Over the last four years, the Seattle Seahawks have finished first in Football Outsiders’ opponent-adjusted DVOA efficiency metrics every season. They have a regular-season record of 46-18 over that time, and a postseason mark of 7-3. They’ve won one Super Bowl, lost another in the last seconds in fairly agonizing fashion and found elimination in two divisional-round games. They have a historically great defense, a rushing attack that seems to transcend its personnel and a young quarterback in Russell Wilson who combines efficiency, athleticism and understanding of the big moment in rare ways for a young player at his position. With an average player age of 25.6 in 2015, the Seahawks have established themselves as one of the youngest and most success-driven teams in the NFL over a long period of time. The window isn’t closing anytime soon, either.
What makes this specifically interesting is that the Seahawks have accomplished all these things with an offensive line that has decreased in efficiency and effectiveness every season, and may be the single worst position group in the NFL coming into the 2016 season. They’ve managed to maintain a top-level run game with the now-retired Marshawn Lynch as the main back and with undrafted rookie Thomas Rawls as a pleasant surprise in 2015 as Lynch struggled more and more with injuries. And there are those who will tell you that because of this, Seattle’s offensive line issues are overblown — after all, how can a team with a poorly constructed line be so successful in the ground game?
To take that theory and run with it, so to speak, is to misunderstand how Seattle’s offense has worked under head coach Pete Carroll and offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell. Both Lynch and Rawls have proven to be masters of extending the play after first contact, and the addition of Wilson’s mobility has turned up the stresses on enemy defenses that would have enough of a hard time dealing with the running back. Moreover, Seattle’s coaches, led by offensive line and assistant head coach Tom Cable, have espoused the need for “ass-kickers” along their front five — the kinds of guys who can fire out on run blocks and run-action plays and make things work with brute strength. And in this narrow frame, the Seahawks have been highly successful.
The question is, is that sustainable? Without Lynch in their future, with Rawls coming off an ankle injury that shortened his season, and with the passing game becoming more of an ongoing focus, pass blocking will become more of an issue. Wilson was pressured a ton in 2015 and sacked a career-high 45 times; he’s been sacked more than 40 times in each of the last three seasons. Left tackle Russell Okung, Seattle’s 2010 first-rounder and the only reasonably consistent pass blocker last season, left the team in free agency to join the Denver Broncos with a contract that was extremely team-friendly, and would have been relatively easy for the Seahawks to match. But the interest wasn’t really there; Seattle had moved on based on Cable’s curious philosophies regarding the value and development of professional blockers.
Cable outlined his specific bias against college systems in an interview with Seattle’s ESPN radio affiliate in May 2015. Among other things, he claimed that spread offenses did little to nothing to develop quarterbacks, running backs and offensive linemen for the NFL, and that in the end, he and the Seahawks were better off taking more athletic defensive linemen and moving them to the offensive line because “I’m going to have to retrain an offensive lineman out of college anyway.”
Fair criticisms, and hardly unique to Cable. But the ways in which Cable and the Seahawks have responded to this schism are odd, at best — and wildly, flailingly ineffective, at worst. While teams like the Dallas Cowboys and Tennessee Titans tried to out-maneuver the spread-offense problem by selecting high picks from schools using more traditional, pro-ready offenses, Cable really was ready to throw the paradigm out and go all in on this defense-to-offense theory with mystery guys who had lower draft capital as defensive linemen — never mind how they’d project on the other side of the ball. His primary pet player was guard J.R. Sweezy, selected in the seventh round of the 2012 draft out of North Carolina State. Sweezy started three games in his rookie season and moved up to full-time starter the next season, giving out punishing run-blocks and looking out of place in pass protection throughout his NFL career. The Buccaneers signed Sweezy to a five-year, $32.5 million contract this March despite his obvious liabilities, and the Seahawks responded to the loss of their right guard with the selection of Texas A&M right tackle Germain Ifedi in the first round. Ifedi wouldn’t seem to be an ideal candidate for the Cable way — he came from a spread system, and he’ll need a ton of technique fixes before he’s ready for the rigors of the NFL game. Cable seemed unperturbed by this when asked after the pick why Ifedi was their guy.
“He handled the workout beautifully,” Cable said in late April of his pre-draft time taking Ifedi through his paces. “One of the characteristics coming in was I knew there was a toughness about him. Since he’d become a starter, he hadn’t missed a day, whether it was a game or practice, so you’re talking about a big powerful guy. He’s a little bit raw fundamentally, so there’s some cleanup to do. It’s an easy fix, I think.”
Well, maybe not. According to Pro Football Focus’ collegiate charting metrics, Ifedi tied for the most sacks allowed of any offensive tackle worth drafting in the NCAA last season with five, and he allowed 25 total pressures in 545 passing snaps, one of the highest totals in the nation. Carroll said almost immediately that Ifedi would start his NFL career at guard, which he had played some of in college, but one wonders why this team took a guy with grievous technique flaws on the outside, with the simple proviso that kicking him inside to guard would automatically work. Again, it’s a common fix among NFL line coaches, but as Casey Stengel once said on another matter, it don’t always work. Cable has a strict belief in the power of multi-positional players, whether their flaws and liabilities lead them to excellence at even one position, and Justin Britt has become the poster child for this particular phenomenon.
The Seahawks selected the Missouri alum in the second round of the 2014 draft, a surprise to most, and Cable specified a strong game Britt had enjoyed against Jadeveon Clowney the year before. Cable also praised Britt’s “orneriness and meanness,” traits common to Cable’s preferences, and said that he would be the team’s starting right tackle — a move that lasted exactly one season. Before the 2015 season, the Seahawks moved Britt to left guard after he proved to be very much a developmental player against the NFL’s most advanced speed rushers. That move also lasted exactly one season, as Britt struggled to find his place. For 2016, he’ll move to center, which would leave the Seahawks ostensibly starting the new season with a starting center who has never made line calls at the position for the second year in a row. That is especially interesting, since the 2015 experiment at center was an early disaster, and may have cost Seattle a shot at its third straight Super Bowl appearance.
For the start of the 2015 season, Cable decided that Drew Nowak, a defensive tackle from Western Michigan who had kicked around the league as an undrafted free agent, would be the team’s starting center. This despite the fact that Nowak had very little experience at the position, especially with the line calls common to centers — the calls that keep lines together and quarterbacks protected against ever-more complex defensive fronts. Nowak started the first seven games of the season before the Seahawks decided to go with another undrafted center, Patrick Lewis, who had at least played the position in college. Seattle’s offensive improved almost immediately, but the damage was done in the team’s 4-4 start — Seattle finished 10-6, second in the NFC West behind the Arizona Cardinals, and never enjoyed a vital home playoff game. It was an unnecessary conceit, especially with Cable’s insistence before the season that everything would work out.
“Just watch, you’ll see,” he said last September. “I know that because we went through that with J.R. [Sweezy]. They probably say that about Garry [Gilliam] too, but these guys are really special and they’re just getting started. I think if anyone is really confident, it’s probably me more than anybody because I see them every day, but I’ve seen what they’ve done the last two weeks, and we haven’t been like that in weeks two and three in the preseason thus far, so pretty excited.”
Gilliam is still around — in fact, he’s projected to be the team’s starting left tackle and Okung’s replacement for 2016. The Penn State alum played tackle and tight end in college and defensive line in high school, which would seem to be up Cable’s alley. At left guard, the favorite is 2015 fourth-round pick Mark Glowinski, who looked good in limited action in his rookie season but has played a total of 36 passing snaps and 38 run snaps. Then, either Britt or Lewis at center, most likely Ifedi at right guard, and veteran J’Marcus Webb at right tackle. Webb has proven to be a more effective guard than tackle in his career — of course, there’s always the chance that Cable will move the chess pieces as the mood strikes him throughout the season, as he has done before. Not exactly a winning formula, given the traditional advantages of positional stability, but it’s the path Seattle has chosen.
Why would the Seahawks do this? Why would a coaching staff and front office that has nailed picks over and over on so many other fronts subscribe to this odd and unworkable theory? There’s the element of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and the Seahawks can point to their overall success as a masking agent. There is also a real belief throughout the organization that college offensive linemen are so far away from NFL excellence, it’s just as sensible to retrain better athletes at other positions. Economics has a lot to do with it, as well — and here, Seattle could be thinking it’s onto a Moneyball gem. In 2015, according to Sportrac.com, the Seahawks spent a total of about $12.7 million in salary-cap space, or 8.59 percent of their total cap, on offensive linemen. That ranked 24th in the league. At this point in the 2016 league year, that total has plummeted to about $9.3 million, or 6.4 percent of their total cap, which ranks dead last in the league by a fairly wide margin.
And for Cable, the motivation is probably simple: If he can pull this off, he’ll look like the second coming of Alex Gibbs, the legendary offensive line coach who preceded him in Seattle. Gibbs had a special knack for putting lines together with unheralded players through his times in Denver and Atlanta, though his lines were far more based on communication and coordination than raw athleticism and a basic glass-eater attitude. Gibbs had a specific model in mind for every position; he wasn’t just throwing stuff against the wall to see if it would stick, and throwing the same stuff against a different wall if it didn’t.
The Seahawks have made it clear: They believe they can work around their blocking liabilities, save a ton of player salary in the process and work that money into other positions. So far, it’s worked against type and for a ton of other reasons. But one is left to wonder: With so many positional groups on this team ranking anywhere from above-average to historically great, how dynastic would this team be if it ever evened out the rough spots and took a more traditional angle?
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Doug Farrar is an NFL writer for Sports Illustrated and SI.com. He has contributed to eight editions of the Football Outsiders annual, is working on his first book and has contributed to the Seattle Times, the Washington Post, the New York Sun, FOX Sports, ESPN.com and ESPN The Magazine. He lives in Seattle.
