Seahawks Defense Still Learning Fangio System
Seattle's bye week gave me a chance to ask Pete Carroll exactly what went wrong in Germany, while splicing in some Seahawks calls courtesy of Jordyn Brooks. This is the state of the 2022 defense:
“Good to see you Matty, you travelled,” Pete Carroll said to me at the start of the Seahawks’ bye week.
Seattle’s head coach was speaking in jest, with my VMAC press conference attendance only arriving via Zoom. Nevertheless, while I did not fly out to the Pacific Northwest post-Germany, this midseason break does provide us all with an opportunity to review.
Carroll: “went back and watched Minnesota, just admiring Ed Donatell’s work and what they are doing there.”
For us, that Vikings-rival defensive coordinator study will have to come another day. Instead, the bye week has armed us with valuable information to look at the state of the 2022 Seahawks defense.
Carroll’s Tuesday answers to my questions were insightful. Meanwhile, Jordyn Brooks’ mic’d up segment—as far back as the week 8 victory at home to the New York Giants—proved enlightening. Oh yes! This pause to the Seahawks’ year has given me Zapruder Film license.
Matching Middle Field Closed
A different style of matching zone coverage arrived with the new-for-2022 defensive system: Vic Fangio’s. That extends to Seattle’s middle field closed zone, cover 3 calls.
Around the 4.33 mark of Brooks’ mic’d up video, you can hear the linebacker shout to the huddle “Crush over red 9, CRUSH.” Cover 9 is a Fangio term for weak-rotated cover 3 sky. The red part is just for the redzone edition of the coverage, where the post safety plays more aggressive to 3x1, shading to the trips side.
From piecing together various details—I promised you some Zapruder—it looks as though this is the play Brooks was calling in. The “crush” part sounded like a defensive line game, and perhaps it was telling Seattle’s DL to “crush” the pocket—notice how they all power rush their men, keeping the pocket tight.
To the non-degenerate, more casual eye, this Fangio-style of matching can end up looking more like cover 1 man defense than a type of cover 3. I asked Carroll if this new approach was more difficult on the players than the past system.
“[Nodding] At times, if you drop a match, like we did on the touchdown pass, it can be a big play because everybody else is matched up and backs are turned sometimes,” the head coach said. “It’s almost like playing man-to-man and you drop your man coverage, in essence that’s really what happened.”
The touchdown pass Carroll referred to, unprompted, was Julio Jones’ 31-yard catch-and-run.
“It was just a play, it wasn’t even a difficult play,” Carroll went on. “It was a play that we practiced, but we didn’t see it quite right, we missed our opportunity there, and they scored a touchdown.”
The Seahawks were in dime personnel, putting Quandre Diggs in the weak hook of the coverage—meaning he was responsible for carrying the #3, innermost receiver, from the 3x1 formation vertical.
As a reaction to the tight split of Jones, on the backside of the trips formation, it looked like Seattle was trying to use a coverage tool to get multiple layers to the deep routes and encourage the throw short of the sticks in the 3rd and 11 situation.
This was similar to the “shove alert” they have used in the past, but instead of the corner shoving the post 1/3 safety, Woolen shoved Diggs—the weak hook/#3 up player—once Jones ran underneath.
With Seattle matched up on all of the other routes deep, the player who needed to make Woolen right was Jordyn Brooks. Instead, the linebacker had his eyes taken inside by Mike Evans running the vertical route from the #3 position and Brady punished this hesitation.
I followed-up with Carroll: questioning if the coverage errors are an example of what the coach meant on Friday, when he said the team still had a lot of learning to do in the scheme.
“Yeah, yes, it is,” Carroll acknowledged. “It’s the consistency because guys have to see things in the same fashion, so they be together to recognize, ‘Here comes the crossing route, okay, I’m going to give it to you, you got it, and I’ll take yours.’ That kind of stuff is really intricate, and it hurt us early in the year. It’s just taken us time.”
That reference to “giving” the crossing route to a teammate and “I’ll take yours” is what should have played out with Woolen and Brooks. Woolen gave the underneath route to Brooks, looking for #3 vertical. Brooks needed to take the underneath route, knowing Woolen had his #3 vertical.
The cover 3 matching is the one aspect of the new defense that Brooks has struggled to adapt to, along with some moments of hesitation from the rest of the underneath defenders. I anticipated the issue against Brady heading into the Week 10 game:
“There were a couple of those,” Carroll assessed of matching coverage errors in Munich.
Another example of a Fangio-system middle field closed call in Brooks’ mic’d up was the middle linebacker calling in “Stay Top, Red Whiskey,” at roughly 4.31 into the clip.