The Seattle Seahawks got a rude wake-up call against the Green Bay Packers in front of a national TV audience on Sunday night. After four impressive wins against their NFC West rivals landed them in the division lead, the battle with a team from the NFC North brought Mike Macdonald’s crew back down to earth. The NFC North has three teams that have legitimate Super Bowl aspirations, and Sunday’s game revealed that Seattle has a long way to go before it can say the same.
Seattle’s chances were not helped by the knee injury that forced quarterback Geno Smith to leave the game early in the third quarter. The Hawks trailed 20-3 and were being thoroughly outplayed at the time, but Geno had them moving. He had just completed a 22-yard pass to Tyler Lockett to move Seattle inside the 25. A touchdown there would have cut the lead to ten with plenty of time remaining.
That’s not what happened. Smith got hurt. Backup Sam Howell couldn’t continue the drive and Seattle settled for a Jason Myers field goal. They would get within ten of the Pack early in the fourth quarter but no closer en route to a 30-13 loss.
Week 15 might prove that the Seahawks need to make some coaching staff changes in the offseason
This is just one game. A bad game to be sure, but still just one game. Macdonald has already weathered one storm at the bye week and got things turned around. Now we will see if he can do it again. Depending on the severity of Geno Smith’s injury, he may have to do it this time with Sam Howell as his quarterback, and that could end up shining a light on Macdonald’s biggest failing in his first season as a head coach.
Simply put, the staff of assistants Macdonald has gathered around him has done very little this season to inspire confidence.
Experienced leaders in any profession understand that their biggest challenge is putting together a great staff. Macdonald made some bold choices when assembling his team of assistants. He hired two coordinators with virtually no NFL experience. So far, Ryan Grubb’s offense and Jay Harbaugh’s special teams have been spotty at best.
He hired an offensive line coach who had never coached at the NFL level. Scott Huff had undeniable success coaching lines in college but in his first stint in the pros, his unit has been a disaster. Injuries and a surprise retirement have certainly plagued the line, but thus far Huff has done nothing to suggest he can fix things. It has been somewhat disconcerting to see youngsters like Michael Jerrell and Sataoa Laumea seem to regress as they played more. Hopefully, the same will not be true for Jalen Sundell, who should be a key member of a revamped offensive line down the road.
Those coaches are all new to the NFL. (Or in Harbaugh’s case, essentially new.) Perhaps you cut them a little slack as they get their feet wet, although that is not exactly something the NFL is known for. Experienced or not, you produce or you are out.
Sunday’s game put a new assistant on the hot seat, and this one cannot claim a lack of experience. Quarterbacks coach Charles London has been coaching in the pro ranks since 2007. Before coming to Seattle this year, he spent the last three seasons coaching quarterbacks with two other clubs.
Evaluating assistant coaches from the outside is very tricky. Evaluating quarterback coaches may be the hardest of them all. So much of the evaluation is dependent on a single player, and if that player is Patrick Mahomes, the QB coach is going to look great. If that player is Zach Wilson, not so much. It may have very much to do with the quality of the coaching. With that said, I don’t want to reach any broad conclusions on Charles London after this one game. But a couple of things are undeniable.
London’s two previous QB coaching gigs were in Tennessee and Atlanta. His quarterbacks were Will Levis and Desmond Ritter. Neither of those players has had success in the NFL. Both are very young and could still develop. It would be unfair to blame London for its failings when there are many other factors involved. But you can say this much. London was not able to make Ritter into a starting-caliber quarterback, and his work with Levis was clearly a mixed bag.
His first season working with Geno Smith has not revealed very much. Geno’s numbers are similar to what they have been over the past several seasons. He is actually completing a higher percentage of his throws. But there have been some concerning trends.
Geno’s touchdown percentage is the lowest it has been since he became the Hawks’ starter. And his interception percentage is almost a full point higher than it has been. That means that although he is still completing passes at a high rate, he is not generating as many touchdowns and he is throwing more picks than in the past.
Can we pin that on Charles London? Doubtful. Shoddy protection is probably a bigger culprit. No, I wouldn’t look at Geno Smith’s play to evaluate Charles London. Something else was evident on Sunday night that may be a better indicator.
I live just outside Washington, DC. I watched every snap Sam Howell played last year. It was a tough season. He was battered. He got little help from his offensive coordinator who kept having him throw the ball despite obvious roster problems. He held the ball too long and didn’t always spot the open receiver.
But as the Commanders' starter in 2023, Howell also showed some genuine assets. He is tough as they come. He could move, both in the pocket and in space. He has a good arm and threw a good deep ball when he had the chance. Most of all, though he hit a wall late, he generally improved his decision-making as the season went on. In two games against Philadelphia – both narrow losses – he threw for almost 700 yards and five touchdowns against one interception.
Sam Howell may have holes in his game, but I have never seen him look as unprepared or as tentative as he did against Green Bay. Of course, there are explanations for this. He entered a very difficult situation against an aggressive defense that was teeing off on him. His offensive line was ineffective. But that was all true last season in Washington, and Howell looked light-years better.
He also has not gotten starting reps in practice as he did with the Commanders and that makes a big difference. But we have all seen backup QBs come into a game like the one against Green Bay and give their team a spark. Howell didn’t come close to that. He was downright awful.
Is that an indictment on Charles London? Hard to say at this point. But if he is a good quarterback coach – and if Ryan Grubb and Scott Huff are good at their jobs – they all had better take big steps forward this week. The Hawks are traveling to Minnesota to take on an even scarier defense under Vikings DC Brian Flores.
If Sam Howell starts at quarterback, we have to hope that Charles London finds a way to at least turn him back into the swashbuckling-if-inconsistent playmaker he was in Washington instead of the timid non-entity we saw on Sunday against Green Bay.
They say players are often playing for their jobs late in a season. The same applies to coaches. Seattle has a lot of unproven assistants who need to show more than they have so far in 2024.