Will the Seahawks have a better record if they have a better defense?

How you rank is not always the same as how you do, plus 3 other Seahawks-related questions: Seaside Joe 1932

How can the Seattle Seahawks win more than nine games in 2024? If there was a guaranteed way to improve, then everyone would do that thing that works. And if everyone did that thing, then it wouldn’t be guaranteed to help you improve.

I love how the Seahawks have addressed their problems by hiring Mike Macdonald and Ryan Grubb to re-imagine the defense and offense. However, “what I love” and “what is right” aren’t always in the same league.

In searching for answers in “How teams win football games”, I came across this post from 10 years ago on the “Joe Daniel Football” website in which the author (yep, it’s Joe Daniel) asks high school coaches on Twitter “What won more football games for your team than anything else this season?”

Answers included:

“Players buying into schemes and believing that the coaches know what’s right”

“Preparation through repetition and simplicity in order to build confidence”

“Structured offseason”

“Being physical; in each of our wins, we were the hammer and not the nail”

“Not going into panic mode”

“Field position” and “talent”

The answers to turning around an NFL team that hasn’t won a second round playoff game in the last decade might be more complex…or it could still just come down to talent. I like what Macdonald and Grubb bring to Seattle, but as we’ve seen with picks like Aaron Donald and Patrick Mahomes, sometimes all you need is a few elite players and the coaches will fall into place.

The concept of improving and what it means for the Seahawks’ chances of making the playoffs is the first question to kick off this week’s Super Joes mailbag. Every other week, I send out a Super Joes-exclusive email to ask for questions, topics, or even just rants that I will use for future editions of the daily newsletter. If you’d like to join the next one, you can do that by clicking here.

zezinhom400: Using last year’s record as a baseline, and considering this year’s schedule: If Seattle has the 10th ranked offense and the 20th ranked defense (your choice on how to rank), what record would that imply?

Really the first part of the question to analyze is “What is a 10th-ranked (anything)?” Thirty years ago, it would have been much easier to say that a “10th-ranked passing offense” was the team that had the 10th-most passing yards. But passing yards won’t fly anymore. I also can’t say that a 10th-ranked offense is the team that scores the 10th-most points, because we know that points scored can be heavily predicated on how good your team’s defense plays, the quality of your opponents, and injury luck.

Last season, the Seahawks scored the 12th-most points per offensive drive in the NFL and as we saw in Friday’s post about win probability, Seattle’s offense ranked 10th in EPA. So by most measures, a “10th-ranked offense” might not be noticeably different from the Seahawks we saw in 2023 because “full-season numbers” don’t always give us the actual full picture, do they?

For example, who had a better offense last season: The Dolphins or the Seahawks?

Right.

Except that the Dolphins ranked 8th in offensive EPA, only three spots ahead of the Seahawks. They had twice the EPA of Seattle, but less than half the EPA of the NFL-leading 49ers. The Niners didn’t have a game where they scored 70 points, they didn’t have a receiver vying for MVP like Tyreek Hill, they probably aren’t even one of the first five teams I’d have called “exciting to watch” last season. But San Francisco ranked first in points per drive, first in yards per drive, first in yards per pass attempt, first in passing EPA, and third in rushing EPA. The 49ers’ Offensive Player of the Year was not a quarterback, receiver, or their All-Pro left tackle…it was running back (albeit versatile) Christian McCaffrey.

So with complete respect to your question, Zezzy, I think it is almost impossible to answer it directly without being disenguous: Would you rather have the 10th-ranked offense of the Kansas City Chiefs or the top-ranked offense of the 49ers in the Super Bowl? The Niners had 268.60 EPA in 2023, the Chiefs only had 87.96. How could it be then that the Chiefs won 25-22 with a 455-to-382 yards advantage, out-gaining San Francisco both in the air and on the ground?

Yes, Kansas City had their best defense of the Andy Reid/Patrick Mahomes era, but we also saw in the overtime how the difference in quarterback and offensive line talent gave the Chiefs a championship advantage over the Niners.

The lower-ranked offense was the offense I’d have bet on every single time, so maybe it’s because of my past NFL traumas with numbers but I am very suspicious of putting stock in these stats and rankings, especially for a full season. I’d rather have the playoff team that was cold in September and hot in December than the playoff team that’s got their versa in a vice:

The other side of it is a weak correlation between these numbers and a win-loss record, so it is tough for me to use 2023’s 9-8 as a baseline and assume that if the Seahawks improve their defense 25% that it will net an 11-5 record. The Seahawks could improve their offense and defense by 25% each and still go 7-10.

Also, the Seahawks could be ranked 5th on offense and 5th on defense and still miss the playoffs if they go 0-4 against the 49ers and Rams. Should Seattle lose those four games, then the Seahawks need to 10-3 the rest of the way to improve their record from the past two years when they had about an average offense and a bad defense…yet they went 7-10 in 2021 when their defense was actually better than it has been the past two years.

Pardon the bar graph (higher the bar, the WORSE they did, not the better) but we can see how Seattle’s defense has gotten consistently worse for the past six years, while the offense has been relatively stable:

We’ve seen this pattern for most of Pete Carroll’s tenure post-2014: Seattle wastes bad teams, hangs with teams that are as good as they are, and often loses to good/great teams. Even when the Seahawks had that awesome win over the Eagles in Week 15, their most notable post-September win IN YEARS, we come find out that Philadelphia actually stopped playing football in Week 13. Despite how much better the Eagles were than the Seahawks from the start of 2022 to the middle of 2023, the Eagles were basically a bottom-5 team in the entire NFL after November of last season.

You would look at 2020, when the Seahawks went 12-4, and incorrectly assume that they must have been an explosive offense when they let Russ…when they opened up the passing offense…The Seahawks ranked 15th in offensive EPA that year, worse than two of their last three seasons. Seattle ranked 13th in defense, but that proved to be a total mirage: Getting to the playoffs meant running into Sean McVay and being down 30-13 following a late-game touchdown from Jared Goff to Robert Woods.

If that was a 13th-ranked defense, then there’s no point in having a 13th-ranked defense unless you have a top-two offense.

So first, I apologize for going this deep to answer a simple question, which is that you simply wanted to know: “If the Seahawks improve slightly but noticeably on both sides of the ball, how much better will their record be?”

My answer, which likely isn’t satisfying, is that the Seahawks probably will be noticeably better on defense, if for no other reason than it would be hard to do worse, and that fact alone doesn’t necessarily mean that Seattle will have a better record. The Seahawks could go from 21.4 points per game to 23.0 points per game and from 23.6 points allowed per game to 22.0 points allowed per game, and still go 7-10.

In fact, in 2021 that’s basically what happened: Seattle’s average score was 23-21 and yet they were 7-10. Russell Wilson’s injury played a part in that, but the Seahawks still ranked 10th in points allowed per game and lost more than they won. And by the way, I’d be fine with it if the Seahawks showed improvement on both sides of the ball and missed the playoffs.

This season, I think seeing improvement and development of young players is a higher priority than winning 10 games or finishing higher in the rankings than they did last season. If the improvement happens, the rest will follow and I’m fine with it if the results don’t come until 2025. Based on the way you phrased your question, I think you probably feel the same and I already knew this.

MTSeahawkFan: I'd like to know more about what Pete Carroll is doing and has been doing. Other than a cameo at the Huskies practice, things have been quiet in the media.

I can only assume that this is because that’s the way Pete wants it. If he wanted it any other way, there’s more than enough opportunities to be “out there” in the public eye or working with the team in a more public way than what’s currently happening. Bill Belichick is doing roasts and TV analyst appearances, Mike Vrabel is working with the Browns, Nick Saban is campaigning to improve college football, and a lot of former coaches/GMs go the podcast route. Seems like Pete’s enjoying time out of the spotlight but I can only imagine that behind the scenes he’s still doing football-related work everyday because that’s still the only life he’s known.

Grant: My follow up question for Kenneth is, what will Pete Carroll's new book be titled, if you had to guess (in my imagination he's working on a new book right now)? "Winning Forever Ain't Everything" or "We Shoulda Run the Damn Ball" or "Compete With Pete" (that last one might be a reality show of some kind).

I’d watch Compete with Pete, or Pete vs. Pete, or some sort of reality-based competition show you’re suggesting, Grant. I feel like at this stage, if Pete writes a book it has to be detailing his experiences between the end of his USC tenure and the end of the Legion of Boom era, but like an actual tell-all. We want dirt, but it doesn’t have to be mudslinging. His life story is as Hollywood-worthy as any coach I can think of in the past 25 years.

As far as titles, I’m not sure. If we’re encapsulating both USC and the Seahawks, there’s an opportunity there with “Pac-12s” maybe…

Bret: I'd like to read your coherent rumination regarding the value, or lack thereof, of Pro Football Focus ratings and what role they may play in how you analyze players and their performances. I get the sense the Seahawks routinely get panned by PFF, but I might just be a biased fan.

I can honestly I have no idea what PFF says about the Seahawks, but generally speaking I highly doubt that the site is panning any of the 32 teams. Why not? Because PFF wants to be loved. Their entire marketing plan is to tweet complimentary notes and write complimentary articles about as many players and teams as they possibly can because fans share good way more often than they share bad. If PFF has a bad PFF grade for Geno Smith one week, fret not…they’ll probably come out with a pro-Geno tweet the same week and say, “He’s ranked first in the NFL in this one stat!” at the same time that other PFF team-specific accounts are tweeting that a different QB is first in another stat, and so on…

But again, I can’t really speak to anyone else’s personal opinion on what any site says about the Seahawks. That information is informed by your experience and it could be totally, 100% valid.

The only opinions I have about PFF are basically marketing-based—like that they just know that over a long enough period of time, they will wear down detractors and be too ubiquitous to stop with a large debt of gratitude owed to Cris Collinsworth’s investment—and that I’m skeptical of any website that claims to grade all 22 players on every play of a football game within hours.

However, I’ve been saying this about PFF since the early 2010s and they’ve only gotten bigger and more accepted since then, so this is life. What I can promise readers of Seaside Joe, whether they agree with it or not, is that I haven’t really used PFF and I don’t intend to. No grades have been put here, to my knowledge.

Lou Slugger: Is the salary cap really worth all the anxiety that it seems to cause fans? Is there a team cap strategy that really leads to wins or is it one of those things that really doesn't impact rosters as much as people think? Seattle seems to be a "spend all your money every year" type of team but is that good, bad or irrelevant compared especially to the top level teams?

The salary cap is super important. But…”is it worth all the anxiety that causes fans?” I’ve said for a long time that I would almost rather have these numbers kept secret because as you say, it really is unwarranted anxiety. For me, this is especially important with players like Leonard Williams, who I only use as an example because he’s the most recent Seahawk to get a big contract; now people are going to talk about how much money he makes, rather than simply enjoying the fact that Seattle kept a really good player on their team.

Have really good players and don’t worry about the money. That’s my motto.

Loaf Bench: Books! Can you recommend any football, and non football, for the quiet summer period? If I may myself, I've just started Dave Archibald's 'The Inches We Need'. Never judge a book by its cover (or text font), as in this case they are both awful, however, within is a fantastic read! For those with an interest in team building, it's got stuff about competitive edges too, so we like that!

Thanks for the book recommendation! I’m re-reading “Thinking, Fast and Slow” right now and planning to use parts of that book as jumping off points for future Seaside Joe articles. So for anyone out there interested in being prepared for those articles, that’s my book recommendation. However, I wouldn’t say I’m a great resource for book recommendations, which is also why I want to put this question to the Seaside Joe community:

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