The Seahawks make a tactical change

We’re not going to talk about the baseball team, though.

Not after Tuesday night when minimal offense was chased by a leaky bullpen and the Mariners lost for the seventh time in eight games.

• Rinse.

• Lather.

• Repeat.

Let’s talk about something different: the Seahawks defense.

That’s going to be new and fresh with this young head coach whose whip-smart and has a scheme that includes “pressure stations” and the expectation that if a defender is applying off-the-ball pressure, he should win any one-on-one matchup.

Often times, when teams change head coaches, they opt for someone whose expertise lies on the other side of the ball than the previous coach.

Atlanta went from the offensive-minded Arthur Smith to the defensive-minded Raheem Morris. The Chargers went from Brandon Staley to Jim Harbaugh.

In this case, Mike Macdonald — like Pete Carroll — has a background steeped in defense. They just go about it in fundamentally different ways.

Maybe ‘that stuff’ does kinda matter

I’m a little leery of digging into the Seahawks recent history. After all, the story of this season is going to be what Macdonald does with this team as opposed to what Carroll did with it.

However, there was a clip I came across last week of NBA coach Steve Kerr talking about Carroll’s impact on him that struck me as particularly revealing.

Kerr was explaining how — before he coached his first season with the Warriors in 2014 — he came up and spent a few days watching the Seahawks during their training camp. Here’s the clip¹ :

“He was great,” Kerr said. “He pulled me aside, you know I was sitting in on all their coaches meetings, watching practices, and he pulls me aside on the second day I’m there, and he goes, ‘So, how are you going to coach your team?’ “

“I go, ‘You mean like what offense am I going to run?’

“He goes, ‘No. That stuff doesn’t even matter.’

“He goes, ‘How are you going to coach your team?’ “

OK, I know that Carroll did not mean that literally. I also don’t think he was entirely joking, either, and one of the things that I found myself thinking about was the possibility that “that stuff” wound up mattering more as time went on.

I’ll be even more specific: Maybe the success of Seattle’s defense from 2012 to 2015 — when the Seahawks allowed the fewest points in the league for four successive seasons — caused the top offensive coaches in the league to locate and then exploit the weaknesses that existed in Seattle’s template.

Now, I don’t believe that anybody solved Carroll’s defense because that’s not how football works.

However, every defense has vulnerabilities. Stress points. And by 2016 opponents were applying enough pressure to cause Seattle’s defense to rupture.

Remember that game when Richard Sherman blew up on sidelines? Wait. I need to be more specific because that happened a couple of times that season.

In Week 6, at home against the Falcons, the Seahawks led 17-3 at halftime. They then surrendered 21 points in the third quarter after a series of blown coverages.

The Falcons offensive coordinator that year: Kyle Shanahan. If you want to read more about the mechanics of how this happened, I wrote about it two years ago after Sherman explained it in an interview with Kevin Clark, who was then with The Ringer. The fact that Shanahan was coaching under Dan Quinn, who was using many of the same principles that he’d learned under Carroll, made me wonder if Shanahan had found a way to consistently land an upper-cut against that scheme.

The fact that Matt LeFleur — who’d worked with Shanahan as far back as 2008 — pantsed Quinn’s Dallas defense last year in the playoffs might be part of this same trend.

It’s not like the Seahawks never changed or evolved on defense. They stopped keeping a single safety over the top the past few years, increasing keeping two back. Last year, they were formally a 3-4 defense.

Doug Farrar is someone who has spent an awful lot of time studying the Seahawks. He’s now working for Athlon Sports, and last week he wrote about what Seattle’s defense looks under Macdonald, contrasting that to what it had become under Carroll.

At his core, Carroll believed that it wasn’t the novelty or intricacy of a scheme that made the biggest difference in NFL games: It was how the players executed them.

He coached his team to maximize his players’ enthusiasm, engagement and confidence in doing so, and I think he had that part down cold. The Seahawks culture remained great under Carroll.

The results, however, were merely good for the team, and often below average for the defense. In some ways the introduction of Macdonald will show us whether “that stuff” that is a football playbook can make the difference.

He’s bringing a defensive system with him. One in which it’s hard to tell who is going to line up where and when exactly they’ll be rushing the passer.

He hired an offensive coordinator who hasn’t coached in the NFL before, but whose system is built in large part around the wide receivers that were a signature for the Washington Huskies last season and should be a strength for this team.

Last season, I was talking to someone who works on the data side of the pro-football industry, and he made the observation that Pete was absolutely exceptional at what are usually the hardest things for coaches like getting buy-in, commitment and maximum effort.

It was the easy things he sometimes failed to capitalize on like knowing when to go for it on fourth down, and perhaps scheme falls into this category, too.

Carroll did not think he ran the best defense known to man. He believed that like all defenses, his scheme had some strengths you tried to accentuate and some weaknesses you did your best to mask. The reason he used that defense is because he knew everything there was to know about it, including how most opponents were inclined to attack it, and what he should to adjust to those approaches.

While Seattle adjusted to its opponent’s innovations, the Seahawks were never even a consistently average defense over these past five seasons. They were usually bad.

Now we’re going to find out if “that stuff” can actually make a difference.

Ring Russ-t?

My belief that you should never opine on veteran NFL players based on preseason games was tested on Saturday night while I watched a replay of the Steelers-Bills game.

Yikes.

Russell Wilson was in the game for five possessions. The Steelers went three-and-out on three of those.

On 13 dropbacks, he was sacked 10 times and while he did complete 8 of 10 passes, none of those throws were down the field.

Wilson missed time early in camp with a strained calf, and Steelers coach Mike Tomlin has described Pittsburgh’s QB situation as “an incomplete study.” He hasn’t named a starter between Wilson and Justin Fields, and former NFL GM Mike Tannenbaum has gone so far as suggest the Steelers trade Wilson to Minnesota.

For the record, I thought Pittsburgh was the best possible landing spot for Wilson. I thought he could get the Steelers to the playoffs, and while I’m not willing to abandon that based on one preseason game, that’s only because I have the aforementioned rule about not judging veterans.

No saving them

In technical terms, the Mariners bullpen lost Tuesday’s game to the Dodgers.

Leading 3-2 after six innings, Los Angeles tied it in the seventh and took the lead in the eighth with a two-out home run.

It was the third time in seven games that Seattle’s bullpen surrendered a two-out home run in the bottom of the eighth. 

For the second time this road trip, it was All-Star closer Andres Munoz who surrendered that home run.

The truth is that the Mariners have asked so much of their pen this year, and the toll of all those high-leverage situations is evident in declining effectiveness.

The problem with this team is not the bullpen. The problem with this team is the lineup has scored more than three runs in exactly one of the eight games on this road trip. It is also the only game they’ve won.

The Mariners are five games back of Houston in the division. They conclude the road trip on Wednesday night in Los Angeles, have a day off and host the Giants on Friday before playing day games on Saturday and Sunday.

1  The actual interview was taped with Bob Myers last year. Myers had previously worked with Kerr in Golden State as the GM. Myers now works for ESPN. The segment in which Kerr talks about Pete starts at 17:10.