2022 may go down as a watershed year for the Seattle Seahawks. Already, the 6-3 Seahawks have proven that Pete Carroll is still one of the best coaches in football. John Schneider hasn’t lost his touch as GM, and that neither one is tied to one specific style of football or football player.
And there has been no lack of defining moments in this team’s season, either. The win over a returning Russell Wilson and Geno Smith’s victory lap thereafter may go down as one of the seminal moments in Seahawks history. Their shootout win over the Lions signaled Geno Smith’s coming out party as the second coming of Rich Gannon. Their convincing win over the Chargers gave us the birth of Ken Walker as a bona fide game-changer.
Yet, for me, it was this last, relatively uneventful game against the Cardinals. Arizona is a team in disarray with many questions arising this coming offseason, that might end up being the defining game of 2022. It wasn’t really a pretty game.
What did we learn about the Seahawks in Week 9?
It wasn’t a barn burner or a defensive struggle. It wasn’t a defining game for any particular player, really. The game wasn’t really even that close.
That having been said, I can’t think of a game to date that would better describe this new incarnation of the Seattle Seahawks. Seattle is a team seemingly growing with confidence each week. Let’s talk about it.
The Seahawks’ defense has finally cemented itself as a solid unit
When this team left Detroit with a 48-45 win a month ago, they looked like a squad that would be scrappy, but still mediocre at best. The offense had just played their third solid game of the season, but the defense had yet to look truly good. While they had managed to create more than a few turnovers in the preceding weeks, they had also treated the line of scrimmage more like the Maginot Line, continuing to retreat further and further behind it.
A week ago, they dismantled the Giants’ offense by shutting down Saquon Barkley, marking the first time they had shut down a team’s offense both on the ground and through the air. They had held teams to limited rushing yards before — Austin Ekeler ran for just over 3 yards a pop against them the week prior — but that had usually come at the expense of allowing plenty of yards after the catch.
This week, they put everything together against a team with no lack of weapons. Kyler Murray threw for just 175 yards, James Conner never got a chance to build momentum, and the returning DeAndre Hopkins was completely boxed out of the game by a certain rookie cornerback.
Furthermore, the front seven bullied and brutalized Arizona’s star QB all day long, picking up five sacks and forcing the Cardinals to play way out of their element. It’s one thing to shut down part of an elite offense. It’s another thing to hold an entire offense in check. It’s something else far beyond that to hold an offense as talented and as fast as the Arizona Cardinals to basically nothing for 25 minutes of game clock.
This defense has officially put the rest of the NFL on notice. They’re not some gimmicky bunch who can only function when they blitz their safety every other play without the offense ever once taking advantage of the hole left behind. This is a fast, aggressive defense that gets after the ball better than it has since Kam Chancellor was forced to hang up the cleats.
Geno Smith isn’t just putting up stats — he’s become a proper captain
Granted, Geno had himself another good day on the stat sheet, putting up 275 yards and a pair of TDs. But it’s becoming clear that his value to the Seahawks’ offense is so much more than just as a passer. He has full command of the offense, gets the team to the line early, diagnoses the play pre-snap, and checks into the proper play to counter with ease.
Against the Cardinals, he put all of those pre-snap skills to use, because Arizona wasn’t coming with some generic 2-high shell look to keep everything in front of them. The Cardinals blitzed Seattle from every angle and every disguise they could come up with, and Smith stood in and delivered time and time again. There were times when I couldn’t help but compare him to some of the great masters of the pre-snap to come through the NFL in recent years, like Matt Hasselbeck, or fittingly enough, Philip Rivers.
Moreover, even with the gaudy efficiency numbers Smith put up, he himself would tell you it wasn’t his best game. Smith did make one blatant mishap during the game, seemingly falling asleep at the wheel when Zaven Collins blitzkrieg’d a screen pass and took it the other way for a third of Arizona’s points on the day. And from then on, Smith was nothing but dead-on, tightening up his reads and leading the Seahawks to three consecutive touchdowns to seal the game away.
Legions of lesser QBs would have been rattled by giving up such a bone-headed pick-six. Even the majority of NFL starters, I would argue, would likely opt to play a safer game than Geno decided to play, maybe taking a drive or two to get their bearings before going back out there and taking shots against Budda Baker and Byron Murphy.
Geno chose to galvanize himself with the mistake instead. Not only did he not let it get to him, but he also used it to shore up the missing aspect of his game, and proceeded to play like a superstar the rest of the way. That is the mark of not only a top-flight NFL QB, that’s the mark of a team leader. If I was Pete Carroll, not only am I asking John Schneider to set aside some big-time cap space for Geno this offseason, I’m getting a fresh “C” patch ready to stitch onto that #7 jersey. And I can’t imagine I’d be the only one.