Field Gulls
Another week, another chart that has the Seattle Seahawks near the top of the NFL in quarterback pressure.
Yay! (right?)
Early on, yes, this was good. But after losing 38-35 to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, there’s growing evidence that Mike Macdonald needs to make a defensive shift to keep up with how the league is countering him.
Baker Mayfield was allowed to run roughshod over the Seattle secondary, juking the likes of Nehemiah Pritchett and Ty Okada into oblivion. He even made Josh Jobe look mortal.
Let’s come back to that play later, because it’s emblematic of what has happened to Seattle. The premise for this article is simple: that for the remainder of the season, being excellent at QB pressure is not good enough.
Pushing down on me, pressing down on you….
Coming out of Week 5, the Seahawks have the fifth-best QB pressure rate. They have accomplished this feat with hardly any blitzes, and with hardly any individual winners.
The first problem is that 25.3% and fifth looks great, but it’s actually a massive decline from the first couple games. They took off at the beginning of the season pressuring quarterbacks at nearly 40% of the time.
25%, then, is actually quite worrying. The Denver Broncos have remained incredibly consistent. Seattle’s down 13 points.
What happened?
Much of it has to do with the first chart above. The Seahawks – namely Mike Macdonald at the moment – have greatly embodied his philosophies of marrying rush and coverage, as well as “four rush as one.” They are very good at this, and there’s probably nobody better in the league.
What they decidedly do not have, are any individual winners. I think they had some individual winners, but Byron Murphy and Leonard Williams have been quieted somewhat the past two games.
Without an individual performer in the top-30 at pressure rate, the defense is completely reliant on a team-rush approach. Essentially, if Macdonald’s coverage holds up, or the specific stunt/simulated pressure package works, they impact the quarterback. Absent of that, there hasn’t been enough individual wins to consistently get good numbers out of any one player. The primary place we would hope to see this is from the edge, via Boye Mafe or Uchenna Nwosu, or Derick Hall before his injury. We haven’t.
As a result, teams have been able to easily devote the necessary attention to Williams or Murphy, and enjoy an above-average-yet-not-devastating amount of quarterback pressure from the Seahawks.
Which brings up the second issue. Occasional team pressure alone is not enough to win games.
Though the defense is fifth at QB pressure, they’re 12th in the NFL at sacks. That’s a marginal indicator: the pressure isn’t as often being converted into sacks. Here’s a far more devastating number: they’re allowing the fifth-worst completion percentage to opposing quarterbacks at 70.3%
And look at the teams around them. Not exactly a who’s who of ferocious defenses.
This gets much more at the heart of the problem....
