5 Mistakes Seahawks Can't Make in 2024: Coaching Complacency

Should Seahawks hire Arthur Smith as OC? Seaside Joe 1772

Hey Pete Carroll, some fans think you should walk away or relinquish some of your duties with the Seattle Seahawks.

Pete Carroll:

Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll has reiterated twice since Seattle’s season ended on Sunday that he wants and expects to return in 2024, once in the post-game media session and again this morning on Seattle Sports. I was wondering if Pete would even do his weekly radio show this week or if he had to talk to the Vulcans that be first, but there was literally nothing different about Pete on Monday than there has been for the last 14 years.

Unless the Seahawks have a real “gotcha!” moment in store for Pete, it would seem that Seattle is not making a change at head coach.

Anything is possible until the team makes an announcement, and while they probably won’t come out and say “Pete Carroll will stay on as the head coach”, news of the Seahawks parting ways with other coaches would be just as significant. It’s like if someone you’ve gone out with a few times all of a sudden ghosts you and stops responding to your texts, they didn’t explicitly tell you that it’s over, but…

Seattle has now had two full seasons with the quadrumvir of Pete, Geno Smith, Shane Waldron, and Clint Hurtt in arguably the four most important roles on any team outside of the front office. The combination does not work and third time is not the charm. You don’t have to necessarily point the finger in one direction because above all else what the Seahawks are lacking since the mid-2010s is not just “X” “Y” or “Z”, but balance between all the letters.

If Geno was elite, there’d be less pressure on everybody else.

If Hurtt was six steps ahead of every offensive coordinator in the NFL, then the defense could help Seattle win a lot of games with an offense that is…what’s that word you’re always using to describe the offense, Geno?

If Waldron was Sean McVay instead of Shane Waldron, the Seahawks would be in the market for a new offensive coordinator anyway because the rest of the league would be clamoring to interview a coach who hasn’t received a phone call to interview as a head coach from any team since…2018? (The Bengals interviewed both Waldron and Rams colleague Zac Taylor and opted to hire the QBs coach over the passing game coordinator for the number one offense. Is that a sign?)

And if Pete Carroll had done a better job of grocery shopping (and chopping, dicing, slicing, cooking, baking, and broiling the goods), we wouldn’t be having a discussion on January 8 about the start of Seattle’s 2024 offseason.

Maybe it’s not that the Seahawks have anybody in a key role who is “the worst”, but they certainly lack enough people in those positions who are anywhere near being the best. Therefore, if they have balance, it’s the wrong kind. They need the balance where someone is capable of doing enough heavy lifting to carry the rest of the regime and whether the personnel loss that upset the universe were Pete’s early-career coaches, or the retirements of the All-Pro defensive players that they used to have/Marshawn Lynch, the Russell Wilson trade, or a reluctance by Pete to evolve, adapt, or to hold others accountable, something is different in a bad way.

Now the Seahawks to be different in the good way.

If it’s not Pete leaving, then it need to be Pete telling other people that they’re leaving. The next group of Seahawks we need to look at under that umbrella then is the next two most-important coaches on the team, Waldron and Hurtt. I’ve never been a big fan of “changing coordinators will solve the problem” but in this case there seems to be a good argument to be made that it is time for one or both of them to be replaced.

But Pete has been fiercely loyal to under-performing coaches and players in the past—some of the players he praised on Monday for the year they just had would NOT have been my choices—and it’s a mistake that could be repeated in the coming weeks.

What should Pete Carroll and the Seahawks do?

I started “5 Mistakes to Not Repeat” last week by looking at the offensive line. Now I turn my attention to the two coordinators because it may only be hours until an announcement is made that renders my takes on the matter as moot or expired.

You and I talk about the team A LOT…probably more than you talk about the Seahawks with any other person on the planet including in your family…and I greatly appreciate that you let me do that with you so often.

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This is day one of the fifth offseason here at Seaside Joe—literally when we started this streak, Frank Clark was on the team on his original rookie contract, “Let Russ Cook” would not be born until 18 months later, and movies could still make money at the box office—and what keeps me going to make sure I sit down and write at least one article about the team every single day is the support of Seahawks fans like you reading this newsletter.

Now back to the part of the newsletter you actually want to read: The Seahawks!

BONUS READ NOW: 12 OC candidates the Seahawks could hire as the next offensive coordinator

Does changing coordinators matter?

Something I want to focus on for the first time today is the question of whether changing coordinators in the offseason has NEGATIVE consequences. Unfortunately, I’m going to probably give more anecdotal evidence that statistical proof in some fashion, and for that reason my reasoning here will be flawed. However, the “quality” of coaching in ANY situation is typically only backed with anecdotal evidence anyway.

“Well, he’s good at this” and “He’s bad at that”.

How do you place a number on the value of someone like Mike McDaniel, who was one of many offensive assistants under Kyle Shanahan with the 49ers and now he’s the hottest name in offensive innovations with the Miami Dolphins? The Dolphins are much better with McDaniel and yet the 49ers are not worse off without McDaniel, so is Shanahan just that good at finding coaches or developing coaches or was it blind luck that he’s hired guys like him and DeMeco Ryans and Robert Saleh?

The Niners have lost coaches to promotions at a high clip recently, but remain a top-3 offense and top-3 defense in 2023. It’s possible that San Francisco will lose more this season, including defensive coordinator Steve Wilks, run game coordinator Chris Foerster, passing game coordinator Klint Kubiak, and/or QB coach Brian Griese.

And what should we expect next season if they do lose or two coordinators? Probably a very similar 49ers team with the same strengths and weaknesses.

Just as with the Los Angeles Rams, the 49ers keep the same identity regardless of change because of the head coach. Since 2018, Sean McVay has lost at least eight coaches to promotions (including Matt LaFleur, Zac Taylor, Kevin O’Connell, and Brandon Staley as head coaches) but the Rams went to the Super Bowl in 2018, won it in 2021, and are back in the playoffs in 2023.

If the Rams lose defensive coordinator Raheem Morris and offensive coordinator Mike LaFleur to head coaching positions in 2024, I would expect the Rams to look mostly the same next season regardless. McVay has not shown any fear of losing assistant coaches to promotions or firing them when they aren’t sought after: McVay fired OC Liam Coen after one season, he fired the legendary Wade Phillips after three seasons, and he fired John Fassel, the most well-known special teams coordinator in the league.

If other teams don’t want you, there’s a chance that Sean McVay is going to become suspicious and wonder why he should want you.

K.J Wright did an extended 3-hour podcast after the Seahawks game on Sunday (I’ll add it to the Seaside Streams playlist here) and retirated this same point, saying that he thinks Seattle has coaches who don’t strive to become head coaches and are complacent with where they are. For too long, it seems that Pete Carroll is happier with assistants who can keep instead of assistants who the Seahawks are in danger of losing.

But you can’t be surprised when the team is horrible at tackling and lacking discipline when you strive for “the middle” of NFL coaching talent.

The BEST TEAMS IN THE NFL will come back next season with new coaches and coordinators, so why should the MIDDEST TEAMS IN THE NFL be so afraid of doing the same? In fact, the Seahawks will be SNIPED of hiring coaching upgrades by better teams because they didn’t try and that will only put them further behind the Shanahans and McVays in the NFC West, as they hire “the next Mike McDaniel” or “the next Zac Taylor” and Seattle is stuck with “the same Clint Hurtt”.

I want to emphasize just how UNINFORMED and IGNORANT Seaside Joe is of the quality of people and teachers that Waldron and Hurtt could be—and even with Seaside Streams and my daily non-negotiable habit of watching Xs and Os everyday, I still have a long ways to go before I touch on the schematic elements at play with these coaches—so I hope that readers can forgive me for throwing them under the bus today.

Maybe if I had an hour to talk to Pete Carroll, he could sit me down and explain to me why I’m so off-base with my take that the Seahawks need to make significant coaching changes this year in an effort to improve from the lower-middle class to the highrises and mansions…an hour in a public place, at my restaurant of choice, so people see us together and there will be witnesses in case either of us going missing.

Is he kidnapping me or am I kidnapping him? I don’t know but SOMEONE HAS TO GO!

The Seahawks had Darrell Bevell for seven years and I think what he accomplished is massively underrated, yet no teams ever expressed interest in hiring him as a head coach. That’s a red flag to me because at a certain point your enemies-the teams who are most closely watching your film-are going to want to poach the coordinators who impress them the most during those study sessions.

Why else would the Dolphins and Jets have poached coaches from Bill Belichick’s staff in the past? Even Carroll did the same thing by “stealing” Waldron from McVay.

Except that the Seahawks were kind of bidding against themselves in that race.

After Dan Quinn took the Falcons job in 2015, Carroll promoted Kris Richard and he spent three years on the job with little outside interest. He hired Brian Schottenheimer to replace Bevell in 2018, an underrated playcaller but another one who almost never gets head coach interviews. (Players recently voted Schottenheimer as the third-best OC in the NFL…) He hired Ken Norton to replace Richard and nobody else was calling for his services.

And now the Seahawks have completed three seasons with Waldron as OC and two with Hurtt as DC. There has not been rumored interest by other teams to have interviews with them or any of Seattle’s other assistants.

Pete Carroll has been fiercely loyal to the coaches he mentors, whether that’s all the years he spent with Richard, Norton, Hurtt, or Dave Canales (the one assistant who has actually been promoted to a coordinator role by a different team in the NFL) as he watched them rise in the ranks (I want to use the word “development” here but I’m not so sure if that’s true because of where Seattle ranks as a defense in the last eight years) or hanging onto people long after he should have moved on.

On one hand, firing coordinators feels like a cop out. A scapegoat answer to hand over to angry fans who want something to change and maybe they’ll ask fewer questions about why you should have a job if the team isn’t winning playoff games. Do I think that changing coordinators on either or both of the sides of the ball is as likely to get the Seahawks to the Super Bowl than if they landed the next Patrick Mahomes or head coaching superstar…maybe the “next Pete Carroll”?

Because obviously Pete’s odds of being the best coach in the NFL in 2026 or 2027, are not as high as the odds of some assistant coaches in the league holding that title who have never been head coaches before as of this moment. And so maybe Pete’s best odds to win another Super Bowl before that happens is to BE THE GUY WHO HIRES THE NEXT GREAT HEAD COACH.

Remember, TEAMS OF ALL KINDS—GREAT, TERRIBLE, GOOD, BAD, AVERAGE—change out their coordinators all the time. It’s a regular occurance of all kinds of football teams and there is no reason to hesitate on making a change, especially when you’ve had problems as massive as Seattle’s (stop the run, run the ball, etc.) and for as many years as the Seahawks have been out of Super Bowl contention.

BONUS READ NOW: 12 OC candidates the Seahawks could hire as the next offensive coordinator

Who are the best teams in the NFL today?

Lions - OC Ben Johnson, the hottest name in the league at coordinator, wasn’t put in that role until he was promoted to replace Anthony Lynn in 2021-2022. It is one of Dan Campbell’s best moves as head coach in the last 3 years. 3 of the 5 teams with openings have requested to talk to Johnson and it's only been one day.

Cowboys - OC Brian Schottenheimer, was hired in 2023 after Mike McCarthy parted ways with Kellen Moore, a move that was criticized at the time but looks wise now. McCarthy also swooped up Dan Quinn in 2021 after he was fired by the Falcons

Texans - OC Bobby Slowik, of course when a team hires a new HC, that usually comes with new coordinators; in either case, DeMeco Ryans’ decision to steal Slowik from the Niners and DC Matt Burke from the Cardinals is paying off immediately for Houston

Ravens - DC Mike Macdonald, OC Todd Monken, another highly publicized coordinator move last year was Baltimore’s decision to fire Greg Roman and hire Monken, but now it is looked at as one of the best moves of 2023; Macdonald replaced Wink Martindale in 2021 and he’s probably going to get a head coaching job now

Bills - OC Joe Brady, Buffalo fired Ken Dorsey in the middle of the season and while I don’t want to say I fully understand the impact of that decision, it didn’t hurt the Bills and they just came from behind to win the division

I could go on but the point is clear: Teams can take rosters with the same players and experience significantly more success with different coordinators. The Dolphins had Tua Tagovaila and Jaylen Waddle and many good players prior to McDaniel’s hire in 2022, but it wasn’t until the schematic changes that Miami went from bottom-10 to top-2 in scoring. (Of course, the Dolphins passing game coordinator is Bevell.)

The Seahawks can’t be complacent with their coordinators and convince themselves that “all Waldron and Hurtt needs is more time”.

No, the time for “more time” has to be earned and in both cases you could argue that time has run out. I don’t want to throw a coach under the bus who doesn’t deserve it and I have to admit that my information and intel is lacking; but the anecdotal evidence and the statistical evidence support the premise that the Seahawks do not have the special types of coordinators who elevate talent to a championship level and out-coach, out-smart, out-wit the coaches who they are facing six times in the NFC West and 11 other times throughout the course of the season.

And maybe that’s the most important note of all: The Seahawks don’t just need good play callers…they need play callers who can stop Shanahan and McVay, coaches who can draw up touchdown-scoring drives against Jonathan Gannon, and people who can go toe-to-toe with playoff caliber teams, elite quarterbacks, efficient offensive lines, and physical+elusive weapons in the NFC.

Anecdotally, it’s just all too easy for me to say that Pete’s coaches do not get requested for interviews by other teams and that tells me what other teams really think of Pete’s coaches.

They don’t find them to be innovative or effective, even though I think you could make a very good case that they had a higher degree of difficulty than many of their counterparts. (Has Waldron has gotten the most possible out of Geno Smith? Does Clint Hurtt struggle because the defensive personnel changes so often?) If this had only been one season in the books, I wouldn’t think as much of making a change…Kyle Shanahan was not that effective as OC in Atlanta in 2015, and then the Falcons led the NFL in scoring and Matt Ryan won MVP in 2016…

But we’re not one year into Waldron’s career. It’s been three years.

The Seahawks were not 14th or 19th or 22nd on defense. At times, the defense was as bad as any in football.

If the first step of the offseason is that we find out that Pete Carroll isn’t being fired, then the second step has to be Carroll’s decisions of which coaches are. And if he’s blindly loyal to his assistants because he doesn’t want to blame them for Seattle’s shortcomings, he needs to acknowledge that his competition is going to be making changes in the same roles and some of those teams will end up getting upgrades that he could have had and that he might not be ready for as opponents.

There’s no way that it is acceptable for the Seahawks to get to next week without anybody falling on the sword.

In a bonus article, I listed 12 offensive coordinator candidates who I would consider no less than “interesting” as Pete Carroll embarks on (if he embarks at all, that hasn’t been totally confirmed yet) his 15th offseason with the team and hopefully his eighth and/or ninth change at coordinator. I will do defensive coordinator candidates next, so subscribe to Seaside Joe and Regular Joes to read that one when it’s finished.

The Seahawks have made hiring mistakes, but just as significantly they’ve made not-firing mistakes. The Seahawks can’t make either of those mistakes again in 2024.