Seahawks shed their sad-sack
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Posted: Thu Sept 17,
1998
 Sports Illustrated
NFL writer Paul Zimmerman checks in each Thursday with analysis
of trends and players to watch.
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When do you start taking unbeaten teams seriously? I'm not
talking about the clubs that are supposed to be 2-0 at this
stage; I'm referring to New Orleans and San Diego and
Atlanta and Seattle, that
bunch.
In the case of New Orleans, never. The only thing I can say
about the Saints (that's right, I'm the same person who
picked them to go 1-15 this year) is that the teams they've
played are worse than I thought, and I'll probably still be
saying that if
they waltz into the playoffs.
San Diego's early success can be attributed to an offensive
line that's gone from one of the league's worst to pretty
decent, thanks to three free agent imports, and a defense
that completely shut Tennessee down in the second half last
weekend. If the
Chargers can put up a sturdy battle against Kansas City in
Arrowhead Sunday, then I'll start
believing.
Atlanta? Well, the jury's still out. The Falcons got killed
by the Eagles in the first half before they turned things
around. Let's face it, they've beaten a pair of pretty bad
teams.
Which brings us to Seattle, and now it gets interesting.
The Seahawks have 16 sacks in two games, which means that
they're either playing against some dismal offensive lines
or they're running a terrific pass-rush scheme ... or their
talent level is
very high. I'd call it a combination of all three.
There's something very seductive about an effective,
relentless pass rush, with a heavy emphasis on the blitz.
It quickens the senses. It can hide a lot of deficiencies.
Purists mentioned that a lot of
Buddy
Ryan's schemes in Philadelphia were fundamentally unsound, but
man, were the Eagles fun to watch. And I never met a
quarterback who looked forward to playing them.
Last year, when Seattle lost to the Jets, 41-3, in the
opener, I thought it was one of the most poorly-coached
defensive performances I'd ever seen.
Greg
McMakin's whole scheme seemed unsound. People were flying around
all over the place, without rhyme or reason, leaving gaping
holes in the zones. And there was plenty of talent there,
too, particularly in the pass rush department, guys like
Phillip
Daniels and
Cortez
Kennedy and
Michael
Sinclair and the new import,
Chad
Brown.
| |
Kennedy leads a resurgent Seahawks defense.
(Stephen Dunn/Allsport)
| The Seahawks ended up with 42 sacks for the season, about
average, and McMakin kept trying to tell us that his system
needed time to kick in. Wait, he said, you'll see. So maybe
now we're seeing
it.
They've got, basically, the same defensive people they had
last year, with one exception, and this is a big one: free
agent LB
Darrin
Smith. No one made much of a fuss when Smith joined the team.
Offensive standouts such as
RB Ricky
Watters
and
G Brian
Habib got all the ink. But Smith had been a terrific weak-side
linebacker on two Dallas Super Bowl teams, breathtakingly
fast, great on coverage, excellent against the
sweeps.
Then last season he went to the Eagles, who already had a
Pro Bowl weak-side backer,
William
Thomas. So they put the undersized (6'1", 230) Smith on the
strong side, over the tight end, and he got lost in the
wash, finally ending up on injured reserve with torn
ligaments in his ankle. It depressed me when people in
Philly referred to him as a bust.
Lordy, if they'd just played the guy where he belonged.
Well, he's found a home now, playing on the right side in a
defense that basically aligns its backers left and right,
rather than strong and weak, but they move him around and
let him blitz a lot, something he's never done before, and
now he's got four
sacks in two games. He's the spark that has ignited the pass
rush, which has keyed the entire
defense.
I didn't see the Hawks' nine-sack performance in Week 1
against the Eagles, and I was kicking myself for it because
I like watching heavy sack games and charting the schemes.
But what the heck, you can't see 'em all. I wasn't going to
miss last Sunday's
action against
Jake
Plummer and the Cardinals, though. I broke down each of the seven
sacks, and this is what I
saw:
The first pair came on the Cards' opening series—when
they had a first down on Seattle's 30—and knocked them
out of field-goal range. Nothing exotic on either one, just
solid rushes by the front four. Sinclair, the left end,
quickly beat his man, RT
James
Dexter, forcing Plummer to back out of the pocket, right into the
arms of Daniels, circling from the other side. Normally
Jake would step up, inside the rush, but left DT
Sam
Adams had gotten such a big push on the
guard, Lester
Holmes, that the middle was cut
off.
Sack No.2, which ended the series, went to the tackles.
Kennedy beat the double team from the center and guard with
a lightning move, forcing Plummer into the the arms of
Matt
LaBounty, the other tackle in the nickel
scheme.
The Hawks ended Plummer's second series with an
interception for a TD, and on series No. 3, with the Cards
backed up deep, they almost forced another pick. Smith and
SS Jay
Bellamy blitzed in tandem from the middle, with Bellamy coming in
clean to force the near-interception. Shaken, Plummer took
a quick drop on his next play, saw nothing and tried to
scramble up, but all lanes were occupied. Sinclair grabbed
him for Seattle's
third
sack.
Three possessions, three sacks. It became four-for-four
when Smith closed out the next series by coming up the
middle, untouched, and running down Plummer as he tried to
scramble to his right. It was a classic zone blitz scheme,
a five-man rush, with
nickel back
Mark
Collins and Smith blitzing and Brown, lining up as a lineman,
dropping back into coverage.
The same type of maneuver ended the Snake's fifth series.
This time it was Daniels dropping into coverage, Smith
blitzing and occupying the right guard and Bellamy flying
in off his outside shoulder, untouched, collecting the sack
and forcing a fumble.
And that was it for the first half. Five sacks and a 20-0
Seahawks
lead.
Before the game Plummer had been quoted as saying that the
problems against Dallas in the opener came when the
Cardinals were trying to "trick the defense, putting
them in different spots, instead of just going out and
beating them with the talent we
have." It was a very interesting quote. Last year the
offense was run by a former running backs coach who knew
zilch about the QB position, and Plummer, operating pretty
much on his own, was loose and free-wheeling and at least
exciting. Now, under
Marc
Trestman, a cerebral type, a former investment counselor, Jake
seems more programmed but almost
robotic.
He is taking on the look of a typical play-it-safe,
dink-passing quarterback. But maybe I'm being unfair here
and that was the only way to work against a rush scheme
that clearly was in control, both intellectually and
physically. On his first series in
the second half he threw exclusively off a short drop and
dink-passed the Cardinals into the end zone. I saw his
face, though, when he came off the field after a timeout,
with the ball on the Hawks' eight-yard line. His eyes
looked dead. He looked
tired, and
old.
The Cardinals' next series concluded with two more sacks.
The last one pushed Arizona back to its own 13, setting up
a short punt which in turn set up a Seattle TD drive,
essentially turning out the lights at 26-7. It was a rather
amazing piece of
muscle-work by the Seahawks' three down linemen: Adams and
Daniels each driving a pair of blockers into Plummer's
face, leaving Sinclair to collect the sack. A defensive
back and linebacker had blitzed, but the heavy duty work
was done up
front.
So that's what I got from my breakdown of Seattle's sack
machine. Everyone's having fun with the mathematical
projections now, getting out the old calculator and
awarding the Hawks a 128-sack season, based on 16 in two
games. Nonsense, of course. There
will be games in which some of their people will be hurt, or
people will scheme them better, or will just have sturdier
troops up front than that sorry front five Arizona put up
last Sunday. But who knows? Maybe they're really that
good.
It was sad watching how the fire went out of Plummer's
eyes. This was the most brilliant young QB in the game last
year, a real action guy, but I saw something at the end of
the first half of the Seattle game that made me wonder if
he really shouldn't
be somewhere else, getting a different type of coaching. The
Hawks had a first-and-goal on the Arizona five, two minutes
to play. They ended up kicking a field goal, but they ran
the entire two minutes off the clock. The Cards never
called a time out,
never tried to stop the action to give their offense another
shot before the intermission.
"We wanted to go in and regroup," is the way
coaches describe this type of thinking, but to me it's
give-up football. Jake the Snake deserves
better.
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