Seahawks must absolutely try to sign safety Landon Collins

The Seahawks have tried to fill in the spot that Jamal Adams normally holds with unproductive players. Why hasn’t Seattle tried to sign Landon Collins?

Landon Collins isn’t a perfect player but he might be the perfect replacement for injured Seahawks safety Jamal Adams. Plus, Collins is far better than Josh Jones or any other safety not named Quandre Diggs on the Seattle roster.

It simply makes no sense that Seattle hasn’t tried to sign the free agent. Maybe after giving up 45 points to a banged-up Lions offense in Week 4, they will.

Collins is healthy enough to play and he is a free agent. The Commanders chose to release him for salary cap reasons this past offseason. Washington saved $12 million in cap space by dropping Collins. Maybe Collins wanted too much money from teams and that is why he didn’t sign elsewhere.

Seahawks need to sign strong safety Landon Collins

Collins also isn’t great in man-coverage but let’s be real, neither was Adams. And Collins does many of the things well that Adams did well. The Seahawks defense also now seemed predicated on having Adams impact as many games as possible by having Adams rush the quarterback. Adams did well in 2020 with that.

To get back to being ultra-aggressive, Seattle needed Adams in 2022 to be more like 2020 than Adams was in 2021 when his sack total fell to zero after having 9.5 the year before.

But Adams was injured early in Week 1 against the Broncos and the defense immediately adjusted to not having Adams by not attacking the line of scrimmage as much. So far, this means the defense has looked a lot like 2021 and that is very bad.

Why the Seahawks seemingly relied on Adams to stay healthy and also seemingly be the only point of aggressiveness in the scheme is beyond me. No Adams means no aggression, it appears.

But Collins, while not as good as Adams, still has an ability to chase down quarterbacks. In 2016, he had 4 sacks. He had 3 in 2021. Collins also had 7 tackles for loss last year. He had 9 in 2020. He would add an ability to blitz and play close to the line of scrimmage that Seattle currently doesn’t have with Jones or even Ryan Neal.

Does Collins miss too many tackles? Yes. He is great in coverage? No. But Collins would allow defensive coordinator Clint Hurtt to implement more of the scheme he thought he would have before the season. And Collins is surely worth risking a one-year deal on and he is better than Jones.