Analysis: Seahawks' Pass Rush Is Not Good Enough in Its Current State
The Seahawks’ double-firing of defensive coordinator Ken Norton Jr. and pass game coordinator Andre Curtis only emphasized that head coach Pete Carroll wants defensive improvement in 2022. Even before Carroll decided to shake up his staff, the 70-year old defensive guru had identified one area that the unit needed to get better at: rushing the passer. And the topic of pass rush has been ubiquitous since Carroll arrived in Seattle.
When asked how he would explain the Seahawks’ 7-10 struggles to team chair Jody Allen, Carroll blamed an inadequate pass rush for a franchise-low takeaway total of 18.
“The numbers of the lack of turnovers that we were able to create,” Carroll said in his end-of-season press conference. “Usually those come when you’re getting ahead in games; and if you’re well ahead, the ball gets more exposed and you get more turnovers and that feeds off itself. But also you’ve got to create them, and you create them with the pass rush. And pass rush, the quarterback is the number one critical aspect of turning the football over.”
As I assessed and explained in my article looking at the Seahawks’ poor takeaway performance, “The pass rush has been patchy and not been able to force the ball out at consistent moments. In basic terms: pressure forces errors and therefore turnovers.”
Carroll agrees. Later in his presser, the coach provided more of his pass rush thoughts. His elaboration tellingly arrived when answering a question on the Seahawks’ two biggest areas to improve in the 2022 offseason.
“We need to improve our pass rush, you know? That’s an area that we need to get better,” he stated. “You saw how dynamic it is when you get going like we did [in Week 18]. But we didn’t have that consistency and that’s an important part of it. So many things feed off of that. It’s the disruption of the quarterback that leads to all the issues, you know, on the positive side for the defense and so we gotta—whatever we can do—we have to work there. So that’s one of the focal points for me.”
Carroll offered a similar evaluation to 710 ESPN Seattle in his last Monday appearance of the season.
“We didn’t get to the passer as much as we need to, and you could see the impact of it last night, what you can get out of it,” he told Mike Salk. “We weren’t as productive as we needed to be.”
The numbers match Carroll’s report.
Let’s first look at the glitzy sacks. Seattle’s 33 sacks on the season ranked 25th in the league (the Steelers were highest, bringing down opposing passers 55 times). Carlos Dunlap led the Seahawks in sacks (tied 29th in the league) and sack percentage, per TruMedia.
Here are the individual sack totals for the team:
- Carlos Dunlap - 8.5
- Rasheem Green - 6.5
- Darrell Taylor - 6.5
- Poona Ford – 2
- Bryan Mone - 1.5
- Kerry Hyder - 1.5
- Al Woods - 1.5
- Bobby Wagner - 1
- Benson Mayowa – 1
- Jordyn Brooks - 1
- Ryan Neal - 1
- Alton Robinson – 1
Pressure figures, however, are the real key to evaluating pass rush. We know that the Seahawks front office and Carroll look at them regularly, and the stats will surely have informed the head coach’s view and his decision to let Norton and Curtis go.
Per TruMedia, Dunlap led the team in pressure percentage with 11.5 percent. However, that rate only placed 41st in the league among rushers with at least 100 pass rush snaps; the highest total was Devin White at 28.5 percent.
Seahawks pressure percentage leaders, via TruMedia (minimum of 100 pass rush snaps):
- Carlos Dunlap - 11.5 percent
- Alton Robinson - 10.8 percent
- L.J. Collier - 10.3 percent
- Darrell Taylor - 10.3 percent
- Benson Mayowa - 8.4 percent
- Poona Ford - 7.7 percent
- Kerry Hyder - 7.0 percent
- Rasheem Green - 6.7 percent
- Robert Nkemdiche - 6.0 percent
- Al Woods - 5.8 percent
- Bryan Mone - 3.9 percent
SportsInfoSolutions charted Robinson as Seattle’s pressure percentage leader (among those with a minimum of 100 pass rush snaps). Robinson’s 12.4 percent placed 43rd in the league, trailing White for the league-lead at 26.3 percent.
Seahawks pressure percentage leaders, per SportsInfoSolutions (minimum of 100 pass rush snaps):
- Alton Robinson - 12.4 percent
- Darrell Taylor - 11.8 percent
- Carlos Dunlap - 11.5 percent
- Benson Mayowa - 10.9 percent
- Kerry Hyder - 9.4 percent
- Poona Ford - 7.4 percent
- Rasheem Green - 7.0 percent
- L.J. Collier - 6.7 percent
- Robert Nkemdiche - 5.4 percent
- Bryan Mone - 4.7 percent
- Al Woods - 4.5 percent
The overall pressure percentage on defense subsequently placed in the bottom tier of the NFL. TruMedia logged the Seahawks’ pressure percentage figure at 27.2 percent, placing 29th with a median of 30.2 percent and the league-leading Dolphins registering 37 percent. SportsInfoSolutions gave Seattle a 36.8 percent pressure percentage, ranking 26th in the league with the Dolphins leading the league at 48.5 percent.
Both TruMedia and SIS agree that Seattle’s pressure percentage figures were better with four rushers only—the heralded number of pass rushers that allows defenses to drop seven men into coverage.
According to TruMedia, the Seahawks' four-man pressure percentage was 26.5 percent (24th), whereas the median was set at 27.7 percent, with the Patriots recording a league-best 33.7 percent. SIS, on the other hand, had the Seahawks' four-man rush pressure percentage at a more favorable 36.2 percent—17 spots behind the league-leading Patriots' mark of 43.9 percent.
A partial explanation for this is the Seahawks’ three- and sometimes two-man rush groupings dropping the overall pressure percentage figure. The four-man rush figures will also include simulated pressures that Seattle ran.
Nevertheless, questions over the scheme’s impact on the low overall pressure rates can be raised. The bear fronts that the Seahawks ran on early downs congested the interior with three defensive linemen and one LEO on the edge. There’s a reason that the majority of passing down snaps in the NFL feature an even-spaced front: each of the four rushers is given the same amount of room. With four-man rush bear, the rusher away from the LEO has to loop from the guard to the edge, leaving only one edge with genuine rush presence.
On January 7, Dave Wyman of 710 ESPN Seattle asked former Seahawks pass rusher Cliff Avril about this issue.
“Is there something about this new defensive line front that’s making it harder to get sacks?”
“Oh, most definitely,” Avril answered. “It’s kind of a hybrid 3-4 type of situation. I mean I’m pretty sure this is the most Carlos Dunlap has dropped back into coverage in his whole entire career.”
“Listen, we don’t get paid to go backwards, we get paid to go forwards and get after the quarterback,” Avril later added.
“I mean, I’d be pulling my hair out, I’d be stressed if that was the role they decided they wanted to have with me and I know I’m a pass rusher. So I think that plays a big role in the lack of production in the guys that we expected to have production. You know, when you’ve got these guys dropping back maybe 40 percent of the time, 30 percent of the time, you know, you can’t get in the groove of the game. You can’t keep throwing your fastball [at the offensive line] and then throw a curve or a changeup for your guy that you’re going up against if you’re dropping back into coverage from time to time. So I think that has really hurt them from a production standpoint. I mean, from a defensive standpoint, I can understand why they might have tried that but for the guys up front, and also you can tell on the backend because they go hand in hand, if you ain’t getting sacks, guess what? You’re probably getting torched over the top of the defense as well. I don’t care how good of a cornerback you have. So all that stuff plays hand in hand into why there wasn’t as much production as we expected from the guys that have been productive.”
Avril’s comments provide valuable edge rusher insight. Nevertheless, we should not ignore the fact that the Seahawks established their heavy bear usage in 2020 (over 30 percent of snaps, according to the charting companies). This season was merely a continuation and extension of the approach that proved successful in 2020.
In terms of Dunlap’s usage, the Seahawks simply reduced his playing time as the season progressed as they tried to work out their best rush rotation. More than that, Dunlap looked poor, with physical decline evident in his game and his punch lacking power. So Seattle played him less, with the LEO pass rusher finishing the season playing just 38 percent of the total snaps. As Gregg Bell researched, Dunlap was the only NFL player to place in the top 47 of sacks while playing less than 54 percent of snaps.
“There was a time where, you know, we tried different combinations, we backed [Dunlap] out of there some, because we just couldn’t get it, we weren’t finding the same kind of production that we had seen the year before,” Carroll explained to Mike Salk of 710 ESPN Seattle.
“And he was trying, he was playing his tail off and all that, but it just wasn’t happening. He seemed to really catch fire with his power rush, which is really his signal rush, and once that started taking off then everything started to fit off it for him and then other guys were able to take advantage of that too.”
Before Carroll’s reasoning for Dunlap playing less, he had described the impact of a fully-firing Dunlap on the defense in 2020 and 2021.
“If you remember a year ago, when Carlos got here, when he started hammering that edge that he breaks down, the rest of the pass rush picks up,” the head coach told Salk. “Well he got going again. In the second half—well, really, just the last I don’t know, six to eight weeks or something; maybe it’s the last four weeks when he really started hitting his numbers—we changed and everybody complimented and it worked out better, so.”
Seattle’s scheme did factor in the clearer passing downs. Firstly, there was its cheetah rush package—featuring the four best pass rushers on the team. By the end of the year, this was made up of Dunlap, Taylor, Green and Hyder. The Seahawks also unfurled a dime package to twin with "cheetah" that utilized more aggressive coverage alignments and "up" mugged fronts while deploying Ryan Neal as the sixth defensive back.
Looking at Seattle’s pressure percentage by down does offer some confirmation that the scheme made things difficult on the earlier downs. However, it is true for the rest of the NFL that defenses will get higher pressure rates on third downs because they do not have to worry about the threat of the run.
A more Seahawks specific element is their second down issue, where they had a better overall pressure percentage than first down, yet a poorer rush-four pressure percentage. This implies Seattle was forced into sending more rushers/blitzes on this down to maintain its overall pressure percentage performance.
The grey area of the vast majority of second down situations is an element that grows especially tricky when combined with Seattle's scheme aspects covered. Second downs have an uncertain nature—an aspect Griffin Sturgeon and I have covered from a coverage standpoint on Seattle Overload.
Nonetheless, whatever the schematic recipe, the pass rush ingredients were ultimately not of a high enough standard. The cutting of Jarran Reed left the Seahawks without their rush 3-technique. Al Woods filled that void magnificently on early downs defending the run. Yet, the additions of Hyder and Nkemdiche were less fruitful from a quarterback-hunting standpoint, as evidenced above.
The what-could-have-been scenario of low-cost free agent addition Aldon Smith sticks in the mind. Through the early offseason camps of 2021, Smith looked like a potential SAM, 3-technique and "spinner" in Seattle’s defense. This would have unlocked more rush options, including more odd front stuff. When Smith was released after another off-field incident, it left the Seahawks without that type of player on their roster.
All of these factors leave Seattle desperately needing to upgrade its pass rush as they head into an offseason in which they must also hire a new defensive coordinator and pass game coordinator. The Seahawks have almost $50 million in projected salary cap space, yet many 2021 contributors are hitting unrestricted free agency at the same time. They are also without a first round pick.
