Macdonald's run defense miracle
Seahawks go worst-to-first in run defense, fans love "The Drake", Uchenna Nwosu must be the new Walter Jones!
Pete Carroll never lost his commitment to stopping the run, but eventually a promise stops being good enough. Now two years after sending Pete off with a 31st-ranked run defense, the Seahawks are 1st. Not just 1st…Really, Really, Really 1st.
As of Week 8, the Seahawks are allowing the fewest rushing yards per game in the NFL at 75.7, they’re tied with the Rams for the fewest rushing touchdowns allowed this year at 2, and they’re tied with the Browns for the fewest yards per carry allowed at 3.3.
If you doubled the total number of rushing yards allowed by Seattle, 530 yards, you still wouldn’t reach the 1,115 rushing yards allowed by the Miami Dolphins, a defense coordinated by former Mike Macdonald mentee Anthony Weaver. And the Seahawks aren’t doing it with an otherworldly-expensive defense like the $163 million being paid out by the Steelers:
Seattle’s $97.5 million defense is 24th most expensive
Seattle’s LBs, arguably a top-5 such unit, is 27th at $9.9m
Their dominant DL is merely an average-ranked $28 million
The Seahawks and the Packers are the only two teams to have three games this season in which they’ve allowed <60 rushing yards (Seattle has done it in each of the last three weeks) and the Seahawks and Patriots are the only teams to allowed <80 rushing yards five times (no other team has done it more than 3 times).
Seattle’s run defense is so good that when the Texans were desperate to score a touchdown in the last six minutes on Monday night and had the Seahawks backed against their own end zone, Houston attempted 5 passes out of 7 plays inside of the 5-yard line.
They gave Woody Marks two rushing attempts from the 3-yard line, which resulted in a 2-yard run and a loss of 1 yard. C.J. Stroud threw four straight incomplete passes inside the 5-yard line, resulting in a loss of downs and then finally a miraculous touchdown to Marks that was too little and too late.
The Seahawks run defense only gets better as you dive deeper into the numbers, so let’s keep building a case that its the best in the NFL, including updates from Next Gen Stats:
Then I want to find out how important run defense has been for other teams in the last few years and how often it leads to a Super Bowl. I’ll also keep digging around on historic numbers for Jaxon Smith-Njigba, as I started to do on Monday night’s newsletter, plus Sam Darnold’s trajectory, Uchenna’s absurd sack streak, Seattle’s dominant linebackers, and other Seahawks statistical notes through seven weeks.
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