Field Gulls
No preamble. The Jacksonville Jaguars won the opening toss, elected to receive, and why the heck wouldn’t they? Atop their division with a 4-1 record, fresh off a win over the Kansas City Chiefs, at home against a Seattle Seahawks defense sans defensive backfield to speak of, who’d just surrendered 38 points a week earlier? You bet they wanted the ball more than Matt Hasselbeck in overtime.
Like Matt, bless his little heart evermore, the Jaguars did not score. They threw it to the right team at least — but they didn’t score, didn’t win, didn’t take advantage of Seattle being more shorthanded in the secondary than Shaquem Griffin. Instead, their offense got their asses kicked from start to finish. And it was glorious.
The Seahawks played Mike Macdonald ball, which, careful, don’t squint too hard or it’ll look like what his predecessor spent his first two years building as well. A deep, young, physical, smart, versatile, starving defense with talons for tackling, buttressed by a patient, explosive, balanced offense that plays clean. That formula worked before and it works now; Sunday’s final 20-12 scoreline only made an un-close game sound close.
(In other words, we got almost exactly the opposite of what we saw at Lumen seven days prior. Didn’t you love it?)
But this post is not about the forgotten past, it’s about the very recent past in which Seattle’s defensive line dictated the game on their terms from start to finish, and the back end held up long enough to assist in a convincing victory.
Remember how Jacksonville took the opening kickoff. Again, why wouldn’t you? For starters, cause you might go the wrong way. You might get sacked by Byron Murphy on the first snap, get called for holding on the second, see your screen blown up on the third (shoutout to Coby Bryant), and run a give-up play on 3rd and forever from your own five-yard line.
That’s when the game took a London-y turn. Some untimely slips, some untimely flags, folks driving on the left side of the road, and soon enough each team had punted twice.
So when the Jaguars did find the end zone on drive three, nothing felt dire, but there were false warning signs galore: defensive twelve men on the field, Dyami Brown wide open but overthrown, malodorous coverage on 3rd and 16, and a bit of miscommunication between Nick Emmanwori and Shaquill Griffin that sprang Brian Thomas Jr. all the way to the end zone.
Thing about Emmanwori is he’s a rookie. That also happens to be the most wonderful thing about him. He’ll get the spotlight fully at the end of the post, so until then know this: making mistakes your first year is literally part of the job description, because how else are you gonna learn. And he made visible in-game adjustments. Let’s table that for a while. Like until Predator and Prey, for example.
Midway through the second quarter, staring at a ho-hum 6-3 game, there...
