Grey Zabel injury update

Will the Seahawks have to play the rest of the season without their star rookie left guard?

The Seahawks on my “5 most important players” list could have just as easily been the Good (Coby Bryant), the Bad (Sam Darnold), and the Ugly (Grey Zabel’s injury) after losing to the Rams on Sunday, 21-19.

On Monday morning, Mike Macdonald was hesitant to say what the Seahawks had found out about Zabel’s knee injury but told Brock and Salk that initial tests were positive. Macdonald said that Zabel was having imaging done on his knee as he was speaking and didn’t want to make any definite statements about the situation until the rookie right guard was “out of the woods”.

It sounds like the physical tests didn’t indicate a season-ending injury for Zabel but even so a stint on injured reserve would seem plausible given that Macdonald didn’t want to say that all the news was good.

As far as getting back safety Julian Love, Macdonald said that he expected him back this week.

After the game on Sunday, I asked readers to leave comments about what they saw, felt, and believed about the Seahawks this week. As usual, I’ll post some of your reactions here — if it seems truncated today, that’s because I want to get the Zabel update out as soon as possible.

Sam Darnold

Blair: I still believe in Sam and the coaching staff for the rest of the season. No one feels worse that Sam Darnold does right now. I wont beat up on him I just expect our QB to be better. I believe in him and his talent. He has the ability to get this right. He can make or break this team and he is smart enough to correct his errant throws.

PNWRider: Darnold had a bad game. They are allowed to every once in a while I guess. The Defense look great we were running the ball pretty well. We have one lineman out on the offense and the other hurting.

mfwords: I wrote in one of your prior posts that this game would come down to QB play and that until proven wrong Stafford had the edge. More than once he threw a ball that only his guy could make, and they fell harmlessly incomplete. Darnold has to learn to eat the ball or dirt it. On the jump pass pick, just throw that one to nobody. Even if you push yourselves out of FG range, you punt them deep. Better still, you throw it to nobody and beyond the LOS and it’s not grounding and you’re within Myers’ range.

I don’t think you abandon Darnold. But he has to learn how to deal with duress. Look: The Rams gave up on a very good QB and traded him to the Lions. That guy finally grew up and learned how to throw the ball away. Darnold needs to handle pressure better.

Don Ellis: Hate to say it but the determining factor in the game were the gifts from Darnold to the Rams. It was a bad day for him but I remain a staunch supporter and am glad he is the quarterback for this team.

Defjames: The D should feel good. The team and Darnold should not. This was a game we should have won and we only have ourselves to blame. The Rams did not beat us, we beat us.

Now let’s all take a deep breath… this L may come back to bite us, but I believe we learn more from our mistakes than our success. I believe this team will grow from this and be better. Darnold knows he blew it. We had no business being in a position to win this game, yet we were right there. Learn from it and move on.

On the jump pass interception, Top Billin’ did a good job of breaking down why that one especially hurt given the situation. Darnold should have just taken the sack.

I also agree with what Top Billin’ said about Darnold’s previous interceptions going into the game: None of them were nearly as bad as Darnold’s four picks against the Rams. His four or five worst throws of the season happened in Week 11.

That’s a good sign to me that Darnold’s bad game is just one of those things that happens to every quarterback. As I’ll get to next, even Tom Brady had bad games…although he had them less and less often as he gained more career experience.

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Isaac B: I’m super proud of the way Darnold handled himself with poise, in spite of a bad game. Very refreshing given the temper tantrums we’ve had to endure the past few years when things go wrong. He didn’t pout on the sidelines, he didn’t throw his helmet, he wasn’t seeing ghosts, he didn’t fall apart, and he didn’t give up. He hung in there and battled to the last play when things were going about as badly as they could have gone. I was inspired by Sam Darnold today, and all of the silly narratives aren’t worth my time.

At this point in his career, what has Darnold gained from experience if not how to handle the adversity of being the player blamed for a loss? This was not the worst game of Darnold’s career, or even close to it, so he’s going to be able to put this behind him and not dwell on the outside noise about how he’s “still seeing ghosts”.

I do this thing where I compare every quarterback to Tom Brady. It may not seem fair but to me it just sort of rationalizes what “great quarterbacking” should look like and how does a player improve to reach that mark? I do the same when I compare how a player’s attitude/behavior with question “What would Larry Fitzgerald do?” because anybody who commits 17 seasons to the Cardinals without complaining deserves his own wing in Canton.

In the first half of Brady’s career, the Patriots went 0-9 when he threw three interceptions or more:

Do you know how many games his teams lost when Brady threw 3+ picks in the second half of his career? 1. Do you know how many games his teams won? 0. Tom Brady only had one 3+ picks game between 2012-2022, a span of 187 starts. That’s more games than Russell Wilson played for Seattle.

Well that’s pretty insane but it is what great quarterbacking looks like. It also implies that Brady was a better quarterback after turning 30 than he was in his 20s. A much better quarterback. Darnold is 28. He’s already a much better quarterback at 28 than he was at 25.

(By the way, another weird fact here is that Brady went 0-9 in the regular season when he threw 3+ picks but 3-1 in the postseason. Wilson has an 0-6 record in the regular season with 3+ picks but as you already know, 1-0 in the playoffs.)

Brady went 7-2 in games following a 3+ pick performance. Darnold faces the Titans next week, the team with the worst record in the NFL, so I expect a rebound.

Don’t stop commentin’!

Samuel Garfield: I hope it’s not too late to say you were being too glib when you said you weren’t worried about turnovers on offense near the Seahawks’ end zone. This is why it was worrying! Because teams prone to turnovers usually don’t just turn the ball over when they’re winning by a boatload of points, and it presaged it costing them the game against a good team.

Hopefully it’s something that’s very coachable—but if that was true hopefully it would have been coached out more already.

I replied to Samuel in the comments as well but the gist of what I said is that I want my assessments to be questioned and I welcome every opportunity to learn from any potential mistakes I make. Many times season I have asked myself if I was harder on Geno Smith than I have been on Sam Darnold for making some bad decisions and poor throws/turning the ball over, and I can’t really say for sure what the answer is.

If yesterday’s game happened in Week 2, then I might have been a lot harder on Darnold this season. Imagine if the Seahawks were 0-2 and he had those bad games back-to-back to start his career in Seattle.

Instead, the Seahawks won seven of their next eight games and Darnold was consistently awesome aside from a few mistakes.

Maybe I was being “too glib” about turnovers, but I think that he played far worse against the Rams than he did in any of the first nine games. I don’t associate any of his turnovers with where the Seahawks are on the field either. I think that’s just sort of coincidental.

It could be that Darnold’s biggest problem is not the pressure of being in the end zone (look at how close he was to leading Seattle into field goal range from the SEA1 at the end of the game) but the pressure of being under pressure. He took so many sacks in 2024 that he may be more hesitant to eat the ball this season than he needs to be and there were clear examples on Sunday of times that Darnold could have won the game if he took a sack.

I expect a better version of Darnold when the Seahawks play the Rams next time but if we don’t get that then perhaps I’m being too glib about this.

Bill Lord: I’m not a huge Darnold fan, but I was impressed by him today. He had a bad day. Embarrassingly bad. A lot of players would have been discouraged. But he persevered. He jumped up every time and kept fighting. And by the end of the game, he got us in position to win on the last play. Tough game. Tough opponent. But I gotta admire his perseverance.

I was thinking something similar, Bill. Not every quarterback plays that poorly and then walks to the sideline and goes back to business without showing his emotions or blaming somebody else. Look, we’d all rather have games where Sam Darnold doesn’t turn it over four times (and he has 10 turnovers in the last 4 games) but in the meantime I think the Seahawks are going to be able to recover because nobody’s pointing fingers about who is “to blame”.

That’s what I hated the most about the last few years or so. It felt like people were always trying to figure out who to blame for a Seahawks loss. I haven’t seen that happen in any of the Seahawks three losses this season, with maybe the exception of Week 1 because we didn’t know yet how good Seattle was going to become.

Daniel Carlson: Most of Darnold’s interceptions were ugly throws for sure. That largely falls on him. But it also felt like every time we had success running the ball the play calling would shift to straight drop backs with slow developing routes which gave the pass rush too much time. The running game seemed to be reasonably functional today, and the short routes were often successful. Seemed like we could have easily won this game if we had just taken what the defense was allowing instead of trying to force deep routes that weren’t there. That was my thinking watching the game.

IdahoFred: One positive item. Sam made a few good scrambles. He may need the skill later, especially with Zabel hurt.

West Seattle Tim: Darnolds picks were less the reason we lost than the 4 trips to the red zone and only getting field goals. Turn one of those into a TD and we are celebrating.

I know the Rams D is very good, but our inability to get 7 points 4 times is a bit concerning. Did MM play it too conservatively? Should we have tried at least one of those 4 and shorts for mnore points instead of settling for 3?

Lots of coulda shoulda, but I am still hopeful. We had no business being in that game down 2, but yet somehow we were. I can sleep tonight knowing one more TD or one less INT in our own RZ and we win that game.

Yeah, even aside from picks, the Seahawks could have won the game if they had converted any of their drives that ended in a short field goal (of which there were 3) into a touchdown.

It’s funny that in the same week that Dan Campbell is finally getting roasted for going 0-of-5 on fourth down, Mike Macdonald may have benefited from being more aggressive. The only time it seemed like a great idea may have been when it was fourth-and-Goal from the 3 to end the first half.

Yes, you might end up getting 0 points from a great drive, but maybe to beat the Rams on the road you need to have guts at the goal line.

Jake: I’ll defend Sam on the 3rd pick. Broadcasters caught it as well Arroyo is young but he went to cut across into the middle of the field where Sam threw it and he then continued up field. There was no reason to throw a juke there. He simply didn’t cut across as much as he should have

He would have cut across the face of the safety and it would have been a big gain that put us in scoring range. The other 3 were just bad. Shit happens. Also the ridiculous hold on JSN was about as bad a missed call as there could be. There was another WTF call in the first as well.

This is something that Greg Olsen said on the broadcast as well, but then Top Billin’ disagrees because he said it was man coverage and not zone. I do think that there’s room for interpretation with any play, but ultimately every pick sort of does fall on Darnold…in my opinion.

Not that I’m a quarterback and this is very hindsight-y, but there was an open checkdown on every interception, it seemed. Which wouldn’t be relevant except for the fact that Darnold kept throwing into coverage/double-coverage/or off-platform. Well, if you’re forcing that many throws into EASY interceptions, take the easy way out check down or take the sack.

What are your next day thoughts on the interceptions?

You left many more great comments but I’m going to cut it off here so that we can all talk about Grey Zabel some more. I will go back to your comments for a part II of this on some other subjects like Nick Kallerup, Jason Myers, the running game, etc. Make sure to subscribe and share Seaside Joe to support!

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