Offensive explanation for Seattle's loss

It is fairly easy to spell out just why Seattle lost Sunday’s game.

1. The Vikings – who are the only team in the league to force at least one turnover in every game they played – forced two against Seattle. The first of those led to a field goal in a game that was decided by three points. The second one ended Seattle’s last-minute chance of erasing that three-point deficit.

2. The Seahawks didn’t have any takeaways against a Minnesota team that entered the game having committed 20 turnovers, which was almost as many as the 21 turnovers Seattle had committed entering the game.

3. Seattle’s offense was inconsistent, looking absolutely incredible on its three touchdown drives – each of which spanned more than 80 yards – but was intent on shooting itself in the foot on many of its other possessions.

 If the Seahawks miss the playoffs – which should be considered very likely at this point – it’s that last fact that will be the primary culprit in my mind.

Seattle’s defense got better over the course of this season. Its offense did not.

I’m just not entirely certain what to do about that.

On the one hand, Seattle did score 24 points against a Minnesota defense that came into the game allowing 18.1, second-fewest in the league. The Seahawks offensive line that was such a liability last week against Green Bay played much more like it had in the two victories before that loss to the Packers.

On the other hand, this is a team that is prone to back-breaking mistakes.

I’m not just talking about the 15 passes that Geno Smith has had picked off, either. Four of those have come when Seattle had the ball inside the opponent’s 20-yard line. Two have ended fourth-quarter drives in which Seattle was trailing by fewer than six points. That includes his final throw on Sunday when he was expecting D.K. Metcalf to do something decidedly different from what Metcalf actually did. 

But in all fairness, the only reason the Seahawks had a shot at making the playoffs is because of the way Smith has not just survived, but thrived while being under a stifling amount of pressure.

And he’s not the only one whose mistakes have hurt Seattle.

Of the 11 penalties called against the Seahawks on Sunday, seven were before the ball was snapped. Five of those were against the offense with four false starts and one for a player in motion failing to come set. Fifteen games into the season, the players in this offense still aren’t entirely confident about what they’re doing, and that leads us to the offensive coordinator, Ryan Grubb. He appears to have a fetish for screen passes and an aversion to handoffs. That last part is particularly puzzling given the stated desire of head coach Mike Macdonald to run the ball.

Look, I wasn’t the guy who thought the Seahawks should draft a running back early in the second round in back-to-back years, but if you are going to do that – and he’s averaging 5 yards a carry as Kenneth Walker was in the first half against Minnesota – he should probably get more than four carries.

And when you’ve got first-and-5 from the Minnesota 47 as Seattle did early in the fourth quarter, you might choose to run the ball except Grubb called one of his super-fancy screen plays that wound up losing six yards and three plays later the Seahawks were punting from their own half of the field.

Like I said, it’s easy to pin-point why Seattle was unable to beat the Vikings on Sunday. The question is what to do about it.

Playoffs?

Yes, the playoffs remain possible, but the Seahawks need help. The clearest path requires the Rams to lose at home to the Cardinals on Sunday. If that happens, Seattle would win the division by beating the Rams in Week 18.

If the Rams beat the Cardinals, however, it gets much more difficult. I’ll explain more at the bottom, but first, I want to touch on the first round of the college football playoffs.

There were four games played this past weekend. None of them were decided by single digits. All were one won by the home team. This has promoted a fair amount of hand wringing about whether those final four teams in the field of 12 were the correct four teams. Like this guy:

Here’s what Herbstreit said: “Next year, I hope the committee won’t get caught up in what the social media and lot of people who are fringe fans get caught up in which wins. They had 11 wins, they must be good. Who did they beat I think is much more important than how many wins you have. That’s old-school way of approaching it.”

Let’s pause right there. I’m not certain that Herbstreit is wrong about this. However, the point he’s making actually is the reason that I think any attempt to impose a playoff format on college footbal is destined to fail.

If you can’t use wins to compare teams, how are you supposed to decide on a playoff field? This isn’t college basketball where you can invite 64 teams or 68 with the play-in games. This is 12 teams right now, probably 16 in the not-too-distant future.

How are you supposed to differentiate those teams?

Let’s get back to Herbstreit, though: “Indiana having 11 wins and beating nobody, that doesn’t mean they were one of the 12 best teams. There’s a big difference between deserving and best. What this is all about is giving us the best 12 teams. Now ,it’s subjective. How you want to figure out the best 12 is up to you. But that’s what I want to see. I don’t want to hear about wins. Winning is obviously important, but just because you have 11 wins doesn’t mean you’re better than a team that maybe had a tougher road that had nine wins. I think we get too caught up in how many wins you have. It’s really more about, ‘Who are the best 12 teams?’ and we need to get the best 12 teams in this tournament every year.”

OK. Now I want you to imagine someone saying that about the NFL playoffs.

They would get ridiculed and for good reason. That sport has a list of objective criteria so well spelled out that I’m about to bore you to tears with the various permutations that could affect the Seahawks.

There’s nothing subjective about it, and it’s absolutely impossible to do that in college football because everything is so subjective. The variance between the teams that play in the top division of college football is huge when compared to the gap between the best and worst NFL teams.

Herbstreit is right: I don’t think you can use records as the ultimate arbiter for the best teams, but if you can’t use records, how exactly are you supposed to put together a playoff system?

Picking the playoff nits

Seattle’s loss to Minnesota didn’t sink the Seahawks playoff chances, but it put a hell of a hurting on them.

Seattle now has two paths to reach the playoffs, each of which requires significant help.

The most straightforward path:

• IF the Los Angeles Rams lose to the Arizona Cardinals in Week 17

  AND

• IF the Seattle Seahawks beat the Rams in Week 18.

• THEN: Seattle wins the NFC West.

  Reason: The Seahawks would be the division champions regardless of whether they won Thursday’s game in Chicago. If Seattle beat the Bears in that game, they would finish 10-7 and finish one game ahead of the Rams and (possibly) the Cardinals. If Seattle lost to the Bears and beat the Rams, both teams would finish 9-8. Seattle would win a head-to-head tiebreaker against the Rams by virtue of being 4-2 in division games compared to 3-3 for the Rams. If the Cardinals won their Week 18 game against San Francisco after defeating the Rams in Week 17, Arizona would also be 9-8. Seattle would win a three-way tiebreaker by virtue of being 3-1 in its games against the other two teams while the Rams would be 2-2 and the Cardinals 1-3.

The more convoluted path:

• IF the Seahawks beat the Bears on Thursday night

  AND

• IF the Rams beat the Cardinals in Week 17, Los Angeles will probably win the division regardless of what happens in the Week 18 game.

  UNLESS a number of other outcomes break in Seattle’s favor.

If Seattle and Los Angeles were both to finish 10-7, the tiebreaker would come down to strength of victory. Currently, the Rams have the edge in that category, but the margin is small enough that it could flip to Seattle depending on results of other games.

You don’t really want to know how that would happen, do you? Because it gets really confusing.

But if you do, here goes:

Victories by Denver, Miami, Atlanta, Arizona and Chicago will help the Seahawks.

Victories by Las Vegas, San Francisco, Buffalo, New Orleans and Minnesota will hurt the Seahawks’ chances.

If you need a visual aide, here goes I’m going to put the games that could conceivably help Seattle’s strength-of-victory in Group A.

OK. Now remember, we’re trying to figure out a potential tiebreaker if the Rams and Seahawks both finish 10-7, and for that to happen, both the Rams and Seahawks need to win in Week 17 so that removes those two games from consideration:

Now let’s move over to the teams the Rams have beaten, but the Seahawks have not.

Seattle needs the wins from teams in Group A to be three more than the wins from teams in Group B.