Should Seahawks be worried about their Week 1 offensive line?

"Released by the Jets", "No interest in free agency", and "Torn ACL", the Seahawks first offensive line of the year is not what we expected: Seaside Joe 2012

As I was working on some bonus material for Seaside Joe’s Regular Joes subscribers this week, the Seahawks made it official with an unofficial depth chart. Here’s a graphic of the depth chart shared by Field Gulls:

The timing was great for me because it turned out that I might only be halfway done with a deep dive into what to expect from Geno Smith this season, which you’ll be able to read if you join the Regular Joes club at $5 per month or Super Joes for $10 per month. $55 for an entire year:

Well, no matter what I say about Geno or Ryan Grubb*, it’s a moot point if Seattle’s “new” offensive line just turns into an impression of the Seahawks typical offensive line. And what really stands out to me from Seattle’s depth chart, which doesn’t actually contain any surprises or revelations but is nonetheless of a reminder of some important offseason happenings, is how off this offensive line is from our April expectations of it.

Don’t worry, I’ll let the 2024 Seahawks offensive line speak for itself. I won’t try to forecast that Seattle’s offensive line will be traumatizing once again, as I do believe that coaching changes and giving players time to get better is a potential path to playing above expectations. But I will outline those expectations again because it’s plenty fair for me to write that this is a patchwork group that not many outsiders are going to believe in.

What we thought would happen that happened

Charles Cross and Laken Tomlinson are the only two starters who most expected to start by the time the Seahawks drafted Christian Haynes in the third round. I’ll get back to him, but I did write at the time that he was drafted that Haynes would compete to start and that neither Tomlinson nor Anthony Bradford represented daunting competition. The coaches are different, but the Seahawks have almost always started rookie offensive linemen who were drafted in the first three rounds.

Of Seattle’s five projected starters, Trench Warfare’s Brandon Thorn only ranked Abe Lucas in the top-15 at his position, as he was ranked 15th at right tackle. Charles Cross was an honorable mention at left tackle, which isn’t that bad considering that there’s more raw talent there than at any other offensive line position.

If I give Cross a “this is totally acceptable” grade as far as expectations go, he’d be the only one of the five projected Week 1 (to Week 4, at least, given Lucas’s place on PUP) Seahawks starters to be above that mark and not have any asterisks.

When Tomlinson was released by the Jets to save the team $8 million, a Jets substack called him “statistically one of the worst performers at his position” and noted that he was bad both years there, even in 2022 when New York tried to emulate the system that worked for Tomlinson with the 49ers. I can’t tell you whether the Seahawks are starting Tomlinson out of necessity or because he’s been super reliable, but I can tell you that if Seattle had fallen in love with ANY two other guards in the offseason (and John Schneider added A LOT of them), there’s a good chance one of them would be starting over Tomlinson.

For the Seahawks right guard competition to come down to the wire—without an official-official starter against the Broncos quite known to the public yet—it’s more most likely an indication that neither Bradford nor Haynes blew away Scott Huff, Grubb, and Mike Macdonald in August.

Which honestly isn’t very surprising, but nonetheless leaves Seattle hoping that Tomlinson won’t be the same weak link to the Seahawks that he apparently was to THE JETS.

And yet, out of the five or six entrenched or expected starters when training camp opened in July, Tomlinson is still one of only two remaining.

The Other 3….4…or 5 Starters

You can say a lot of things about the Seahawks offensive line, most of which would be fined as conduct detrimental to the team, but you can’t say that their positional competition fluidity didn’t make this outcome super predictable. In other words, the Seahawks only had two definitive starting offensive linemen going into the post-draft offseason and one of those players is on PUP.

Left guard, center, and right guard were all competitions, while right tackle was a pseudo fourth competition because Seattle’s known for a long time that Lucas was in danger of missing at least the first part of the season.

We got what we expected, which was…this:

Connor Williams is going through the second ACL recovery of his career and at this point is only reliable if he’s able to recapture the dependable streak he had while not missing any games from 2020-2022. Otherwise, there’s still a very good chance that the Seahawks will have to rely on Olu Oluwatimi, a player who by one definition lost a training camp competition (for the second year in a row), at certain times of the season.

George Fant is basically the right tackle equivalent of 2022 Geno Smith: He was one of the most readily available “starters” in free agency but not a single team, not even the Seahawks, were willing to pay him like a starter. He returned to Seattle because the Seahawks wanted to avoid another signing-Jason Peters-level catastrophe in case Lucas misses a considerable amount of time again. The fact that Fant is a WEEK 1 STARTER was the contingency plan, but not the plan.

And right now, the right guard position could only have been described as “We’ll see” because nobody competing to start there has done anything at the NFL level that would inspire fans (or outsiders) to be excited from the jump.

In other words, just going back to this term “EXPECTATIONS” and not predictions (this is not, not, NOT a prediction), I’d have to say that most people who cover or follow offensive linemen could potentially rank three of these players in the bottom-5 of their position’s starters to open the season: Tomlinson, Fant, and Bradford were all ranked about that low in 2023 and the free agent market clearly indicated that with Tomlinson and Fant.

Connor Williams had great reports on his 2023 season with the Dolphins, and yet he also missed a month with a groin injury prior to tearing his ACL in December.

Seven of the 11 offensive linemen on Seattle’s active roster were not even on the Seahawks in 2023, but that change hasn’t yet manifested itself into a starting five that anyone expects to be good. Which may not even matter—these are only expectations, which are often beliefs that simply haven’t been shattered yet—but it is where the Seattle Seahawks stand heading into the first week of the season.

Depth charts change. Coaches change. How we feel about this unit by the end of the season is what could use the biggest adjustment.

More Ryan Grubb content from TCP Patreon

*A few weeks ago, I posted The Coordinator Project’s detailed responses to some questions I had about Ryan Grubb’s offense. It was for sure one of the most popular Seaside Joes of the summer and I feel it is also worth highlighting that TCP has since posted a new one hour breakdown of Grubb’s UW offense based mostly on Washington’s loss to Michigan in the national championship. The link for the video can be found at TCP’s Patreon and the reason I’m promoting it is simple: If I can help get TCP a little more support at his Patreon, then TCP is going to create more content specific to Seahawks fans.

(He didn’t tell me he was going to post more content about the Seahawks, but it likely works the same way that it has worked with All-22 Films, another non-Seattle channel that has since made a lot of Seahawks content since we’ve been supporting him.)