4 things we learned from the Seahawks Week 4 shootout
By Matthew Holm
It has now been a month since the NFL season started. The Seattle Seahawks are a .500 ball club right now. Pete Carroll is running an offense-first squad. Every team in the NFC West looks mortal, despite the preseason predictions that the Rams and 49ers would both be Super Bowl contenders.
Teams with superstar QBs are being outpaced by teams running offenses designed to limit QB input.
A new era in football appears to be blooming. Defenses are now taking away all the deep shots that used to be open when every defensive coordinator was preaching from the gospel of single-high coverage. Congruently, teams with strong running games are scoring more points.
And in this brave new world of football strategy, Pete Carroll oddly comes across as forward-thinking. The NFL is re-valuing the run game as more valuable, and no one invests more in the running game than Pete Carroll.
What we learned about the Seahawks in Week 4
The Seahawks’ passing game has been all about the intermediate throws in front of the safeties when safeties are playing further back than ever before. The Seahawks aren’t the youngest offense in the league, but many of the core positions still have a lot of youth present.
And when everything is working as intended, wow, is this offense potent! For the first time in franchise history, the Seahawks went an entire game without punting and did so without ever once going for it on 4th down or turning the ball over on offense.
Things suddenly look remarkably hopeful for Seattle’s re-tooling, despite looking very up-and-down through these first four weeks. So, how did we get here?