Despite the efforts of Michael Bennett and Cliff Avril, the Seahawks’ pass rush just has not gotten the job done well enough so far this season.

Coach Pete Carroll has noticed it, and he and his coaches are finally taking corrective measures.

The Seahawks’ pass defense ranks in the bottom third of the league after being a top-10 unit in 2013. The Hawks ranked first in passer rating (63.4) and interceptions (28) last season, but they are 28th this year (103.9 rating, just two picks). After allowing just 59 percent completions last season, they are giving up 68.3 this year. And they are worse by many other measures as well.

The Hawks have just seven sacks, which ranks 27th, and the rush has suffered in the face of some of the league’s best quarterbacks — Aaron Rodgers, Philip Rivers, Peyton Manning, Tony Romo.

“We’ve faced the best of the best so far,” Carroll said last week after Romo beat them, “and they’ve been able to hold us off a little bit. We haven’t been quite as effective.”

This week, after yet another game in which the Hawks got little to no pressure on the QB, Carroll said, “The inability to really disrupt the quarterback has been a factor. There are some things that we have to do that will change us a little bit from what we’ve been in the past. So we will make those moves.”

He said the coaches are tweaking the scheme to help Bennett become more effective.

“We’ve got to get Mike active inside and get him to be the disruptor that he can be,” Carroll said. “We need to help him with some stuff there, some stuff scheme-wise we’ll tweak here and there.”

That likely means more blitzing on the outside to pull blockers away from Bennett in the middle. The Hawks have never liked to blitz — last season, they did it just 21.3 percent of the time (only four teams did it less often). But they have to change something if they are going to fix their 47 percent surrender rate on third downs and start pulling more turnovers.

The Hawks seem set to vary their pressure packages to become less predictable.

“I just feel that we should mix it up a little bit, and I think that’s what we’re doing now this week,” defensive end O’Brien Schofield told The Seattle Times.

Defensive coordinator Dan Quinn seemed to agree that is a good idea: “I think on most good third downs there’s a mixture between the four-man rush and the pressures, and that’s really when we’re at our best.”

To hear Schofield, it sounds like the coaches have been holding back the unit with a rigid plan that has not worked.

“I think we just need to be able to flow with the game a little bit more than designating who’s going to get the sack or who’s this rush for,” Schofield said. “I think it just needs to be an all-out effort and just play off each other.”

Schofield also intimated that the Hawks miss the veteran savvy of Chris Clemons and Clinton McDonald, who combined for 10 of Seattle’s 44 sacks in 2013. Clemons was released because he was making too much and the Hawks needed to pay Bennett, and Carroll decided to keep the run-stopping Tony McDaniel over the pass-rushing McDonald, who left for a four-year, $12 million deal with Tampa Bay.

Schofield described what the Hawks are missing without Clemons and McDonald.

“There were times where we’d call certain stuff and Clem would be like, ‘No. I’m not going to do that.’ And he’d go and still get pressure or a sack,” Schofield said, further arguing for coaches to allow defenders “the liberty to play your game.”

That works only if the players are making plays, but what do the coaches have to lose by giving their rush defense some freedom?

“Hopefully we’ll get back to where we’re causing more problems,” Carroll said. “There’s a lot of football to be played. Hopefully we’re going to make a turn and really feel the same kinds of results that we had before that were crucial to the way we played in general.”