"There aren't many players who are worth penalties. There are very few of them." - Bill Belichick
If you have not made your voice heard yet in Friday’s Seahawks fan survey, gauging your expectations for how the rest of Seattle’s season will go, you have two more days to do that. I think the last question of the survey will probably incite the most debate: “Which aspect of the Seahawks has been your biggest source of frustration so far?”
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And I don’t think I’m giving anything away to say that it is a two-horse race between the defense and the offensive line. Based on answers to other questions, most Seahawks fans agree that they expect the offensive line and the defense to both finish ranked in the bottom-10 of the league.
Maybe more people are frustrated with Mike Macdonald’s defense than Seattle’s offensive line because expectations were already so low for the latter, but then there’s a good argument to be made that it was foolish to expect much from the former: The Seahawks need to find five guys for the offensive line and they already have Charles Cross, but Pete Carroll probably wasn’t fired because ownership was frustrated by a lack of effort to fix that group. My guess would be that he was fired because he’s “the defense and running guy” but Seattle couldn’t run and had no defense.
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It takes five players to make an offensive line (if you’re lucky), but it takes way more than that to make a defense. As we’ve found out in the first six weeks of the season, the Seahawks need literally every player on that side of the ball on the roster—and some on the practice squad—to step up and play well or any weakness on Seattle’s defense has proven to be exposed and exploited by opposing teams.
Should we have expected a defense that ranked 31st in rushing yards allowed and 30th in third down conversion rate allowed last season to now be a top-10 unit just because they hired Mike Macdonald and drafted Byron Murphy II?
That’s probably doubtful, right?
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But even though we might not have expected much from the offensive line or defense, that doesn’t mean they can’t still be frustrating, right? It totally makes sense to me why anyone would answer either (or both) of those two areas as the biggest sources of frustration and I’m not saying any of you shouldn’t have voted that way. You should be voting based on your own personal experience and the only person who can know what that is, is you.
What I can say about the offensive line that is full-ass undeniable: That position group is not the worst value on the roster.
It’s not even close to the worst value on the roster.
Seattle’s offensive linemen might actually be out-playing what their contracts pay them, believe it or not.
And the degree to which the Seahawks offensive linemen are criticized is MASSIVELY DISPROPORTIONATE to how other Seahawks players and positions groups are criticized by fans, media, or even me. It’s very rare that you’ll see most people who cover the team specifically call out any players, and yet we’ve seen that this courtesy does not apply to offensive linemen.
Let me be maybe the first person in this arena to actually make a little bit of a defense for Seattle’s offensive linemen. Oh gee, I hope this does not banned from the Seahawks media parties. I think my invitation keeps getting lost anyway. As far as Corbin’s string of tweets throwing Stone Forsythe and the offensive line under the bus, I think context is important: The last three games have come against Aidan Hutchinson, Dexter Lawrence, and Nick Bosa, three players who are probably going to end up as first-team All-Pros, and this all happened within 11 days. And Seattle has played the most pass snapping blocks in the NFL—by far—increasing the level of difficulty for a third-string tackle who is playing on “expert mode” while most of the guys ranked by PFF in the top-20 are coasting against an easier schedule.
And even a rate stat is unfair: If I play twice as many snaps as you, I had twice as long to make mistakes. You catch up to me in snaps and then we’ll talk. This is one of the BASIC TENETS OF ANALYTICS: It’s too small of a sample size! Or you play your 166 pass blocking snaps in 11 days and be asked to block Bosa in the fourth quarter on TNF and tell me how you do. Stone Forsythe deserves to be thrown under the bus while he’s making $1 million? That’s not fair analysis to me.
The offensive line isn’t the position group that sunk Seattle’s cap space and is being overpaid for their actual on-field contributions…
And the defense, for as bad as its been, should still be expected to be a work-in-progress, while paying every group on defense a below-average salary other than the defensive line…
It should be obvious where the Seahawks are getting the worst bang for their buck, but it might not be because traditional stats and Grubb’s one-dimensional passing offense might be skewing the perspective of just how awful Seattle’s wide receivers have been this season relative to what they’re being paid.
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"There aren't many players who are worth penalties. There are very few of them." You thought I was using this quote to bring up Anthony Bradford and Laken Tomlinson?
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