An in-depth look at why the Seattle Seahawks moved on from offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer, firing him on Tuesday.
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In the modern NFL, the moment you stop adjusting on either side of the ball, you’re dead in the water. The league has advanced so far schematically in the last decade, every team has to deal with constant change from down to down. If your coaches are living back in 1973, when the primary edict was “We’ll beat your guys with our guys,” you have no shot.
Sadly for the Seahawks, this is what they had become on offense. And it was never more apparent than it was in Seattle’s 30-20 wild-card loss to the Rams. Russell Wilson completed just 11 of 27 passes for 174 yards, two touchdowns, and one interception. Wilson did complete three of seven passes of 20 or more air yards for 103 yards and a touchdown, which was pretty miraculous considering that he was pressured on 20 of his 36 dropbacks and took five sacks, but you don’t have to be Bill Walsh to see how uncomfortable Wilson looked in this offense.
This isn’t to ignore the brilliant scheming done by Rams defensive coordinator Brandon Staley, but Seattle’s offense finished the season broken, and there’s one obvious instigator. Offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer was called out in subtle and obvious fashion after the game by the head coach, the franchise quarterback, and one of the team’s two best receivers.
Not ideal.
On Tuesday, the Seahawks took the next inevitable step.
“What we wanted to do was we wanted to continue to play-pass and find our chunk opportunities,” Pete Carroll said. “That doesn’t mean we throw the ball over their head all of the time and going for just bombs. But there’s a lot of space we create in the play-passing game, and it seemed like during the course of the season, after the half-way point, we had hit so much early, we had been so effective that people found a way to stay back and just try to bleed us and make us have to throw the ball underneath and we were maybe really going for it more than we needed to and didn’t take advantage of switching gears a bit there, as effectively as we would like. We like chunking them and like going after them.
“As I look back now, I have a lot of work to do to figure it out, but I would think that we might think that way a little differently. At one part of the year, it was available, and we took it, and then in the second part of the year, against the really good defenses that we played, they were able to keep us out of that kind of a mode. I wish we would have adapted better under those circumstances.”
Russell Wilson: “I think that teams know that we throw it down the field well and stuff like that. Also too what they fear is our pace, the tempo, and all that. I think that I feel when the game is on the line, two minutes in the game or whatever, teams obviously fear that because of the feeling of me going and all that stuff. I think that is something I think along the way that kind of lose track of a little bit. I think we kind of lost track of that maybe along the way. I think that could have helped. But I also think that we still played some really good football. I go back to the Eagles game, and didn’t feel like it was one of our better games, but going there and everything else, we could have — really that game could have been a massive game in terms of making plays. DK went for however many yards he went for and this and that, but I think there were touchdowns in that game, and you go to the next week and then it just kind of — next thing you know the weeks add up and get here and you go down to Arizona, play the 49ers; doesn’t feel like our best game.
“But go back to the Washington game and it’s like our first half was great. First two minutes of the third quarter was great. Then feels like we kind of got flustered there along the way. Not flustered, but slowed down along the way. And I think that kind of you get to the end of the season or end of the road and it’s like — a few games, and it’s like, Why didn’t that work and this and that, and you can question this and that. But I think for us, to sum it up for today, I just don’t think that — we obviously didn’t play our best football. I think that it’s — we got to do the little things right along the way. Didn’t feel like we did that all the way.”
Receiver Tyler Lockett: “I just think teams probably did a great plan game planning against us, scheming up against us. A lot of times, teams that we play just play defense a little differently from what we’ve seen on film. They just came out with a whole different game plan that we haven’t seen them run in games. That just comes with us this year, being a passing team, because we became a passing team it became easier for teams to try to scheme a little bit different. When we ran the ball a lot, we didn’t have to worry about teams trying to throw out all these different coverages that we haven’t seen before; because they had to figure out how to stop the run. Sometimes when you start passing the ball like we did; we did a great job of doing it was well.
“But now you have teams that’s starting to figure out, ‘let’s drop eight people back, let’s do all this different type of stuff’, that they normally haven’t shown on film and now we have to try to adjust. Even in the last eight games I think we did a great job adjusting, we didn’t really know what teams were going to do. We did a great job game planning; they just might have thrown out different things in the game and we would have to adjust.”
Again, you can’t just line the same things up over and over when your opponents have figured it out. It was time for Schottenheimer to jump into the 21st century, or the Seahawks had to start looking for someone who already lives there.
