Field Gulls
The Seattle Seahawks have won six games in a row, averaging almost 30 points per game in the process, and are a win away from securing a franchise record 14th win and the NFC’s number one seed. And yet, something feels off about the offense. An offense that was lighting up the NFL through most of the early portion of the season.
It sounds silly to nitpick a team that hasn’t lost since mid-November and is looking like one of the greatest Seahawks teams ever assembled, but with heightened expectations of a Super Bowl given the way this season has gone, there’s always going to be reason to worry when something feels off.
The decline of the Seahawks offense is not a feel. It’s real.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, maybe it’s not, but the Week 11 loss to the Los Angeles Rams marked a turning point in this offense that has not been exclusively negative, but it’s conclusive that the hot streak to start the year did not sustain itself beyond November.
The sack rate is actually worse if I take out the Rams loss, in which Darnold wasn’t sacked but turned it over four times. Darnold has been sacked at an above average rate during Seattle’s winning streak. Turnovers also can harshly impact EPA numbers, and the Seahawks have had a season-long issue with giving the ball away. Even if I excluded all turnovers, the Seahawks have still been a middling offense for several weeks.
One of these days we will find a consensus opinion on what constitutes an explosive play. Today is not that day. It is logical to me to consider an explosive pass to be 20+ yards and an explosive run to be 10+ yards. In the Seahawks’ first nine games, they were not good at generating explosive runs, but they were far and away the best at creating explosive passes.
The y-axis shows the Seahawks turned roughly one out of every six passes into a 20+ yard gain, something no other team was even close to doing. Then the Los Angeles Rams loss happened, and the Seahawks had only three 20+ yard passes on 44 Sam Darnold attempts. That has been the clear shift in the Seahawks passing game, which is now below-average at creating explosives, but… above-average in explosive runs?
The Seahawks notably did not have a single explosive pass against the Carolina Panthers, only one versus the Minnesota Vikings, and three on 36 attempts versus the Indianapolis Colts.
Jaxon Smith-Njigba’s average depth of target was over 10 yards in each of Seattle’s first nine games. Over the last seven, he’s only climbed above 10 twice, and the deep shots his way have reduced significantly. After JSN caught 12 of 16 passes over 20+ air yards through the first nine games, he’s only caught 4 of...
