Field Gulls
The search for a new offensive coordinator is over for Seattle, and now fans are looking to understand the why behind the hire.
The long nightmare is over for fans of the Seattle Seahawks, as the search for a new offensive coordinator came to a conclusion Sunday with the announcement that the team had hired Klint Kubiak.
Some fans were excited, others were underwhelmed, but the simple reality is that as offensive coordinator for the New Orleans Saints in 2024 Kubiak ran exactly the type of offense Mike Macdonald wants - a motion heavy, play action based system that can put points on the board and keep a team with potent offensive weapons in the game.
There will certainly be some fans who don’t like the hire, in particular certain Huskies fans who feel that Ryan Grubb wasn’t given a fair chance to show what he could do and should have been given another year. However, the reality of the situation is that in spite of starting Spencer Rattler for a half dozen games and Jake Haener for a seventh, the Saints finished the 2024 season at 1.84 points per drive. Just for comparison, the Seahawks offense under Grubb finished the season at 1.89 points per drive, or somewhere around nine points better over the course of a seventeen game season that sees an offense have 180 drives.
However, while the two coaches coordinated offenses that put up nearly identical per-drive metrics over the course of the 2024 campaign, there was one major difference between the two. Specifically, Grubb had his starting quarterback, Geno Smith, available for all but a couple of the 182 drives the Seahawks ran on offense, with backup Sam Howell stinking up the joint under center for just six and a half drives in relief of an injured Smith in the third and fourth quarters of Week 15 loss to the Green Bay Packers.
Excluding the half dozen nausea-inducing drives for which Howell was on the field, Grubb’s offense with Geno at the helm averaged 1.91 points per drive, which would have finished tied for 20th in the NFL.
Circling back to the entire reason this comparison exists, the split for the Saints offense under Kubiak is significant when considering which quarterback started.
For those curious where those results fall, 1.10 points per drive would have been the worst offense in the league, as the Cleveland Browns finished 32nd in that metric at 1.21 points per drive. Meanwhile 2.39 would have been good for ninth best in the NFL, just behind the Cincinnati Bengals, and ahead of the Arizona Cardinals and Kansas City Chiefs.
So, for those attempting to figure out why Mike Macdonald and John Schneider went the direction they did at offensive coordinator, the answer is simple. They want someone who can lead an offense that puts points on...
