It is important to me to maintain a fair perspective as a diehard Seahawks fan, especially after a disappointing loss. There have been a few times, in recent years, where I have allowed my writing to enter into toxic realms after a loss to a team like the New York Giants at Lumen Field, and after publishing, I would sometimes feel some sense of regret that I didn’t use a more tempered approach. Therefore, in this piece, I am going to try to be behaved while being honest with you as readers.

The Giants aren’t a very good team. They most likely will not make the playoffs this year. Their quarterback isn’t very good, outside of one concussed receiver, their skill players aren’t special. They will need to rely on defense to win games, and any team with a decent offensive line, and capable quarterback is probably going to beat them on most Sundays. Giant fans, like some of the more obnoxious ones that walked out of Lumen Field Sunday afternoon, can feel great about this win, but they still play in a division with the Eagles, Commanders, and Cowboys. Good luck with that moving forward.

So, on that level, it really sucks that Seattle fell behind to these Giants, and made a bad quarterback look pretty good, right?

Yeah, it does. It most certainly does.

It sucks because we replaced legendary Seahawk head coach Pete Carroll with this Mike Macdonald cat from Baltimore who is supposed to be this defensive mastermind in the league, and we lost this game just like a Pete Carroll coached team lost over the past couple years. We played undisciplined, soft, and disorganized on defense, unable to stop the run or pass, and then we passed the fuck out of the ball on offensive instead of leaning into the run to help sustain drives. We could have just kept with Carroll, Clint Hurtt, and Shane Waldron, and we could had this same annoying result.

This is the sting of this game for me. It wasn’t just playing (and coaching) down to an inferior opponent, it was doing it and looking like the exact, same, hair pulling out, frustrating team as we were last year against Pittsburgh with backup Mason Rudolph quarterbacking them to an easy win here.

Seahawk fans who remain staunchly big Pete Carroll fans are going to use this loss against the Giants in defense of the former head coach, and they are going to rub Mike Macdonald’s nose in it like a poodle puppy dog to just poo poo’d all over the carpet of Lumen Field. You can be certain of this.

Mike Macdonald might still end up being a really good coach for the Seattle Seahawks, coach here for a long time, going to the playoffs, winning division titles, and maybe getting a Super Bowl ring. This could happen, and I believe in him, but he has a lot of work to do. Tons of it.

After a promising start to the season, going against teams with bad quarterback situations, Macdonald’s defense has now had back to back games looking pretty bad. The excuse in Detroit was valid. They were down four starters on the defensive line, going against an offense with a great offensive line, good quarterback, and lots of weapons to move the ball. Against the Giants, however, the excuses feel nonexistent. There is no excuse for an effort this bad against a bad team.

Seattle’s front seven too often got out of their gaps, giving up easy long runs. Their defensive backs were getting beaten way too often, and Daniel Jones had way too much time to pass down field, and way too often caught defenders off guard with his ability to run.

Macdonald, to his credit, said everyone needs to do a better job, himself, included as the caller of the defense. From my vantage point up high in the nose bleeders, it looked like New York used Seattle’s aggressive scheme against them to their advantage. Whenever a linebacker would blitz, Jones found the easy hot read. When a linebacker would attack a specific gap, the running back found a huge hole in the other gap.

The lack of fundamentals, proper tackling, gap control, coverage all had the same look of what we have seen for the last two years when Carroll shifted this team out of his standard 4-3 into a 3-4 hybrid scheme. Then, it was felt like too much was put on the plate of the players and they were in a constant state of confusion as to who does what when, and whatnot. After this game against the Giants, one is free to wonder if Macdonald’s scheme is no different in its heavy demands on players to understand it, and play it properly.

It could simply be that the Seattle players need more time with each other communicating, and building the proper chemistry to do all the tasks this scheme demands. It could also be that Seattle just doesn’t have as much talent needed to play within this scheme as we were thinking a few weeks ago. It could be a little of both, or again, it could just simply be that this unit needs to play more games together in order to properly gel. I am hoping for the latter.

Time will tell, as we get further through this season, whether or not this defense is going to be some special this year, or a problem, but one thing is clear. If they don’t show signs of improvement, and building towards something special, the pressure will be on big time next offseason to get it fixed.

You don’t replace a legendary defensive minded head coach with a young defensive minded head coach, and not have an outstanding defense in result. If Mike Macdonald is to be the guy here in the PNW, the defense in Seattle must be one of the absolute tops in the league. This is a nonnegotiable, in my view.

That all said, however, in my opinion, the defense wasn’t even the most frustrating side of the ball in this game. Color me absolutely done with Ryan Grubb’s almost obscene pass happy attack with Geno Smith. I get it that this aggressive passing attack won him tons of accolades as a play caller in college, and I know that Seattle has a lot of nice receivers that fit what he did at UW, but this is the NFL. Things are not going to be nearly so easy for him at this level to chuck it around the place every Sunday, and none of this feels sustainable right now.

For a while, I have been allowing myself to blindly buy into this Grubb hype. Diehard Husky fans, arrogantly blinded by their own purple and gold eye glasses, have promised us great results from Grubb, and I have gotten sucked into it, myself, like an ancient mariner looking at bright red hair and big boobs on a fish woman sitting on treacherous rocks in the middle of the sea.

I have been swept up in the idea that between Grubb, Geno and all these pass catchers in Seattle, we would see some fancy version of the eighties run and shoot offense with Warren Moon in Houston, or the K Gun offense of Buffalo with Jim Kelly in the nineties. Here is the reality pill, though, both of those legendary offenses had really good offensive lines, and neither of those teams won a Super Bowl playing that way.

If you want to be a really great defensive team, you must have a balanced offense that controls clock while it scores, and gives the defense time to rest. This is how you play connected football. This is what Pete Carroll always preached while he won national championships in college and a Super Bowl in the pros. This is what Mike Macdonald must get Grubb to now see.

With a unique player at running back such as Seattle has with Ken Walker, it is absolutely bad coaching to not have him become a fixture of this offense. With the leaky state of the pass blocking portion of this offensive, it’s not even bad coaching that Grubb has 34 year old Geno Smith drop back passing at this rate, it’s borderline criminal to the point of possibly charging Grubb for assault and battery with his intentions of having Geno pass so much.

Let us be very real about what the Seattle Seahawks are with their offensive line. They have a decent young player at left tackle, they have an old journeyman at left guard on a cheap one year contract, a decent center new to the team, an unsettled situation (still after five games) at right guard, and their starting right tackle is a third string player.

With this offensive line, they should be running Ken Walker (and Zach Charbonnet) way more often than they are. They should be playing more with two tight ends, they should be using a fullback more on occasion, and they should be allowing Geno Smith to play to his truest strengths as a play action passer.

Grubb might want to use almost exclusively three receiver sets out of shotgun, but he does not have the offensive line to hold up playing that way, and I feel now it is catching up to this club. What he has been asking Geno to do with all of this high volume drop back stuff, now feels unsustainable to a dangerous level. It puts more pressure on sub average pass blockers, more pressure on receivers to catch against contested coverage (like JSN’s crucial third down drop in crunch time), and it puts tons of pressure on Geno to deliver tight passes under a barrage of pressure.

Ryan Grubb must adjust this attack to better fit what his situation is with the offensive line, and the unique underused talents he has at running back. Offensive linemen play better when they are finding rhythm in the run game. It’s easy to move forward on the attack of defenders than moving backwards being attacked by them in pass pro. Grubb needs to allow these guys the ability to find their confidence by running the rock. This is a must.

So, sure, we can talk about DK’s fumble for the second time in two weeks that killed a scoring opportunity, and we can talk dump attempt to go for it on fourth down late in the game in their own territory on a play action play with bad execution. We can even talk further about how bad this defense played. We can point fingers at all of this stuff, but Geno passed forty times in this year, and was sacked seven times, and Ken Walker only carried the ball five times for nineteen yards. That is inexcusable.

Good luck calling an offense like that against San Francisco on Thursday night. Good luck playing against the Bills like that, the Vikings, Jets, and Packers.

In this game, when the defense felt out of sorts, Grubb needed to get K9 and Charbonnet going with a run game for which Geno Smith could have play action passed off of. They needed to sustain long drives, shrink the clock, and give their defense a rest to sort themselves out. Total failure on the offensive coaching staff that this was not more in the game plan. Now it is time to fix that.

So, I think the holistic reality of this season is now very different than the visions of grandeur we all felt after going 3-0 to start the season. While we all got caught up in the dreams of winning the division, and going on a playoff run, the more realistic goal for this team with new coaches, a first time NFL head coach, first time NFL offensive coordinator, first time NFL defensive coordinator, is probably to lay forth the foundations of what the identity of this team is, and build positively off of it.

If they make the playoffs, great. If they do win the division, even better. If they fail to do either, that’s fine, as long as they are building towards a clear identity that can be a winning sustainable formula moving forward. This is the goal for 2024, in my mind.

As I watch these twelve remaining games, I am going to now temper expectations each week. I am going to try to exude patience with the offense and defense. I’m going to look for signs of who the building blocks are moving forward. I am going to look for signs of a winning philosophy within this coaching staff.

Is Geno Smith the guy who can be here longer termed as QB1? Does Macdonald ultimately want a pass happy attack that Grubb seems to continue to fancy, or does he want more balance? Is DK a guy this offense should center around or should it be more K9? Who are going to be the real building blocks of this defense?

If the season was over today, and we were heading into the offseason, I would make the offensive line the high priority in free agency and the draft, but I would also acknowledge that maybe we do not have the building block linebackers to green dot this defense and make it special. There is lots of work to do in these two areas.

I see lots of reasons why they should extend Geno Smith a few more years, and also extend DK Metcalf. They can drop both of their 2025 salaries down, and create more cap space to be active in free agency. I can also see the argument some make that maybe perhaps Seattle has used too much of their resources in their offensive skill positions, and maybe making a tough choice (or two) to move on from the more expensive pieces opens up more money to use at the offensive line.

Seattle has the cheapest offensive line in the league right now, and you know what?

It painfully shows.

Time to change that up.

At the very least, I think that starts with running it more with K9, but bigger picture? I really need to see John Schneider go on a big time mission next offseason to improve that offensive line.

For now, just run that f’ing ball.

Go Hawks.