Seahawks: Ranking the five best defensive coordinators in team history

Number 1: Dan Quinn, Seahawks DC and 2013 and 2014

Two seasons and he is the best? Yes, and there should be no doubt. Quinn was gifted with a loaded defense but he squeezed every ounce of talent that he had and turned it into the best defense that ever was. In 2013 and 2014, the Seahawks defense wasn’t just great it changed the course of NFL history. DCs changed the way they schemed and called a game which caused offensive coordinators to react to the defenses and create new ways to attack them.

But when Quinn was the DC in Seattle, teams didn’t know how to attack the Seahawks. Seattle ranked first in yards allowed and points allowed in both years Quinn was the DC. In the regular seasons of 2014 and 2014, Seattle went a combined 25-7. In both years they went to the Super Bowl. They won the championship for the 2013 season.

And let’s be real. The reason that Seattle lost the Super Bowl in 2014 wasn’t that the team made a bad call offensively at the end of the game. It was because Cliff Avril had to leave the game in the third quarter when Seattle would soon take a 24-14 lead. Plus, Richard Sherman was basically playing with one arm due to an injury two weeks prior in the NFC Championship game.

Had Seattle been as healthy as New England was by the end of the game (heck, even coming into the game) then it would never have come down to a last-minute bad call. Seattle’s defense was better than the Patriots were as they had been mostly better for every game in 2013 and 2014. This was because Quinn was and still is a great DC.

In 2021, the Seahawks could have fired Ken Norton in the offseason and hired Quinn. But they didn’t. Seattle then had to fire Norton in the 2022 offseason because he was awful at his job. Quinn, though, made the Dallas Cowboys into a top-ten defense.