Seahawks offensive line update: They're better!
How Seattle cut their sack rate in half from 2024 to 2025
Seaside Joe’s offseason coverage of the Seahawks offensive line was a consistent thread of sharing with you that places like ProFootballFocus and ProFootballNetwork were too lazy to do the research, especially as it pertained to having Seattle at the bottom of their rankings. This was never a “woe is us, we’re boohoo babies” campaign because oftentimes the Seahawks do deserve to be at the bottom of offensive line rankings and I don’t care if they’re criticized for it.
My articles about Seattle being ranked 30th or 31st were simply my observations of their observations seeming to suggest that even “analytical” websites — the ones that fans rely on to tell them what to think about offensive linemen — didn’t do any research at all!
What I Wrote Then
On July 21st, I wrote that the “Seahawks OL is treated unfairly and I can prove it” by comparing Seattle’s 30th-ranked offensive line at FantasyPros to Arizona’s 16th-ranked.
“I can understand the narrative that the Seahawks have a bad offensive line. What I can’t understand is how there is such a consistency with the Seahawks being a bottom-3 offensive line — while rarely mentioning the coaching/scheme changes, the potential for a healthy Lucas, and the monumental differences between Laken Tomlinson and Zabel — while so many teams ranked above them, even 10-20 spots higher, seem to be in the same boat or sinking.”
I didn’t want you to take my word for it, so I compared the starting five between Seattle and Arizona, position by position. The Seahawks seemed to have an advantage at best or a split at worst at every position. Cardinals QB Jacoby Brissett has been pressured on 48.1% of his dropbacks, the highest rate in the league.
On July 11th, I wrote that based on my “insights in the guards n’ of good and evil” sites like PFF and PFN don’t even seem to acknowledge the importance of coaching, scheme, or quarterbacks. That seems odd to me given that they’re supposed to be smarter than us about football. PFN also wrote around the fact that Seattle has been overhauling the line since 2022 and underwent significant changes from 2024 to 2025.
“But aside from mentioning that the Seahawks drafted Grey Zabel to replace Laken Tomlinson, personnel changes were ignored by PFN. They also wrote this ridiculously misleading sentence: “This selection represents just the second time in the past decade that Seattle has invested their first-round selection in an offensive lineman.”
But THE SEAHAWKS HAVE DRAFTED A FIRST ROUND OFFENSIVE LINEMAN IN TWO OF THE PAST FOUR YEARS! The sentence implies that the Seahawks have consistently ignored the offensive line problems for a decade. In actuality, Seattle’s offensive line investment issues are more related to bad picks (both draftees and signees) whereas recent decisions like Cross and Lucas* seem pretty good!”
As mentioned in that article and others, the Seahawks entered 2025 with the potential to ahve one of the most overhauled offensive lines in the NFL and that’s something we’ve known since the draft. Other than Charles Cross, every other starting position has changed in some way:
Abe Lucas only played 37% of the snaps last year (and the OL improved after he returned)
The Seahawks would have a new center in some capacity (Olu Oluwatimi only played in 40% of the snaps last year)
The right guard position would have a competition (Anthony Bradford played 52% of the snaps last year)
And we knew that a first round pick was replacing Tomlinson, the worst left guard in the NFL
Just between Zabel and Lucas, we could safely assume that Seattle had two significant upgrades on the starting five if they were healthy. I also didn’t need PFF to tell me that Connor Williams had to be one of the worst centers in the NFL in 2024. And the one returning starter we could count on is a 24-year-old left tackle who has everything in the bag to be a top-10 player at his position.
Grading/ranking/analytics websites and humans should not solely rely on offensive line personnel, as I’m about to get into, but what more do they need a team to do if not have two top-20 picks under 25 on the left side and the return of one of the top right tackles in the league???
It doesn’t matter if these changes are not reflected in how the Seahawks are ranked, and in fact Seattle has only been given mild bumps on most lists because the run blocking leaves a lot to be desired, but I could rarely even find acknowledgements of how much different the offensive line was going to be. Especially where it mattered most: The Coaching.
Seahawks overhauled the staff more than the roster
When I previewed the offensive line on August 5th, I wrote that the team “changed the farmers, not the farm”. (Maybe “crops” would make more sense than farm?)
It started with firing Ryan Grubb and most of the offensive staff, then hiring Klint Kubiak to be the new coordinator and John Benton to be the offensive line coach. Often cited as the most important non-coordinator assistant role on any staff, Seattle’s new offensive line coach brought a ton of experience and an impressive resume with him to the Seahawks. (No disrespect but the old offensive line coach Scott Huff has neither of those things.)
That still was not enough for Mike Macdonald after what the team has gone through on the offensive line: As I wrote back on April 1st in a post titled “If we believe…”, Seattle tripled down by also hiring Rick Dennison (Gary Kubiak’s former OL coach) and assistant OL coach Justin Outten. A fourth coach, Quinshon Odom, is listed as the team’s “quality control offensive line” assistant.
At minimum, the Seahawks would be replacing 100% of the snaps at left guard, 60% of the snaps at center, 60% of the snaps at right tackle, and 50% of the snaps at right guard PLUS overhauling the staff from the least-experienced to one of the most experienced. Hate it, Love it, I don’t care just acknowledge it.
The Quarterback Factor
Sam Darnold and Geno Smith both started 2025 with a career sack rate of EXACTLY 7.72% but that’s not how they will finish the season.
It’s often been said that “sacks are a QB stat” and if that’s the case then something must have really clicked for Darnold in the offseason. After posting a sack rate of 8.09% on the Vikings last season, a tick higher than his aforementioned career rate, Darnold is being sacked a career-low rate of 4% this season.
By comparison, Smith’s sack rate on the Seahawks last year was 7.96%, a number he has carried over to the Raiders at 8.02% in 2025. Either due to coincidence or responsibility, Smith’s sack rate has remained eerily consistent after traveling teams.
Quarterbacks should be applauded or blamed for how many sacks they take because they are often a product of risk aversion: Is the quarterback self-aware enough to know how much time he has to get rid of the ball? Russell Wilson’s high sack rate (career 8.5%) is due to the fact that he trusts himself to extend the play after the pocket breaks down, often to his own detriment.
Well, self awareness is a key to Darnold’s career-best 4% sack rate:
Darnold’s 2.77 seconds time-to-throw average in Seattle is the best of his career, significantly faster than the 3.08 seconds he averaged in 2024.
Darnold was sacked 48 times with the Vikings in 2024, but he’s only been sacked nine times with the Seahawks, a pace of roughly 19 sacks. There’s a good chance that Darnold’s sack total will be cut in half and a non-zero chance that it will be cut by two-thirds.
And Darnold’s pressure rate, the number of times he’s pressured per dropback, has never been lower than 37.8%. Right now that number is at 28.4%, which is 11% lower than his rate in Minnesota.
Here is the chart courtesy of Next Gen Stats with 2025 being the number on top, chronologically ordered down to his 2018 rookie season on the Jets:
These numbers have also improved as the season has developed, from a 32% pressure rate in Week 1 and 40% in Week 2, to a season-low 12.5% pressure rate against the Moons in Week 9. The Seahawks have kept Darnold’s pressure rate under 25% for the last three games…
Sam Darnold did not have a single game with the Vikings last season where his pressure rate was under 25%. He was over 30% in 16 of 18 regular season games. He’s already been under 30% in half of his starts with the Seahawks.
Obviously Darnold has never had a season as good as the one he’s currently having on the Seahawks and one reason for that would be his improved numbers in terms of pressure, either because of the offensive line or because of his decision-making and often a combination of the two.
Of course, an improved game plan by Klint Kubiak — better compared to what the Seahawks had and what Darnold has prior to 2025 — is another factor. How much do these numbers impact Darnold’s “second” breakout season in a row?
Darnold has a passer rating of 79.7 when under pressure (30-of-56, 3 TD, 2 INT, 7.2 yards per attempt) vs. 128.7 when the pocket is clean (122-of-160, 13 TD, 3 INT, 10.5 Y/A).
Also the offensive line is better
As mentioned earlier, Geno Smith was pressured twice as often with the Seahawks last year as Darnold’s mark this year despite the expectation that Darnold’s sack rate would “travel with him” from Minnesota to Seattle. That’s something we can attribute to everything mentioned here today:
Better Left Guard
Healthy Right Tackle
Same Left Tackle (and he’s Better)
Better Center
New Coaching Staff
Better Offensive Game Plan
Decisive Play at Quarterback
We can keep going. We can talk about how Jaxon Smith-Njigba has probably made Darnold’s life easier by getting open often and early. A.J. Barner and Cooper Kupp are pretty good at that too.
However the Seahawks have cut their sack rate in half, it’s happening and it’s helping Darnold, which in turn gives Seattle one of the top-5 passing offenses in the league through eight games. That’s so important in the NFL because even teams with the best defenses could find themselves losing in the fourth quarter, needing a touchdown to win, or they fail and get eliminated. In 2019, the Chiefs were down by at least 10 points in every single playoff game that they won en route to the Super Bowl championship. In 2021, the Rams needed a game-winning drive in each of their last three playoff wins.
With the last 10 offenses they’ve had, I don’t think the Seahawks could have done that. Seattle hasn’t even scored 25 points in a playoff game since the 2016 wild card. This year I know that they can score 30 against playoff teams and it’s because unlike PFF, the Seahawks did acknowlege their offensive line.
Seaside Joe 2438
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Most preseason content is pretty much a way to kill an offseason. Speculate, form opinions without research, and post, post, post. Thankfully that's not the way it's done here.
I didn't KNOW the o-line would be better, but for all the reasons you mention, I allowed that they certainly could be. Now that they have proven they ARE better, I think by the end of the year you could argue they will be better still. Zabel will be an ascending player for several more years. Sundell is an ascending player. I think the ceiling on AB is pretty close already, but he's proven to be serviceable if you use him to his strengths......and wide zone is not to his strengths.
The other piece of this is the (incorrect) assumption the Seahawks didn't invest in their o-line, when nothing could be further from the truth. Since 2021 they've invested heavily. Have their investments always worked out, no. But it wasn't like they weren't taking swings. Perhaps their talent evaluation was a little suspect, but it wasn't through lack of 'investment'.
And here they sit with Cross (drafted), Zabel (drafted), Sundell (UDFA), Bradford (drafted), and Lucas (drafted). Looks to me like they were investing their little hearts out, it just took a while to come together is all......and it took new coaching to make that happen! You can have all the ingredients, but without a cook, that's all you have.
I think it’s also worthy of note, Bradford had his best game, at least from a pass pro standpoint, against the Moons. He’s still very young, and while i do think his mobility is not a great fit for a wide zone run scheme, it does seem like he’s still working hard at improving and perhaps still has room to grow.