“We need to improve on our run game. It’s pretty cut and dry.” – Mike Macdonald
The Seahawks have the NFL’s No. 5 scoring offense (27.7 ppg), the No. 10 offense by EPA and the No. 4 offense by DVOA – all without any consistent running attack.
There are two schools of thought about the Seahawks’ struggling running game – and both have their merits.
The first is what Mike Macdonald said on his radio show Monday: The running game is not good enough. The second is that the threat of the running game via play action has enabled the passing game to thrive and it’s a fair sacrifice to make.
The Hawks have literally run hot and cold this season. They have been under 100 rushing yards three times and over 100 three times. But they are second behind the Raiders in the most runs stopped at the line or behind.
Zach Charbonnet has been the biggest victim of that stat – he has the worst yards before contact in the league, which means the line is whiffing on a ton of blocks on his runs. He also is being run outside far too much – and getting nothing out of it (he gained zero yards on four outside runs in the 20-12 win over Jacksonville).
Some fans are calling for Kenneth Walker to get the ball more, but the Hawks clearly are trying to keep him healthy by keeping him on a carry count. The split for the season is Walker 78, Charbs 60 (he missed a game).
One reason the Hawks have not fared well, other than some struggles at center and right guard, is that they are facing a stacked box 40% of the time – highest rate in the NFL, per Next Gen Stats.
“We’ve got to keep chiseling away at it,” Macdonald said on 710 Seattle Sports. “It’s not like we’re going to give up on our run game. Can’t throw it 70 times a game and be the type of team we want to be. We’ve played some good fronts, a lot of great players, some good schemes — so that’s part of it.”
Klint Kubiak has focused on maintaining a run-pass balance: Seattle has attempted 164 passes and run the ball 169 times. That keeps the play action effective.
As Houston coach DeMeco Ryans said of his counterpart for Monday’s game in Seattle: “(Kubiak has) done a really good job of marrying both run game and passing game – meaning they both look very similar. The play-action pass game works because of the offensive line and how they come off the football, how they make the run look exactly like the pass. It puts the second-level defenders in a bind.”
Ryans also credited the threat of Walker for the success of the play action. “When you have him running the ball the way he runs it, guys are gonna commit (to the run).
“(Sam) Darnold has done a good job of … making good decisions down the field. He’s got a lot of guys open in those play-action passing concepts. … A lot of guys are wide open.”
Houston happens to be the NFL’s best defense against play action. But Ryans knows the Seahawks already have played the No. 4 (Pittsburgh) and No. 6 (Jacksonville) play-action defenses and have hit big plays in wins against those teams.
As Ryans said, the play action is creating open passing lanes for Darnold.
The Hawks’ tight ends are huge in this as well. The Hawks are the top 12 personnel offense in the league, by EPA. They are using it 31% of the time – 10th most in the league. They are using their tight ends in various ways, with motion a huge component in helping confuse the defense. See these three plays against the Jaguars.
It might be only a matter of time before defenses decide to start defending against Darnold and Jaxon Smith-Njigba, the NFL’s most lethal passing duo so far this season. It will become a pick-your-poison situation for defenses. Focus on those two at the risk of opening up explosive runs for Seattle.
The Seahawks actually are among the top 10 units in run and pass block composite, which is a credit to Kubiak’s scheme and staff and to John Schneider’s drafting of star rookie Grey Zabel.
It is just the lack of consistency that tends to hurt Seattle. In the Arizona game, Seattle could not it close with a four-minute drill (Darnold and JSN had to do it with a big pass). At Jacksonville, Charbonnet was stuffed on three straight goal-line runs.
“They are solid, sound plays,” Macdonald said of their rushing attack. “They are plays we’ve been running since April; it’s not like we’re reinventing the wheel every week, figuring out new ways to run the same package set of plays. It’s a block here, it’s a block there, it’s a communication thing, it’s an angle there, it’s how we run it — it’s all these little things.”
If they get the little things fixed, the Hawks might be entirely unstoppable on offense.
For now, they are putting enough pressure on defenses with the play action to be one of the top 10 offenses in the league. We’ll see whether they can keep it up against Ryans’ stellar Houston defense on Monday night.
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