September 11, 2005 and the Seattle Seahawks are playing the Jacksonville Jaguars. I'm sitting in my living room in West Lafayette, Indiana, waiting for the 2005 NFL season to kick off. It's been a long summer — I'm in a new town, 2,000 miles away from anyone and everyone I know, and I'm finally getting some familiarity for the first time in months.
The Seahawks are wearing their steel blue jerseys for a road game, which I will come to learn is never a good sign. The mercury reads 82 degrees Fahrenheit, but the Seahawks are in Jacksonville, it is still summer, and the on-field temperature is much, much higher due to the humidity.
The Seahawks will go on to turn the ball over five times over the course of the next three hours. They will possess the ball nearly ten fewer minutes of game clock than the host Jaguars. They will rush for fewer than 100 yards in a season where Shaun Alexander alone will approach a number nearly 20 times that.
Maybe Week 1 wasn't as bad for the Seattle Seahawks as it appears
And maybe worst of all, they will end the game on a meaningless strip-sack, fumbling the ball away on a dropback despite being down two scores with less than ten seconds to play. Just in case the rest of the day's results weren't insulting enough, they fumbled away a garbage time play in which the only thing up for grabs was any measure of pride to salvage from one of the worst games the Seahawks played in the Mike Holmgren era.
Clearly, this team was already cooked. Byron Leftwich and Fred Taylor took turns chiffonading the Seahawks' defense, and the offense was prone to 86-ing the football at the worst moments. A heart-breaking overtime loss to Washington three weeks later did nothing to quell those concerns.
Anyone who's been a Seahawks fan long enough to know who Matt Hasselbeck is knows what comes next. The Seahawks rattled off ten straight wins, carved up the rest of the NFC in the playoffs, and made it to the first Super Bowl appearance in franchise history.
Sunday looked rather similar to that fateful four-year anniversary of 9/11 for the Seahawks, dropping a 30-13 result to the Rams, a team most thought they should have beaten handily. The defense couldn't stop a runny nose, the offense gained 3 yards in the second half (no, that is not a typo), and the Rams held the ball literally twice as long as the Seahawks did.
And I know what you're thinking — this fraud hack just spent 350 words comparing this team to the 2005 Super Bowl squad. He can't possibly think the Seahawks are title contenders this year after watching that, can he? And to answer your question, no, I would not put money down on this Seahawks squad against the Eagles or 49ers. Probably not against Detroit next week, either. But it's not worth writing this team off after one week, either. Let me explain.
Where has this Jarran Reed been these last four years?
It seems there are two different forms of Jarran Reed. The one we last saw was a pass-rushing 3-tech who could clean up messes made further back in the pocket and rack up huge sack numbers for a DT, but only at the cost of his ability to hold a gap in the run game. That one wore number 91 and was the guy Seattle spent big money on along the defensive line.
This year, number 90 is back. The Brandon Mebane heir apparent from half a decade ago. This guy doesn't get home nearly as often, but he is much harder to sneak past if you're holding a football. And after watching what Josh Jacobs did to this defense last season, I'm ready to call that a welcome change. He's not quite as sturdy as Al Woods was at the top of his game, but for what Seattle's asking of him, that will be more than sufficient.
And unlike Woods, Reed can be a three-down lineman if you need him to be. He still has a good first step, and isn't a complete non-factor as a pass rusher, at least any more so than the rest of the team was. For what it's worth, Reed ranked 9th in ESPN's pass rush win rate among DTs on Sunday and was the only member of the front seven to register a hit on Rams' QB, Matthew Stafford.
Granted, Darrell Taylor and Boye Mafe also ranked in the top-10 for edge rushers, and one would think having three players rank highly in a pass rush category would result in, well, a more effective pass rush. Perhaps there's more to it than that, though — after all, Reed did show out enough to stand out as a positive in a sea of reps to be thoroughly forgotten.
All told, though, the Seahawks still have plenty of time to get the pass rush sorted. Derick Hall didn't seem to be on the field much at all on Sunday, and the way the events of the game fell did Seattle's pass rush no favors at all. They could still be an effective unit through the rest of the season, especially if Reed can anchor the run game enough to give the edge group more opportunities to pin their ears back and go for the QB.
The running game might be better than the passing attack.
We've done a lot of talking about the potential with all the weapons Geno Smith will have this season, between the receivers, the tight ends, and some improved pass protection as Charles Cross and Abe Lucas continue to develop. But if there was anything to take away from the offense yesterday, it was how the running game might turn this offense into a throwback West Coast unit.
Ken Walker, in particular, looked really sharp running behind the revamped offensive interior, cutting back every which way for a yards per carry average north of 5. He also looked more consistent and patient in his reads, picking up positive yardage with regularity.
It's fair to wonder how much of the ground game had to do with the Rams' exodus of talent from their defense over the last few seasons — they did sell the farm for their Super Bowl rings two years ago, after all. But even if Zach Charbonnet doesn't get going the way Walker did in the first half on Sunday, that's still going to be a game-changing off-speed pitch for the Seahawks to have in their arsenal.
Just as curious to note is that Charbonnet only had three carries to his name this week. Of course, given that the Seahawks only possessed the ball for 20 minutes and Walker got the main workload out of the backfield, I suppose that's not a surprise. But it also leaves me wondering if the plan is to use Charbonnet as a second-half hammer the same way Seattle used Chris Carson in tandem with Rashaad Penny when they had the luxury of both back being healthy.
If that's the way they intend to use the ground attack, we could very well see the Seahawks do to other teams what the Rams did to them with the benefit of some healthy tackles.
The Seahawks' defense needs Jamal Adams back — badly.
So, for those of you who are unaware, Pete Carroll comes from the vaunted Monte Kiffin coaching tree. That's why there's been so much hay made about the applications of Tampa 2 ever since Ken Norton was piloting the defense.
But the truth is, at the end of the day, the scheme Seattle runs is a very conventional Kiffin 4-3 at heart, and though every coordinator the Seahawks have brought in to coach it has had their own twists to it, it's been fundamentally the same defense ever since Lofa Tatupu was wearing the captain's patch.
And the goal of Tampa 2 is very simple — pressure the offense at the line on early downs with cover 3, get them into third-and-long situations where calling the titular Tampa 2 coverage is ideal, and keep the offense in front of the sticks at all times. It's one of the simplest defensive schemes that exists in football today, and it still works as well as it did back in 2002.
But in order to run Tampa 2, a defense needs a few very specific roles to be filled. First off, the front four need to be able to get pressure without any blitz help. We've talked about that already, so no need to rehash those lamentations. Secondly, since Cover 3 is only ever played as a man/zone hybrid coverage anymore, you need at least one corner who excels in press and man coverage. Ten years ago, that was Richard Sherman, and now, it's Riq Woolen, who has tools we've never seen before but is still polishing the finer aspects of his game.
Lastly, and most importantly, you need a set of defenders to lock down the space between the hashes with enough range for one to drop back into a deep third on obvious passing downs. Jordyn Brooks hasn't lost a step since whatever Wolverine-type rehab he did to recover from an exploded knee in about half a year, and Julian Love has some decent traits, as well, but Bobby Wagner is no longer suitable to run Tampa 2. He simply doesn't have the speed or agility anymore.
I wonder if maybe the coaching staff knew this going into the season, as well, because they talked about having Jamal Adams play some off-ball LB this year, which on the surface sounds like a way to get him involved as a pass rusher more often. But Adams is also exactly the guy you would want to run Tampa 2 with, because he's probably still fast enough to get back into that deep middle zone, and he's also highly instinctual as a short-area defender. Truthfully, it seems to me that Seattle's need for Adams is just as much in coverage as it is in the pass rush, as silly as that might sound to some.
It's not fair to say that this defense is built around Jamal Adams, any more than it is to say that this defense is built around John Lynch or Mike Brown. But getting Adams back would immediately give the Seahawks the personnel they need to run their defense the way it was meant to be run.