Why it's not surprising that the Seahawks have a guard problem

Who is the most surprising Seahawks player so far? Question Everything, Week 4: Seaside Joe 2034

The Seattle Seahawks go into their first primetime game of the season with a perfect 3-0 record, but also some bad news that rookie first round pick Byron Murphy II is expected to be out for a little while with a hamstring injury suffered against the Dolphins. Luckily, Seattle’s depth at defensive line is one of the team’s strengths, as long as Leonard Williams doesn’t need an absence due to his own injury, and this is the perfect time for a player like Myles Adams or Mike Morris to show the Seahawks what he’s capable of doing.

Unfrotunately, Seattle’s practice counter-part to the defensive line is not so lucky: Whereas the Seahawks are forced to reach into their depth chart for help at defensive tackle, Mike Macdonald wishes he could make a change at guard if only he had players he thought were better than the current starters.

I’ve been writing extensively about the Seahawks guard position—the history, the philosophy, the consistent lack of a presence there—not just for the last 15 years, but also heavily concentrated in that area for the last six months. NOTHING about Seattle’s struggles with Laken Tomlinson and Anthony Bradford are actually surprising in the slightest. We’ve known that these problems would happen really for the entire offseason, and it’s been a monthly topic addressed at Seaside Joe to not get hopes up for these guards.

Yet that is the area that gets the most attention, even at 3-0, and guard is going to be a topic this week at Question Everything. Every week, I send a newsletter to Super Joes to compile questions for a mailbag, and that continues with Seaside Joe 2034…the 2,034th straight day of a Seahawks newsletter.

Join the Super Joes or upgrade from Regular Joes at a prorated annual rate to join the next Q and A mailbag thread:

Joshular: Who’s the most surprising Seahawks player for you over the first three games?

I’ll split it up into surprisingly good and surprisingly bad. I think it’s important to say that citing a breakout player like Charles Cross or Derick Hall, it’s not surprising. They were drafted high enough for these outcomes to be reasonably expected. Conversely, we might have expected Jake Bobo to have been targeted more than twice so far (2 catches, 15 yards) but as an undrafted free agent receiver fourth on the depth chart? It’s not surprising.

Surprisingly good: Tyler Lockett continues to trend in the direction you’d expect of a formerly speedy receiver—he hasn’t been targeted deep once all year and his depth of target is a career-low 8.6 yards—and I don’t think he’ll cross over 800 yards. But he’s showing with each opportunity he gets that he can be a dominant “closer” for the Seahawks offense.

Defensively, Johnathan Hankins is proving that he actually is “born-to-hustle”. He was one of the defense’s top players on Sunday and Seattle will need him moving forward with Byron Murphy expected to miss time due to an injury.

Surprisingly underwhelming: Michael Dickson. There are good punters and there are great punters. Seattle once had a great punter. For too long, he’s been a good punter. Through three games, he’s arguably been kind of a bad punter actually.

Q for You: Who are your surprises so far?

Defjames: 4 of the next 5 games are against what I’d consider playoff teams. What can the Seahawks learn from the first 3 games that they need to do better or keep doing to go 3-2?

For what it’s worth, I think the Giants (presumably your non-playoff team) might have the best defense of any team Seattle faces in that stretch. They’re playing better than the Falcons, in my opinion. And the Niners, are they maybe getting a lot of credit for the past? They’re not playing that well either, I’d actually have higher expectations for the Seahawks to score against the 49ers defense (30th in Y/A allowed) than the Giants.

The Seahawks are 23rd in rushing yards and 26th in yards per carry. They need to run the ball more effectively and whether Walker’s return would help a lot in that area, I think remains to be seen. But the Seahawks need to be much better on the ground and the Lions have a top-5 run defense thus far.

Defensively, the Seahawks are a mystery. They haven’t allowed many explosives or bad plays, but we all know the story about their schedule. There have been holes and blown coverages in Seattle’s secondary that better quarterbacks and receivers would exploit. Mike Macdonald’s going to need to find out how to tighten those gaps against Amon-Ra St. Brown and Jameson Williams this week because those two will make you pay for it, especially St. Brown. And of course, lots of rooms to improve on special teams.

I won’t predict anything, but if the Seahawks win their home games and lose their road games, they’ll be 6-2 going into three straight NFC West matchups: vs. Rams, bye week, at 49ers, vs. Cardinals.

Maxx: Can/Will the offensive line hold up just enough until the bye week?

I predict that the offensive line will improve, yes. More on this in the next question…

Rusty: Is there anyone we can trust when it comes to evaluations of draftable interior offensive linemen? Before and even after the draft, we heard that Christian Haynes was the most complete guard prospect in the draft and that he was a plug and play option. Yet he can’t get on the field even with someone not playing well in front of him. The prior year, Olu was the best center in college. Yet in year two, he’s been a healthy scratch for 2 of the 3 games played.

Are our expectations too high? Does it take 4 years to learn those positions? I get having a rough rookie season. But I kind of expect improvement in year 2.

As to whether or not expectations are too high, the default answer is “Yes”. For all draft picks, for all fans of all teams, expectations are unreasonably high. Players picked first overall usually have expectations that are too high; undrafted players who don’t sign with a team until camp, like Jamie Sheriff for example, also usually get overrated and overhyped. Part of it is the media’s fault.

Imagine if we lived in a world where the Seahawks draft Olu Oluwatimi—after 153 other players have been drafted—and the headlines were “Seahawks draft center who is most likely going to have a Joey Hunt-like career and only starts in a pinch” instead of what you get from most other sources. When I wrote about Seattle’s day three picks last year, I said that Evan Brown would almost certainly start over Oluwatimi and added that Dane Brugler’s report for The Athletic called him a “rotational center” which is exactly what he appears to be.

When I wrote about potential training camp surprises, I wrote that Oluwatimi could beat Brown but also shared all the data showing how rare it is to find day three steals at center like Jason Kelce. Our default response to 5th round picks should be to shut off our brains and shuck expectations—if a player is a steal, awesome let’s celebrate after it happens—but Oluwatimi isn’t doing anything that he isn’t supposed to be doing as a second-year fifth round pick. If everybody who wrote or talked about Oluwatimi and Anthony Bradford did so in the vein that they deserve, I don’t think anybody would be surprised or worried that Seattle had to sign Connor Williams. In my opinion, the reaction to Olu and Bradford struggling shouldn’t necessarily be, “Why are the Seahawks so bad at drafting guards and centers?”.

It should just be, “Yeah, teams have to pick players on day three and most of them don’t become good starters.”

Only after we get into their actual NFL careers and see real world success, like a Riq Woolen or a Richard Sherman or a Russell Wilson, do I think we can start to re-evaluate their value to the Seahawks as starters.

If you buy 10 scratch tickets and have 2 winners, you don’t take the other 8 tickets back to 7-11 and ask for a refund because those tickets were “defective”. You played the lottery, that’s how the lottery works. If the Seahawks make six day three picks and end up with Abe Lucas and Riq Woolen out of the six, is it fair to go back and criticize John Schneider for “missing” on Tyreke Smith?

No, Tyreke Smith did what he was supposed to do as a fifth round pick. Woolen didn’t do what he was supposed to do. He did better.

If Charles Cross was a liability at left tackle, I’d be worried about Seattle’s ability to draft in the top-10. Instead, the Seahawks seem to be doing a really good job with their recent early first round picks and they’ve also been getting good-to-great contributions from their day two picks with the exception of Haynes, who has only been given a matter of months to develop into a quality starting guard and failing to do so has already placed him in the crosshairs for a lot of fans wanting to take out their frustrations with the offensive line on somebody.

In this case, that somebody is probably John Schneider since he is the main drafter.

When Haynes was drafted I did write that I expected him to start because since 2005 the only other day one or day two Seahawks draft pick at guard/center to not start as a rookie was Rees Odhiambo. Should fans be worried that Haynes will turn out to be another Odhiambo? I think the best possible answer is…Why weren’t you already worried about that?

Why is it that we kind of do the same thing every year—cursing the Seahawks for all of their past iOL draft picks while simultaneously praising the latest one as “the savior to erase all the past mistakes”—without updating our expectations of these picks?

It’s not that the Seahawks are incapable of drafting good offensive linemen, as two years ago the story of the season was two rookie offensive tackles. It’s more like, and I write this so often that at a certain point I’ll either have to stop or learn how to put it in another language, the Seahawks don’t want to prioritize guards and centers anywhere near to the degree that fans want to happen. The Seahawks could have kept their second round pick, not traded for Leonard Williams, and potentially drafted a guard 30-some picks earlier. They didn’t want to draft a guard in the first round, they wanted Byron Murphy II. I don’t think any fans are complaining today about Murphy and Williams.

To take Christian Haynes 81st overall, okay, that’s right around the cusp of the expectations to have a starting guard. But it’s far from the guaranteed point. Haynes was the eighth offensive lineman drafted in the third round, these are the ones who went before him:

3.67 - Brandon Coleman, WAS (doesn’t start)

3.68 - Caedan Wallace, NE (doesn’t start)

3.71 - Isaiah Adams, AZ (doesn’t start)

3.73 - Cooper Beebe, DAL (starts)

3.75 - Kiran Amegadjie, CHI (doesn’t start)

3.77 - Delmar Glaze, LV (doesn’t start)

3.79 - Matt Goncalves, IND (doesn’t start)

Why do the Seahawks get to be special in that their third round guard is a bust if he isn’t starting in Week 4, whereas none of the teams that picked an OL in the third round ahead of him are starting those players except for Beebe, a player sort of forced in at center without much competition?

Haynes not starting shouldn’t be classified as “Clearly the Seahawks are doing a worse job of drafting than other teams” when the evidence couldn’t possibly point to anything other than, “Teams rarely draft players in the third round who can immediately plug the holes on their starting lineups.”

Why isn’t THAT the popular narrative with rookies who sit on the bench? Because 99% of the stories after the draft coming from content creators who are also fans of the team will sound like, “Wow, (TEAM) just drafted (PLAYER) who is going to (DO A GREAT THING) because I’ve noticed his (STRENGTHS) and decided that his (WEAKNESSES) are actually all fixable with (NFL COACHING)!”

I don’t think it does Seahawks fans any favors to set unrealistic expectations of all players who end up joining the Seahawks, which is why I write so many newsletters that might feel like reading a break-up text. But I’d rather you be UNCOMFORTABLE with the roster than fooled into a false sense of security and believing something like, “You know all the Seahawks draft picks of the past that disappointed us? Well, good news, that’s not going to happen this time. This time all the picks actually will develop into starters.”

It’s the same as when the Seahawks drafted D.J. James 192 overall and the narrative was, “Geez, I had James going in the third or fourth round!”. But instead of that, the real story should have been: “Seahawks draft cornerback unlikely to ever have an impact based on all the historical evidence.”

Not a good headline, not attractive enough to make fans click, but far more true than some of the inverse stories I’m sure you read at the time. And the stories I’m sure you will read following the 2025 draft and the 2026 draft and the 2027 draft.

In 2027, will I still be writing about why Seattle’s 4th round guard selection from 2026 isn’t starting over some veteran free agent addition like Graham Glasgow or someone? I don’t know if I will still be writing it, but I know that it will still be a topic of conversation.

One other thing I’ll add is that even if Haynes was called by some “the best pure right guard in the draft,” he wasn’t even close to being the first guard drafted. There’s a reason for that. Teams do still draft guards in the first round, they sometimes draft centers, and the best guard/center prospects often go in the second round. It’s not the same as a running back going in the third round, guards still have way more draft cache than running backs, and if Seattle wanted a home run pick in that area then they could have selected Graham Barton instead of Byron Murphy. Would fans have preferred that?

I don’t want to say that Haynes wasn’t a bad pick or that Schneider’s draft team is infallible because they aren’t, my only thing is that it’s too early to say one way or the other and it’s probably not a very pleasing topic to be addressed after every single game. This is how it is for the 2024 season, we may as well just settle into it and find out if players will get better with more experience and not re-living the question after every game.

Now here’s my far less annoying answer (sorry for the diatribe) to what I think is the heart of your question, which is what should we expect from the Seahawks interior offensive linemen moving forward:

• G Laken Tomlinson: Potentially replaced midseason, likely not back in 2025

• C Connor Williams: Not replaceable during the season if he’s healthy, has the potential to re-sign now that he’s in the fold

• G Anthony Bradford: Too early to write him off, potentially getting better as we watch the season progress

• C Olu Oluwatimi: Being a career backup center was and continues to be the most fair expectation; if teams viewed Olu as a starting center in the NFL, he would have been a day two pick

• Jalen Sundell, Sataoa Laumea, Michael Jerrell, McClendon Curtis: If it happens, it happens. None of these players necessitated an investment that would imply a future as a starter.

Now you probably want to hear some good news…

I could see four of Seattle’s five offensive line starters for 2025 already being on the team: Cross, Lucas, Williams, and one of the five or six developmental options at guard, maybe Haynes or Bradford. And if Cross and Williams play at a high level, it takes pressure off of whoever is at left guard, which seems to be the most pressing need. Will the Seahawks use their first round pick to address that? Probably not. So I wouldn’t really expect guard to stop being cited as Seattle’s “great offensive weakness” 12 months from now.

Will I remember to cite this diatribe again when that happens?

Chuck Turtleman: Are our special teams as bad as they're ranked, or is it largely sample size and giving up a few big returns/Dickson not nailing a couple of coffin corners he would usually make? And while I didn't hate the Harbaugh Jr hire, could/should we have kept Izzo and not entirely cleaned house? Seems we kept only the S&C staff, for some reason.

Without having a personal or working relationship to the 2023 Seahawks coaching staff and front office, I can’t speak as to what Schneider’s reason was for replacing every single coach except Karl Scott. Maybe people didn’t like Larry Izzo, I’m not sure. I think personal relationships are really important and yet it’s not something that usually gets reported. I personally don’t think about the special teams coordinator very often, but I don’t think that the best time to judge any of these coaches is after their first three career games in Seattle.

I’m not sure where the special teams is ranked, so I couldn’t say if the Seahawks are as bad as whatever that number is. Special teams isn’t really a cohesive unit though, right? Individually, I don’t have a problem with the job that anyone is doing, including Dickson, I just don’t think he’s worth being paid as the number one punter in the NFL. Dee Williams and Laviska Shenault are satisfactory returners, Jason Myers is a good kicker, and everyone’s trying to learn how to handle the new kickoffs. A lapse in a punt coverage or whatever, that’s going to happen to every team and with only eight returned punts so far, it’s not much of a sample size.

Something to re-visit after at least a couple more months have passed.

Eduardo: It was nice to see Charbonnet finally gaining traction on the ground. I'm curious with the use of "change of pace" back tandems, does an offensive line have to block differently for a power back (Charbonnet) versus a shifty/quick (Walker III) back? More specifically, would Scott Huff instruct the offensive line to block/angle/push/line-up a certain way or is it more of the back just follows any daylight that can be created by the O-line?

A running back like Walker might do better in a zone blocking scheme, whereas Charbonnet might do better in a power/man blocking scheme, just due to Walker’s ability to read and quickly react. Charbonnet might be better suited for a very specific run “Hey you go run through the backside A-gap as hard as you can”, but then again he seemed to read and react perfectly during his Week 3 touchdown run.

What do the Seasiders think? I could be wrong:

zezinhom400: Do you have any info suggesting Walker III and Nwosu could actually have gone this week, but the decision was to give them another 8-day week so they're really recovered? Or are they still legitimately unable to play and may not be able to play at Detroit either?

The Seahawks have to release an injury report on Thursday, but as I write this they haven’t done so yet. Macdonald refused to address any injuries in his press conference on Wednesday. Walker and Nwosu both returned to practice on Wednesday, probably on a limited basis. I won’t speculate as to their availability for Week 4, but it’s nice to know it is on a Monday.

The Seahawks obviously didn’t think that Nwosu would miss four games when they decided not to put him on IR, so at least the timeline would suggest a possible return. Walker missed two games last season with the same injury he has missed two games with this season.