Yep, I’m one of those poor suckers who root for the Seattle Seahawks. They lost their sixth consecutive play-off game yesterday, and their third consecutive game against the St. Louis Rams, to complete another season of essentially mediocre professional football. It’s Mike Holmgren’s sixth year in Seattle, and the luster of his 1996 super bowl win with the Packers seems to be fading fast.
Not that any of that matters; apart from the 1983 & 1984 seasons, this franchise really hasn’t done anything great. Nor, aside from the dismal 1992 season, they haven’t done anything horrible. The fact is, the Seahawks are the most middling team in the league, and when they do have success it is because they are barely better than the competition. During their 21 year play-off victory drought, the Seahawks have gone to the first round six times, which only means they don’t draft in the top ten.
What do they do next? How do you take a franchise and break out of the mediocre paradigm? You change the expectations. By that I don’t mean a new slogan and some cutesy TV ads, I mean holding individuals accountable for their actions – front office, coaching staff, and players.
The defense is a sieve, the wide receivers drop too many crucial passes, and the special teams aren’t. The number of games lost by starters to injuries seems to be on the rise, the third down efficiency for both the offense and defense is abysmal, and the average time given to the quarterback on passing plays is high for the defense and low for the offense. Maybe this is just a situation of energy focused in the wrong direction. Maybe with a refocusing of the overall direction of the franchise, there could be a sea change. Without one there is definitely not going to be anything but the same old Seahawks.
Some specific changes:
say good-bye to:
- Ray Rhodes: the reclusive defensive coordinator isn’t aggressive enough and falls in love with the fatal combination of zone defense and no pressure on the QB. With the young talent on defense, there should be more risks in the scheme and more reliance on speed and athleticism.
- the optional off-season program: whatever is being done for off-season conditioning isn’t working, especially for linebackers. If you can’t make it through 20 games without missing a game, you can’t be a starter, period. If you get hurt, you will lose your job, period. If you don’t participate in a team approved off-season workout, don’t expect to be with the first team when training camp opens. This is professional athletics, being weak isn’t part of the program, and if you don’t want to be dedicated to clean, healthy, professional, world-class fitness you shouldn’t be there. Yes, football is a violent game that has it’s share of season and career-ending injuries, but the nagging and lingering injuries that can be prevented by having and maintaining high level fitness. That is the job of the Head Coach, and his Strength and Conditioning coach and program.
say hello to:
- Numbers:
- games lost to injury – as a measure of team fitness;
- passes caught/passed to & passes dropped/passed to – as a measure of receiver efficiency;
- 3rd down stopping percentage, opp 1st downs/total plays;
- opp 3rd downs/total plays – as a measure of defensive efficiency;
- third downs/yards gained, 3rd down conversion percentage, 1st downs/total plays, 3rd downs/total plays – as a measure of offensive efficiency;
- time to pass (ttp) – as a measure of offensive line efficiency;
- time allowed to pass (tatp) – as a measure of front 7 efficiency in passing situations.
- These are just off the top of my head, but the gist should be evident – measuring the right things will bring attention to the things that seem to be holding this team back from the ever-promised ‘next-level’. If you have the numbers, then you can’t argue about what it is that is missing, you can chart it.
An example might be the 1st downs/total plays stat. In the first round of the play offs, here is how the offenses performed on that metric:
| Game | Team | 1st downs/total plays |
| 1 | Seattle | 34.85% |
| 1 | St. Louis | 34.38% |
| 2 | San Diego | 31.75% |
| 2 | New York | 29.87% |
| 3 | Green Bay | 34.38% |
| 3 | Minnesota | 30.51% |
| 4 | Indianapolis | 44.83% |
| 4 | Denver | 31.03% |
Two things stand out in this list, first, that the team that got the most first downs lost when that team was using some variation of the West coast offense, and that the only team that had a blow-out was the team with the 15 percent differential.
All this really says is that keeping the ball is important, something Vince Lombardi would have told you, but it also measures how well you keep the ball. Those teams that lost but have higher ratios of first downs to total plays lost the battle on third down, sometimes dramatically, on both sides of the ball. Denver only converted 25% of it’s third down opportunities on defense, while Minnesota converted 83% of theirs, one team won convincingly, the other was blown-out. In the Seattle game, they converted almost 42% of their first downs opportunities on offense, but also dropped three potential first down passes, and the defense committed four penalties on third down that awarded a first down.
Execution matters, but the numbers don’t lie – seven of the eight teams playing last weekend delivered a mediocre performance, middling their way through the game, unable to achieve a decisive advantage to win the game. Only the Colts, with league MVP Payton Manning being his normal superhuman self, achieved a decisive victory. The rest of the games were brutal bludgeoning matches between second-tier teams. Of the remaining teams, only five deserve to be in the hunt for the Super Bowl – Patriots, Eagles, Falcons, Steelers, Colts – and of those five, only the Steelers and Colts are winning decisively. The Eagles without Terrel Owens, the Falcons are one dimensional teams with defenses that are keeping them in the game, while the Patriots are simply a machine, but the optimization of that machine means they win by just enough. The Rams, Vikings, and Jets should be shown the door. Parity might be good for the regular season, but in the playoffs the weak-but-lucky should be killed by the league.
What then for the Seahawks? How to they leap from the bottom of the second-tier into the top of the top-tier? Difference makers and the scheme to use them to win. Receivers whose ratio of caught/thrown to approaches 1, a average time allowed to pass around 1.5 seconds, a 1st downs/total plays ratio over 40%, and 3rd down conversion over 50%, a third down stop over 50% as well. These seem like little things, maybe, but what it takes to achieve them will bring with it all the in-between actions and decisions to make a big change in the ethos of the franchise.