Ill-disciplined, dysfunctional football leading to a three-game losing streak where the opponents combine for 519 rushing yards. It wasn’t supposed to be this way.
So what’s gone wrong and what’s the state of the Seahawks franchise?
1. They don’t have enough quality players
The 49ers can line Nick Bosa up every down and believe in good faith he’ll impact the play. They know Fred Warner, on any given snap, could make something happen. Increasingly they can rely on their quarterback to be far more than a game-manager. Brock Purdy is becoming a legit dynamo as a playmaker.
The Seahawks, with all their draft stock spent and free agent money invested, do not have any blue-chip players. Tony Gonzalez made this point on Amazon pre-game. He claimed the Seahawks don’t have any all-pro’s. I saw the aggregate accounts populating Seahawks twitter having a field day with this, mocking Gonzalez.
He’s right though, isn’t he? Who are Seattle’s special players?
Over the years they’ve neither used a top-10 pick on a superstar like Bosa, nor have they struck gold in the later rounds. When John Schneider and Pete Carroll built the LOB era they constantly found diamonds. Drafting Earl Thomas early, then Kam Chancellor and Richard Sherman later on. Finding a franchise quarterback in round three. Trading for Marshawn Lynch, a genuine world class running back and culture/tone setter.
The Seahawks have some good players, some average players, some bad players and some underachieving ones. There’s a distinct lack of greatness, though.
Until they acquire those players, they’ll continue to be a team that is too good to be horrible yet not good enough to be taken seriously as a post-season threat. That’s not a good place to be if you want your football team to play meaningful games after New Year’s Eve.
2. Too many players flatter to deceive
It’s clear there are players on Seattle’s roster that have the physical capability to be better than they’re currently showing. Some failed to live up to their potential under the Carroll regime. The hope was that the change in staff could unlock them and they turn into blue-chippers.
Sadly it isn’t happening. D.K. Metcalf, for example, remains an occasionally brilliant, often frustrating commodity. If he wants to achieve greatness he has to dominate a decimated San Francisco secondary. He failed. The inability to come back to the ball on the underthrown deep-pass before half-time and beast the defender to either make the catch or draw a penalty summed up the worst of Metcalf. Mike Evans makes that play. Metcalf regularly doesn’t. He’s rarely unstoppable, despite his outstanding physical traits.
Ken Walker is showing that physically he might be the best running back in the NFL at the moment. Yet in the last two games they haven’t been able to get him going. Against the Giants they basically ignored the run. Against the 49ers they asked him to bang his head against a brick wall up the gut early and often. Compare this to the 49ers who, even with their injury issues at running back and mediocre O-line, were able to spring massive gains. The Niners achieved 6.9 yards per carry compared to Seattle’s meagre 2.6 yesterday.
Nobody sums up the frustrating tease of this roster more than Dre’Mont Jones, though. A big-ticket free agent in 2023, most fans celebrated his addition. Finally, the Seahawks made a splash on the market. They’d needed an impact, versatile defender like this for a long time. Now they had one.
Jones has been a big waste of money. Making it worse is the way they doubled down on his contract in the off-season. It’s now more expensive to move on from him. He received a pathetic 32.9 grade against the 49ers. His grade for the season is 50.1. He’s grading badly both versus the run (50.8) and as a pass rusher (58.4).
He’s been an epic disappointment. There had to be some hope that Mike Macdonald could get him going but if anything, he looks worse than last season. His cap hit next year is an eye-watering $25.6m. It’s projected to be 9% of Seattle’s entire cap space. Cutting him would cost you $14m in dead money.
Both Jones’ signing and the decision to push some of his money into the future go down as huge gaffes by the front office. He’s their biggest ever outside free agent splash and he’s just become a financial dead weight. Jones is a honking disappointment and embodies the way this roster has plenty of athletic potential but is largely ineffective.
3. The coaches are struggling
This isn’t a big surprise. When you appoint a rookie Head Coach with only two years’ experience as a NFL defensive coordinator, an offensive leader who’s never even coached in the NFL, a defensive coordinator whose only experience previously was as a position coach and a special teams coordinator who only previously did this job in college — growing pains are inevitable.
However, things are starting to unravel. The concern has to be — do they have the capability to stop the rot? Will things continue to regress? Is Leslie Frazier’s presence enough at this point? Do they actually know what to do in this situation — tactically, emotionally and in terms of man-management?
Part of my problem with the latter years of the Carroll regime was their inability to fix glaring issues. The answers were never forthcoming to persistent problems. We’re seeing it again now.
Seattle’s fundamentals are a disaster. They aren’t doing the basics right as individuals, meaning the team frequently is collapsing with no foundation on both sides of the ball. That’s why we’re seeing so many back-breaking mistakes. At the same time — things that should be par for the course such as an ability to tackle, get off a block occasionally, complete an easy third down pass, field a kick, make a routine block or catch the football aren’t happening anywhere near enough.
Macdonald is starting to sound exasperated during press conferences, in part because I don’t think he knows what to do. He’s never been in this position before. At Baltimore it was always fairly plain-sailing. Now he’s facing true adversity and the buck stops with him. He probably can’t recall moments in his career to know how to handle a situation where a lot of things are going wrong at the same time.
You start to wonder if the players feel it too. Metcalf ripping off the headset of a coach to yell at Ryan Grubb was a terrible look and it suggests there might be eroding trust — perhaps from both sides. Geno Smith, meanwhile, looked miserable on the sidelines and he was tetchy in his post-game press conference.
The Seahawks invested in freshness within their staff and clearly hoped that talent and ideas would make up for a lack of ‘been there, done that’ experience. At the moment they look like they’re on the bike but aren’t ready to take the training wheels off.
It’s a little bit worrying because for all the ‘defensive Sean McVay’ tags being attached to Macdonald, there’s little evidence on the field to back that up. His defense stinks, as does the cumulative team product. McVay went 11-5 in his first season as Head Coach of the Rams and won coach of the year. He helped Todd Gurley win offensive player of the season. He famously embarrassed the Carroll Seahawks 42-7 in week 15 — ending the LOB era as we knew it in the process.
Sometimes you realise quickly when you’ve won the coach lottery.
McVay started 7-2 in year one with his only losses being a closely fought defeat to the Seahawks and a beating at the hands of Minnesota, who finished the year 13-3 and reached the NFC Championship game.
Macdonald’s start in Seattle feels very different.
The new regime deserves a period of grace but it doesn’t last forever. Even if we all have to resign ourselves to this being year-one of a structural rebuild and/or transition to bigger roster changes in the future — you still need to see an improvement on what we’re witnessing at the moment.
The fundamentals can’t be this bad. You can’t give the impression you’re a bit lost for much longer. You need to find answers and solutions so that even if you’re going to lose a game, you don’t lose like they are at the moment.
Players and fans need a reason to believe that the people captaining the ship will get you to the shore.
4. The franchise needs a kick up the arse
I remember my first visit to what is now known as Lumen Field. It was a 2006 encounter against the Packers on Monday Night Football. There were a few fans from Green Bay present but make no mistake, they were heavily outnumbered.
The atmosphere was electric and the noise deafening. It was a special environment to watch a game of football and it’s why I became addicted to the Seahawks from the minute the 12th Man Flag was raised that night.
Now look at the place. Primetime games are filled with away fans. The sea of red in the lower decks was again prominent on TV. I bet it was even worse in person. The 49ers fans could be heard loudly chanting ‘let’s go Niners’ at the end.
In the last four seasons where fans have been in the stands, Seattle’s home record is a terrible 19-18. This doesn’t include the Covid season of 2020 when no fans attended games. In that period, their road record is 20-16.
However it has happened, Seattle’s home-field advantage is gone. The mystique of Lumen Field is no longer there. It’s a fading force. I think teams actually relish visiting these days — especially the well-backed clubs with armies of travelling fans paying for the expensive re-sale tickets.
There are other things I could discuss in this section of the article but to me it feels like the franchise on the whole is going through a period of malaise. They’re not terrible or anything like the Panthers. They’re not good either, like the 49ers. This feels like a franchise that deserves to have a 19-18 home record. In every sense, that’s what they are at the moment. Middle of the road. Unexciting. Kind of making up the numbers.
5. How do they get better?
This is the big question and I’m afraid, there’s no obvious fix. It’s not as simple as ‘just draft amazing players’. Well yeah. Everyone’s trying to do that.
The 2025 draft class, as we’ve often discussed, isn’t loaded at the top end. If they end up picking in the top-half of round one again, it might be tricky to identify a player worthy of a big investment.
Then you start to wonder what they should be trying to do. Is it just a case of build up the O-line? Maybe — but it’s particularly thin for O-liners projected to go in round one. How do you fix the glaring defensive issues we’re seeing every week? Geno Smith just turned 34 and remains, to me at least, a pure bridge to the future. Do they need to finally draft a quarterback early? But do you do that in 2025 when the options are not mind-blowing?
The Seahawks had an opportunity to build something with the haul from the Russell Wilson trade but that stock is now spent. How you travel from what they are now to the next step is extremely difficult to map out.
In the meantime, unless they fix things on the field, further question marks will be asked about the players and staff. The GM John Schneider is starting to get heat because he’s the consistent feature remaining from the last regime.
It’s not a great place to be at the moment. There are only a few teams more in need of some reassuring, nerve-calming wins and better performances to just settle everything down.
When the other teams in your division can show an ability to compete and beat the 49ers, even when they’re banged up, and all you do is get handily beaten to the tune of six straight defeats — all while being so fundamentally ragged and losing three-in-a-row — it’s inevitable that concern will grow.
