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Dale Roberts's avatar

Joe is absolutely correct. I believe Seahawk leadership plans to contend for a Super Bowl in 2024 and 2025, therefore 2023 is still a critical draft for bringing that plan to fruition. Just not for 2023. I'm mostly concerned with John's ability to staff the new defensive approach with appropriate personel whether through the draft or free agency. Then there's our lack of a running game.

Poona Ford, Quintin Jefferson, Shelby Harris, Myles Adams, Brian Mone, and Al Woods are great rotational pieces but which one is the penetrating disruptor? Nwosu, Talyor, Mafe, and Irvin (with Robinson, Johnson, and Smith on IR) comprise our pass rush and run contain group. Who makes plays they aren't supposed to? Who limits the opposing OC? That's thirteen players but only two that could be starters on an elite defense. Two.

Pete Carroll said, ""They ran their game," Carroll said. "That's their running game. We were trying to knock them back, and we couldn't get it done. We tried everything that we had to get it stopped, and we were not able to stop them… Our guys are trying. They're working hard to get it done. We went through all of the process during the week to line it up so we knew what they were doing. We were not fooled by anything today. We were on it. But you have to play the line of scrimmage and get off the blocks and play together. Everybody has to fit together. It's always about those fits. It wasn't good enough. It just plain old wasn't good enough." The translation is we don't have adequate personel to withstand a pounding run game even if we know exactly what they're going to do.

What's odd about the demise of our offensive running game is the lack of information. You can find a plethora of articles on our inability to stop the run but nothing on why we can't run. The little available blames injuries to K9 but we couldn't run before that. Three things have changed in terms of the run game since Penny's dominant stretch. Obviously, there's no Penny, both offensive tackles and the center are new, and the run coordinator has changed. We were able to maintain decent running totals without Penny and with the new run game coordinator. Our 2022 run totals to date are, 76, 36, 112, 235, 151, 136, 213, 87, 158, 39, 65, 90, and 46. Denver and SF were the first two games and have excellent defenses but after that we were fairly consistent, not great, but consistent until the Tampa Bay game. The elephant in the room is that it appears that the rookie tackles, and maybe Blythe have run out of gas. I'll also note that Carolina showed us the value of wide recievers blocking and Shenault is a load. If anybody has a good analysis of what has happened I'd really appreaciate you sharing.

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D. Wade's avatar

A successful draft is a mid-league rated rookie starter. A wildly successful draft is a stand-out pick, either picked for obvious reasons (read high pick) or coaches saw something (3-5th round). Drafts that yield one of those guys dont make over teams in general but a couple years of those you do flip teams. Which to me makes the ‘23 draft super critical to get right and maybe even get a little lucky. Another solid draft of a stand out and a couple serviceable guys will fix a bunch of the woes. Because right now if the defense is not fixed doesn’t matter who the QB is. Might as well not risk your high pick on a position that has shown nearly year after year has top 10 pick busts. Getting defense right is going to be an all assault for draft, FA, and trades- and it still may take another year to do it.

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