4 Seattle Seahawks who robbed the team blind in 2023

The Seattle Seahawks are 8-8 and could still make the playoffs this season. They would need to beat the Arizona Cardinals in Week 18 and then have the Chicago Bears beat the Green Bay Packers. But would there be any expectation for Seattle to win a playoff game?

Seattle seems to be good enough to beat teams worse than they are but not good enough to beat better teams, except for the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 15 though the Eagles are greatly struggling currently. Seattle's defense simply is once again so bad they cannot help out an offense that most of the time is good enough to win games.

Seattle was once 5-2 this year but has a real chance of finishing the season 3-7. Plus, that 5-2 record was a bit of a lie. Seattle beat the Cleveland Browns when Cleveland had a third-string quarterback playing. Finishing 8-9 would be unacceptable and the following four players would definitely deserve a lot of blame for what went wrong.

No. 1 - Seattle Seahawks right guard Phil Haynes

After playing double-digit games for the first time in his career in 2022, Seattle re-signed Phil Haynes for one year with a cap hit of $4 million. Like with Will Dissly in 2022, however, Seattle seemed to be bidding against itself for Haynes' services and the Seahawks still lost. Haynes had been oft-injured in his career and not overly good when he did play. He looked a little better than he was in 2022 because he was splitting snaps with fellow right guard Gabe Jackson and Jackson was atrocious.

Haynes played eight games in 2023 and was eventually beaten out, when Haynes was healthy, by rookie Anthony Bradford. Bradford was not good in his first year but Haynes barely graded better than Bradford, per Pro Football Focus (subscription required), even though Haynes now has five years in Seattle's system. Both Haynes and Bradford were terrible in pass protection, but Bradford only has a cap hit of $950,997 this year and just $4,643,988 total over the four years of his current contract.

Haynes got worse as his year went on as well. In his first three games, he allowed just one pressure and one sack. In his next five, he allowed 4 sacks and 11 total pressures. Haynes was also penalized an astonishing 6 times this year. Plus, those were the accepted penalties. He was flagged two more times that were declined. There is no way Seattle should even think of bringing Haynes back in 2024