11/30/2023 0 Comments 2017 seattle seahawks rosterYou can.īut I saw over the offseason a troubling framework emerging, for example during the free agency period when there was interest in bringing back Russell Okung to stabilize the tackle spot, or even asking what if the Seahawks had paid to keep their original championship line together? And look I’m not dragging those articles. You can want the team to play well-play better!-without being hung up on the past. Same with Kenneth Arthur’s demand to create more takeaways, among other indicators of good play. That’s what ANY/A measures-not a shallow ambition to match a historically-great unit, but a signal of how well the defense is stopping the pass today. Plus this is a league where most teams still try to win with passing, so it makes sense to try to have good pass defense. Many of the same pieces and planners are in place, so it’s not an outrageous expectation. 2013 was the greatest, most successful year in the franchise. ![]() So I started wondering instead about the purpose of all this continual circulation back to 2013-the comparisons to contemporary teams and any attendant anxiety for Seattle to “return” to its form and even recreate the formula that produced such a championship roster. By 2016, the Seahawks’ depth couldn’t bear witness to that fitness. It’s tempting and even fair in abstract to insist the defense performed as “designed” when at full strength, but the truth was the team’s contingency for losing a key player didn’t meet the group’s standard-which may be a hyper expectation but is part of the intention built into that word design.įolks still sometimes blame Chris Clemons’s torn ACL for how the 2012 season finished, after all an injury that helped prompt the front office to go get Cliff Avril and Bennett, and although there was no comparable casualty to Thomas in 2013 part of what made 2013 worth reminiscing over was how exceptionally the defense was stacked. Like similar studies analyzing the cost of Thomas’s absence, those contrasts are revealing but they’re also picking from smaller and smaller samples. And you can even see one alternate ending where the pass defense rather improves on that figure down the stretch, since Michael Bennett was just returning from missing five games after surgery when Thomas went out (the Seahawks allowed 3.7 ANY/A with its full complement of coverage and pressure before Bennett’s swollen knee sidelined him-approaching the ridiculous 3.2 adjusted net yards per pass play from 2013). Yes you can slice it to show Seattle was good enough with Thomas for 10 games (4.8 ANY/A, a full 1.4 yards better than league average 6.2 in 2016) that it was actually on pace in that segment for its best rate since 2013. Specifically, the overall differential tumbled to within 0.3 yards of league average ending the streak of four straight years with a margin more than a yard per attempt superior to the rest of the league. Unfortunately, the follow up is about what you’d expect: The Seahawks in 2016 were great with Earl Thomas and bad without him, which tells us everything and nothing. ![]() Last year I compared season-long ANY/A differential to combat the narrative that Seattle’s pass coverage had a poor year in 2015 compared to the standards established by the Legion of Boom from 2011-2014. I had been intending all offseason to take a look at how the Seattle Seahawks’ pass defense performed in 2016 relative to past years, using adjusted net yards per pass attempt allowed like I did in my first-ever post for Field Gulls.
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