We already know about the value of Quandre Diggs to Seattle’s secondary. It could be argued that it was even more transformative than Clowney’s on the defensive line.
“I think it was pretty obvious,” Carroll said in his end-of-season press conference regarding Diggs’ impact. “We played cleaner with him. He helped us in a number of ways. I’ll continue to tell you that he’s helping other guys play well. The confidence that he brings in adds to those guys. I thought Bradley [McDougald] played better when he was playing with ‘Q’ [Diggs] in the game. When he is in the game with the younger kids, he’s got to control quite a bit more as opposed to focusing on his play. I think you can see that help. I don’t know if statistically it shows up as much as it felt different when he’s playing.”
It showed up statistically, as well.
One way to quantify Diggs’ effect on the defense is to look at the success rate of routes specifically designed to test the deep third. Sports Info Solutions has this data, and it’s fascinating. From Weeks 1-9, on posts, deep crossers, go routes, hitch-and-go routes, out-and-up routes — anything that would test a secondary deep — the Seahawks allowed five receptions on six catchable targets for 144 yards, one touchdown, and one interception to the middle, right middle, and left middle of the field.
But from Week 10 through the end of the regular season, things got quite a bit better. Neither Diggs nor McDougald were targeted at all on such routes, and the Griffin/Flowers combo was targeted eight times, allowing three receptions for 56 yards, on deep stuff. For the Redskins, Dunbar allowed one catch for 17 yards on five targets in that span, with a dropped interception and a pass defensed. For the entire season, Dunbar allowed just that one completion on 10 total targets on those types of deep routes.
Regarding Diggs, two plays against the Vikings in Week 13 typified the type of pass defense Carroll has always taught — exact and aggressive. At the start of the fourth quarter, Kirk Cousins attempted a short pass to receiver Stefon Diggs, but Flowers (at the bottom of the screen) was having none of it. Diggs is one of the NFL’s best route-runners, and Flowers has been vulnerable to shorter, angular routes through his career, but he “landmarked” Diggs perfectly here, ran the route with him, and came up with the interception.
And here, halfway through the second quarter, Diggs shows his closing speed and ability to negate a play in space as he screams down from his deep safety role to lay the boom on tight end Irv Smith, Jr. for a six-yard gain.
With Diggs on board, this was now a formerly disorganized secondary playing in concert. One could easily argue that his addition to Seattle’s defense created a similar impact to Minkah Fitzpatrick’s in Pittsburgh after a mid-September trade with the Dolphins. Pittsburgh gave up their 2020 first-round pick for Fitzpatrick, and that’s not to say they gave too much — general manager Kevin Colbert and head coach Mike Tomlin would likely tell you they’d make that trade again 100 times over. But the Diggs deal does further the reputation Schneider and Carroll have earned for finding the players who fit their concepts and putting them in the best possible positions to succeed — especially players who have become mysteriously undervalued by their former teams.
At the scouting combine in February, Schneider was very specific about what he wants out of a secondary that was set to regress before Diggs was added to the roster.
“I think just like every position, you’re constantly looking to tweak it and figure out how to get better, whether it’s at strong safety, free safety, you know? Obviously we want to get better. If I told you that we were satisfied with the performance I’d be lying. We all need to get better.”
Adding Diggs last year was a major part of that, and the acquisition of Quinton Dunbar might be the piece that puts the Seahawks’ secondary back in the good-to-great category. Perhaps not what the Legion of Boom was at its peak, but any team would take a reasonable sub-version of that.
More remarkably, the Seahawks created that new secondary with the invaluable skill of spotting the suckers at the table, and taking them for all they’re worth.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”