Seahawks Fixing 2023 Run Defense
Even before preseason games, it looks like the Seattle Seahawks 2023 Run Defense is fixed from their 2022 struggles. The key? The way they are playing their nose tackle in nickel fronts:
Ahead of 2023 football, it’s already clear that the Seahawks defense has changed significantly. And I’m not just talking personnel. No, the schematic outlook for Seattle’s run defense, 25th-ranked in 2022, looks a lot brighter. How can we forecast this? Well, there’s a key sign: the nose tackle is lining up a couple of steps narrower.
Back in June, the Seahawks YouTube channel posted a video of defensive pass game coordinator Karl Scott mic’d up. Like most of the official team content that time of year, Seattle was careful not to include too much on-screen football, instead choosing to feature Scott’s high energy and coaching style.
Yet, at the 1:08 timestamp in the footage, the Seahawks’ cropped scrimmage action revealed a major defensive detail. Rookie nose tackle Cameron Young was lined up as a shade on the center in Seattle’s four-down, nickel front. And, on the snap, Young appeared to be take a 6-inch, forwards step as he struck the center backwards in run defense.
The significance of this small step forwards cannot be understated. In 2022, Seattle ran nickel, five defensive backs for 56% of their snaps, and six defensive back dime for an additional 17% of their snaps, per FTN’s Almanac.
Their typical approach in this sub-package world was a four-down, nickel over front, which Sports Info Solutions had the Seahawks in for 24% of their total defensive snaps. Meanwhile, Seattle ran their dime four-down, over front equivalent on 51% of their dime snaps.
However, there was a crucial difference to the Seahawks’ style from previous years. When Seattle was in this even, four-down, over front, their nose tackle always played on the inside shoulder of the guard. From that position, rather than take a 6-inch forward, “power step”, the nose would look to take a 6-inch lateral step, while catching and mirroring the guard’s angle of block.
This “mirror stepping” style has been described by Seattle coaches as playing “gap-and-a-half”, but it is essentially two-gapping. In simple terms, the “power step”—the footwork we saw Young deploy in June—is one-gapping.
While past Pete Carroll defense’s had utilized this 2i, mirror-stepping nose tackle in nickel even fronts, their usage of the technique had been more specialized: chiefly, they did it in a front called “Tank”.
The specific aim of the 2i nose tackle was to buy time and air for strong safety Kam Chancellor. Often playing from more depth, Chancellor was helped by the 2i, and the “heavy-playing” 3-technique, when the safety was asked to run fit one of the interior gaps and pass cover one of the interior hooks in cover 3. And still, when in “Tank” fronts, Seattle often ended up going for a power-stepping, tilted shade nose instead of that 2i.
In 2022, Clint Hurtt’s appointment as defensive coordinator, along with the arrival of Sean Desai as pass game coordinator, brought with it Vic Fangio system ideas. And so, where in previous years the thinking in Carroll defenses had been to use mirror-stepping defensive linemen mainly to buy time for run defenders arriving from tougher spots, 2022 saw Seattle use a 2i all of the time—regardless of where the help was coming from.
Presumably, the thought process was to allow the Seahawks to present a two-high safety shell on every snap while also having less distinct “tells” in their front appearance, therefore obfuscating what pass coverage Seattle was actually in by having a close-to-identical pre-snap look on each play.
It failed. The Seahawks’ run fts were left in disarray for most of the season. And then, even when Seattle started putting a safety down in the box and running middle field closed pass defense—with the aim of having one immediate, extra defender to stop the run—they still persisted with the 2i nose approach. Subsequently, the run fits out of the nickel, even front still lacked cohesion. Why did they murky the picture?
“It starts up front, really it starts up front,” Carroll evaluated to Brock and Salk, speaking January 16th after the playoff loss to the 49ers. “We have to play the running game way better than we did. We knew we made some concessions in what we were doing starting out. And we didn’t control it well enough, and it got away from us.”
It’s surprising that Seattle didn’t use the in-season fix that they applied to their base personnel defense.
2022’s 3-4 package, featuring bear fronts, starts with a familiar story, but—spoiler—it has a different ending.
The Seahawks began the year with more mirror-stepping up front—just like in their nickel, four-down front. Yes, in base bear, the Seahawks would have both their defensive ends two-gap, mirror-step, and play 4i techniques on the inside shoulder of the tackle, as opposed to one-gap, power-step, as a 3-technique on the outside shoulder of the guard. Even when Seattle had an extra hat in the box and was playing middle field closed pass defense, they persisted with this mirror-stepping, two-gapping strategy at defensive end.
After early struggles with the approach, in week 6 the Seahawks reverted to how they had played their base bear fronts prior to 2022—how Pete Carroll had run his “stick” package since his USC days. Unless Seattle felt the need to buy time for a run fitter—say a quarter safety asked to fit a c-gap formed by a tight end to their side—the Seahawks played their defensive ends as one-gap, power-stepping, 3-technique players on the outside shoulder of the guard. Bar a few tricky moments, it worked.
“We made a transition, week 4 or whatever it was,” Pete Carroll told me the Friday before 2022 Week 10 versus the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, in Munich, Germany.
“We took a look at what we were doing and how our guys were fitting with the scheme and decided that there were some things that we needed to adjust, to fit our players. Which is how we always try to do it. But we hadn’t done it well enough at that early stage. We were trying to make it come together. So we made a couple of changes and it just worked out great.”
“The players really embraced it and they made it happen,” Carroll continued. “It wasn’t that much technical as it was physically placed them in positions and asked them to do some stuff that they were more accustomed to, and it worked out really well.”
Carroll also remembered the base bear tweak positively when reflecting on 2022, speaking to reporters January 16th: “One of the adjustments we made during the early part of the season when we were struggling a little bit really helped us. And we got our guys a little more active. And you saw us take about a 4 or 5 week turn right in there, you know? And so we have to recapture that.”
Whatever the Seahawks’ reasoning for not also switching back their nickel fronts in 2022—and there were moments they tried other stuff that looked more like earlier Seattle years, albeit watered down—the evidence shows the defense has now reverted for 2023 football.
What Carroll would probably suggest is that a greater amount of one-gapping run defense better suits Seattle’s current skillsets up front. That’s true, with first-string nose tackle Jarran Reed listed at 307 pounds and his team weight expectation, per Carroll, over 300 pounds.
A personnel versus scheme discussion is often a case of ‘What came first, the chicken or the egg?’ Except, in this instance, we know what the Seahawks decided. They chose to move on from their defensive front personnel this offseason, including 340+ pounder Al Woods. The team opted to sign the lighter Reed, to draft “only” 320-pound Cameron Young.
And skillsets-wise, these new additions sorta match what Carroll said to the media following the wildcard round defeat to the 49ers: “Really we’re gonna have to become more dynamic up front. We have to, you know? We’ve kinda been in the same mode. We’ve gotta get more production out of the guys, they’ve gotta be more of a factor.”
A lesson from this is that that we should listen closely to the Seahawks’ head coach in the offseason.
The challenge of correcting these defensive issues appears to have energized Carroll as a tactician, take his comments on April 25th.
“I've just jumped back into my work in a way that I haven't done in a few years, and I'm really excited about it,” Carroll told Adam Grant’s ReThinking podcast in late April.
“I just feel that the connection to going for it right now in, in a little bit different way, and my whole world has shifted forward and I'm really excited about it. And what it means is I'm just getting more involved with one side of the football and the defensive side just because I want to, you know, and then I, and I wanna help, and I want to be there to give them everything I got. And I, I felt like I, I had more to offer. So, it's really been exciting. And, uh, I'm looking forward to it.”
What pulled Carroll back to the defense?
”Well, that's just kind of always been my strength and I just think it's time to, to, to re-revisit it,” the coach answered. “And so rethinking is to, is to take a step back, but yet with new vision and new eyes and, and all of that. So I'm excited about it.”
From the 2023 Lumen Field mock game, and what we will see in the preseason, Seattle’s run defense feels distinctly more Carroll-like. That’s visible in the way the nose tackle is one-gapping in nickel, four-down. But there is also a logic and cleanness to the second-level run fits that was absent for far too often last season. Even the safety run keys, when they have a more pressing run concern, look a lot more active than they did this time last year, or, truly, at any point in 2022.
“I’m diving in as deep as I can dive on this thing to make sure that this defense is our defense,” Carroll said to Brock and Salk, January 16th. “It’s not somebody else’s.”
This is not to say that the Fangio system influence and elements have been totally scrapped.
“It’s really a combination of all of the great things that we know we can do,” Carroll continued of his early vision for 2023, later adding: “we need to find the blend of what’s best for us.”
Seattle switched to the Fangio 3-4 personnel because of the 3-4 fronts that they had been running at a heavy rate since 2020, where Ken Norton Jr. ran these bear looks 32% of the time overall, and 37% in base personnel, per SIS.
“In the last three years we’ve featured it, it’s been some of the best stuff that we’ve done,” Carroll told Brock and Salk on May 12th. “And it did fit, it’s why this all happened the way it did, but it did fit the scheme that really Clint and Sean had the background in, you know, with Vic.”
The advantage of the move to purely 3-4 personnel is that, from a rostering perspective, Seattle gained two edge players that could genuinely rush or cover. This was more preferable to the situation the “4-3” Seahawks had in 2020, for instance, where one of the edge players was the LEO, Carlos Dunlap, and the other was the SAM, K.J. Wright. Dunlap looked clunky in coverage and it drew ire from fans. Wright offered little as a pass rusher. Offenses knew which player was likelier to do each task.
In 2023 and their 3-4 personnel defense, the Seahawks now have four seriously talented outside linebackers: recently re-signed, 9.5 2022 sacks Uchenna Nwosu; 2021 second-round pick Darrell Taylor with 9.5 2022 sacks of his own; 2022 second-rounder Boye Mafe; and 2023 second-rounder Derick Hall. Whether these guys play in the “SAM” or “WILL” outside ‘backer positions of the new system, they all bring real, believable, usable threat as both pass rushers and pass droppers.
The Fangio pass coverage system and tools offer similarly attractive multiplicity. It reminds Carroll of his 1990s coaching days as defensive coordinator of the San Francisco 49ers, again meeting the theme of this being a combination of all the experiences on Seattle’s staff.
“I’m not going to a new place that’s never been charted before, I’m returning to some of the roots of the things that give us more coverage opportunities,” Carroll shared with the Seahawks Man 2 Man podcast in June.
“And it calls for really good safety play, you know Tim McDonald and, you know [Merton] Hanks back there in the day at San Francisco, gave us a lot of style in our safety play. Well, we’ve got that again and so I’m trying to elevate the opportunity for Q [Quandre Diggs] and for Jamal [Adams] and now Julian [Love] to do their thing as well and expand. It gives us more freedom to do more things and make it more difficult on the opponent. That’s really—what’s difficult is they can’t move it, if they got you, and it’s too easy for them, then you have to make it more complicated and stress them more. So that’s something, we’re just going back.”
Returning to the front, we haven’t seen any nickel bear fronts this offseason, and it remains telling that the Seahawks ran nickel bear for just 7% of their snaps, per SIS, in 2022. The reason for this is simple: nickel over fronts present better pass rush angles for four rushers, the typical amount of guys you want to send at the quarterback in order to have seven others for pass coverage.
“Yeah, it’s just different from when we play our five-man front,” Carroll explained to me November 15th on the nickel four-front’s run defense issues, leading into the pass rush advantages.
“It just calls for a bit of a different approach and the different coverages and the additional force players come from different angles, different spots. Sometimes they come out of a two-deep look as opposed of being up in the three-deep look. We are more oriented to rushing the passer. We have to do a good job to fit them up. We are having really good success in the five-man fronts in general, but when teams throw the ball a lot, we would rather be in the pass rush mode when we can.”
This season, the nickel four front and the dime variant will still be Seattle’s most-used looks. The good news is the difference: the nose tackle will play the run in a way that will have the knock-on effect of fixing the entire run defense. There’s even signs that the Seahawks will play their edge to a tight end more intelligently too. That’s a possible future topic. For now, rejoice that Carroll (effective) run defense is back.
Thank you for being a paid subscriber to SeahawksOnTape,
I really appreciate it.
Let me know what you thought of this article in the comments section down below.
Also please enjoy this link of useful resources.