 2021, Seattle has given up 29 sacks but that is on pace to get 55 for the season. That’s awful.
The hope was entering this season that with the addition of right guard Gabe Jackson the overall line would be better. It’s been worse. Jackson is the 36th-highest-graded guard in the NFL, per Pro Football Focus. Fellow guard Damien Lewis (and Lewis has taken a big step back from his rookie performance in 2020 and was flipped to the left side this season) is the 59th-best guard.
At tackle, Duane Brown, normally a top-ten tackle, is having his worst season and is graded as the 37th-best tackle while right tackle Brandon Shell is 47th. Center Kyle Fuller (Fuller has gotten by far the most snaps at center for Seattle this year) is the 36th-best center. There are only 32 NFL teams and just one center on the field so that shows how bad Fuller has been as some backups on other teams are better than he is.
Carlos Dunlap
Midway through the 2020 season, Seattle traded for Carlos Dunlap and that was a big part of the defensive turnaround the last half of the year. Dunlap played 8 games for the Seahawks and had 5 sacks and 14 quarterback hits and 6 tackles for loss. Dunlap is still just 32 years old so it wasn’t like he was playing on rekindled fire last year near the end of his career.
What makes Dunlap’s 2021 season so disappointing so far is how good he was after coming to Seattle last year. I thought that Dunlap wouldn’t be able to be re-signed for this year after Seattle released him this offseason (that was part of the agreement Dunlap made to be traded from the Bengals to Seattle in the first place) because I wasn’t sure Seattle would outbid anyone. But he ended up back in Seattle and that seemed like a good thing.
But in 9 games for Seattle this year (one more than he played for the Seahawks in 2020), Dunlap has just a half-sack, absolutely zero tackles for loss and just 4 quarterback hits. Dunlap does have 4 passes defended, though, when he has batted passes down at the line after not getting pressure on the quarterback. That can be effective but not really all you want from a player like Dunlap.
Seattle’s defense has gotten better over the last five games but to continue to be better it needs Dunlap to start making more of a difference. Consistent pressure by Dunlap means less focus on players like Rasheem Green and Darrell Taylor and that would be a great thing.