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Inside the Unraveling of the Seattle Seahawks
- By Prime Time
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 28 Replies
It looks like the coddling of Russell Wilson by Pete Carroll caused the divide in that locker room. Playing favorites to the exclusion of others tends to tick people off. A long, in depth article, but a good read for those who detest the Seahawks as much as I do. Enjoy!
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https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/09/07/seattle-seahawks-dismantling-rift-russell-wilson-pete-carroll
The Dynasty That Never Was: Inside the Unraveling of the Seattle Seahawks
As they grew into Super Bowl contenders, the Seahawks—especially the Legion of Boom defense—prided themselves on a ruthless internal competitiveness that lifted everyone and was the foundation of an NFL championship.
But some former and current Seattle players say a growing rift developed, based largely on the special treatment some felt was afforded quarterback Russell Wilson. Now the team they believed was set up for a long run of success has been torn up and rebuilt around Wilson. Did it have to go down like this?
By Greg Bishop and Robert Klemko
TMZ.com
Back in March, three weeks after the Seahawks released him and he signed with their division rival, All-Pro cornerback Richard Sherman married his longtime girlfriend Ashley Moss in the Dominican Republic. The soirée doubled as a reunion for the best defense in recent history, a unit that allowed the fewest points annually from 2012 to ’15, that won one Super Bowl and nearly won another, that gave the NFL the Legion of Boom.
Sherman invited his closest friends and family to the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Punta Cana. The ceremony took place on the beach, the happy couple encased in a glass frame, the structure adorned with white roses. A turquoise ocean sparkled behind them. Waves lapped onto the beach.
Members of those mighty Seahawks defenses spent that weekend drinking and gambling and celebrating Sherman’s good fortune, which cut two ways. Because they weren’t simply toasting his nuptials in paradise; some were also saluting his escape to San Francisco, away from the Seattle organization a handful of players had referred to in private as “the Titanic” for the better part of a year.
Even on the happiest weekend of Sherman’s life, inside his sprawling suite at the Hard Rock or at one of the resort’s blackjack tables, the conversations inevitably turned back in the same direction, to what one Seahawk describes as the “dynasty that never was” and some players’ lingering disdain for quarterback Russell Wilson.
The complaints current and former players bandied about spoke to the way an era had ended this offseason, with the Seahawks removed from their once dynastic ambitions, restarting, trying to reclaim what had been lost.
Seattle had ascended to the precipice of becoming the NFL’s latest dynasty, behind arguably one of the greatest defenses of all time and a quarterback who was young and sometimes great but also inconsistent. And it was an ethos that held them all together—the notion that ruthless, unsparing competition would prevail above all else.
These wedding discussions usually started in a good place, with players reminiscing about the glory days, the way the Seahawks had battered Peyton Manning and the Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII. “I was telling the guys I never thought of us as being that elite,” says Cliff Avril, a defensive end on those teams. “It was just a bunch of bad dudes having fun and playing for each other. I was like, we were pretty awesome.”
Rod Mar for Sports Illustrated
All that was over now. The Seahawks had released Sherman, traded Pro Bowl defensive end Michael Bennett (and a seventh-round pick) for a fifth-rounder and an unknown receiver, and refused to meet safety Earl Thomas’s demands for a contract extension. Avril and hard-hitting safety Kam Chancellor were forced into retirement from spine and neck injuries. Cornerback DeShawn Shead and defensive tackle Sheldon Richardson departed in free agency. Corner Jeremy Lane was also released.
The final tally: six Pro Bowl-caliber players and eight contributors who departed, could not return or did not report to camp. (Thomas did report, on Wednesday of this week.) As a new season kicks off this Sunday when the Seahawks play the Broncos, only five players remain from their championship team—Wilson, Thomas, receiver Doug Baldwin, and linebackers Bobby Wagner and K.J. Wright. “I would never have thought this would unravel the way it has unraveled,” Avril says. “Pretty much everyone who left was a Pro Bowler, if you think about it.”
What kept coming back up at Sherman’s wedding wasn’t the massive overhaul the Seahawks had made. What kept coming back up was why. The less disgruntled members of the audience acknowledged that age and injuries played a role, that change in the NFL is inevitable, that teams, even great ones, eventually come undone in one way or another.
But a dozen sources with direct knowledge of the Seahawks’ internal dynamics who spoke to Sports Illustrated this summer also pointed to a locker room they contend had fractured last season, with private spats spilling into public view and a rift deepening between those who supported Wilson and those who felt the coaches held him to a different standard.
The overhaul, those sources maintain, was a direct result of that dissension. It was the management in Seattle deciding to “take the power back,” according to two departed Seahawks, with that notion confirmed by three other current or former players. If everything that happened after their loss to the Patriots in Super Bowl XLIX was done in attempt to rebuild faith and trust in one another, this summer marked a pivot toward something else.
The Seahawks rebuilt around Wilson, their most prolific and polarizing remaining player, for at least the next two seasons, when he’s under contract—and they’re hoping to capture lightning with their roster, the way they did in 2012.
Several current and former Seahawks say that coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider can “feel the pressure mounting.” Rather than wait for further erosion, for the divide to deepen, for the defense to get older, they acted decisively this spring, after that defense fell from third in points allowed in 2016 to 13th (tied) last year.
But those who left, and even some who remain, wonder if the changes ignore what they see as the more fundamental issue: that what made Seattle great—the highest of expectations, the unrelenting competition—is over, too.
“This is a crucial year, marking a new era of Seahawks football,” Baldwin says. “The jury is still out on what’s to come.”
The dismantling of a great defense dates back to one random 2014 practice, which ESPN first reported last summer as a catalyst for the Seahawks’ rift. That afternoon, Sherman intercepted Wilson, the two traded words and Sherman yelled “you f------ suck” as he flipped the ball back at the quarterback.
The pick itself wasn’t as important as what happened afterward, when several players who spoke to SI said Carroll gathered his offensive and defensive leaders and told them they needed to protect Wilson, to treat him more gently than they would their other teammates.
Those same players had been indoctrinated into the NFL the exact way they were trying to teach Wilson, with merciless competition as the way to bring out the best in each other, by never letting a lapse slide, by talking s--- after interceptions, even in practice. In the meeting, they told Carroll exactly that. “This is making him one of our own,” one player said, while several others nodded, according to two who were in the room. “He’s got to go through the process.”
No, Carroll told them. Not Wilson. “He protected him,” one Seahawk says. “And we hated that. Any time he f----- up, Pete would never say anything. Not in a team meeting, not publicly, never. If Russ had a terrible game, he would always talk about how resilient he was. We’re like, what the f--- are you talking about?”
That Seahawk uses a pack of wolves as an analogy to explain his thinking. It’s as if Carroll sent his pack out to hunt but kept one wolf back, and that wolf still ate when the others returned with food. “We talked about that,” says Tony McDaniel, a defensive tackle with Seattle in 2013, ’14 and ’16. “Russell had his f----ups; he never got called out. If I was Pete Carroll, I’d tell Russell, I have to call you out in front of the team so there won’t be any problems.”
One former Seahawk says he and a handful of teammates speculated that Carroll judged Wilson too emotionally fragile to handle the criticism, be it from them or his coaches. That presented Carroll with a difficult choice: between the environment he’d fostered and the franchise quarterback he’d found in the third round. He chose the quarterback, the former player says—a choice many coaches would have made—adding “[Carroll] realized Russ couldn’t handle being part of the dynamic we had.”
Not every teammate felt that way. Some noted that it’s in Carroll’s nature to stress the positive, quarterback or not. But roughly half the locker room had issues, according to its inhabitants. Some complaints were pettier than others: that Wilson had his own space for treatment in the facility, which some thought was off-limits to his teammates and others insist was not; or that he didn’t interact with other players at the team’s annual Christmas party.
Jonathan Ferrey for Sports Illustrated
All these accusations, though, spoke to the same theme: that Wilson was both treated differently than his teammates and, in some instances, willingly stood apart from them. When McDaniel arrived in Seattle in ’13, he went to dinner with several defensive players and asked them why things seemed off between the defense and the quarterback. He was told by those players to be careful speaking frankly when Wilson was around, because they believed what they said could wind up on Carroll’s desk.
The players said that had already happened—subjects that had been discussed in the QB’s presence had come to the attention of Carroll, an assertion four other players who spoke to SI also made. “When guys would talk candidly in front of Russell, somehow all that stuff got up to Pete,” one player said. “And after a while, after a few instances, everyone started noticing that, and everyone made sure not to talk about anything that could be misconstrued near Russell.”
Some also dispute that Wilson puts in the work necessary to earn his status with the team and in NFL at large, believing he has prioritized his business interests over football. Others at Seahawks headquarters disavow that characterization. Their opposition speaks to the sort of polarizing presence Wilson had become in Renton.
(Asked to comment on all specific incidents in this story, Wilson declined through the team and his representatives. The Seahawks also declined to comment.)
CBS Sports
The same players also cite much larger, more pertinent issues. Such as after the 2014 NFC Championship Game against the Packers, when Wilson was invited to the podium at the 50-yard-line after having thrown four interceptions in the game. The Seahawks had just pulled off a miracle comeback, with the defense limiting Aaron Rodgers to 178 passing yards and intercepting him twice.
Multiple defensive players had gutted through injuries, and yet it was Wilson who received the most praise, and Wilson whom Carroll saluted in team meetings that next week as having saved the season. “That’s when guys really started to notice the lack of accountability,” says one former player. “Before that, if guys made mistakes or we lost games, guys took responsibility for it, for good or for bad. We started losing that.”
All of this came, remarkably, before the crushing Super Bowl defeat, before Wilson drove the Seahawks to the 1-yard-line in the game’s final minute against the Patriots, giving Seattle a chance to win. That Wilson threw an interception mattered less than the fact that the Seahawks had called a pass play on second down.
Many who lamented how Wilson was treated differently now believed, truly believed, that Carroll had called a pass play to give Wilson a better chance to win the Super Bowl MVP award and decrease Marshawn Lynch’s chances, perhaps conveniently ignoring that offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell might have actually called the play.
Regardless, the players say, that call contradicted what Carroll always said publicly: that he wanted to run the ball and play great defense, that that’s how he built the Seahawks—to be tough and stop foes and let Lynch bulldoze Seattle to victory after victory.
Again, several players felt that Carroll said one thing and did another, and this time it had cost them a repeat Super Bowl title. (Such a view disregards the fact that the Seahawks defense missed 18 tackles and allowed the Patriots 196 yards-after-catch in the game.)
“That’s when some guys started to openly question whether [Carroll] believed in his philosophy,” says Avril, who says he still trusted the coach at that point. “Guys started to be like, do you even believe what you’re saying?”
Some Seahawks still remember every detail from that night. Sherman pacing back and forth, wearing his frustration into the carpet in that locker room in Arizona. Lynch, fully dressed, downing a bottle of cognac, saying “These motherf------ robbed me,” and “f--- this,” over and over. “If we gave the ball to the soul of our team and we lose, f--- it, we lose,” one Seahawk says. “Point-blank, period. You lost doing what you do best. But he gave it to Russ. I didn’t believe the MVP thing at first. But now I wonder. It’s at least plausible.”
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“That one play changed the whole locker room,” McDaniel says. “When Pete would give a speech or try for a heart-to-heart, people just stopped responding. They didn’t know who to trust anymore.”
Rather than acknowledge the rift, though, these Seahawks say Carroll doubled down on Wilson in 2015. The quarterback took members of the offense and defense to Hawaii for a retreat before that season, to, according to sources, repair any lingering issues. But some lingered. “A lot of people felt like he was doing that to save face,” says one player who was there. “We were like, What is this? Why are we here? He was disingenuous."
It wasn’t just Seattle’s handling of Wilson that irked the locker room. The Seahawks had previously made difficult decisions around the likes of Bruce Irvin, Red Bryant, Brandon Mebane and Malcolm Smith, among other key contributors.
Many of those moves were accepted as part of routine NFL business—the team did have to pay Sherman, Thomas, Baldwin, Wilson and many others, after all —but over time, after the Seahawks released or dealt several of their top leaders, the sense that competition would prevail over all else began to fade. What had felt so unique to Seattle for players who had spent time elsewhere—a true sense of meritocracy, absent favoritism for high-priced free agents or high draft picks—was eroding.
An early move that bothered some was the release of McDaniel, a favorite of the defensive vets, after the 2014 season. “Tony did all this dirty work,” says one former Seahawks defensive starter. “I don’t think people on the outside really recognized how valuable he was. Nobody in that locker room understood why we cut him.”
McDaniel was eventually brought back, in 2016, finding himself in a time-share with other players whom he argues he was outperforming. “I was one of the guys who came in, put my hat on and went to work. Didn’t complain, didn’t say much,” he says. “The eye in the sky don’t lie. They started letting guys in front of me who I knew clearly weren’t better than me play. It frustrated me that they were favoring guys they drafted. I came off an eight-tackle game and they would bench me.”
Players who spoke to Sports Illustrated said the preference for younger, underperforming players over quality veterans was most apparent in the career arc of one lineman: Germain Ifedi, the Texas A&M offensive tackle whom Schneider and Carroll drafted 31st overall in 2016. The opportunities Ifedi has enjoyed while consistently grading out poorly have irked veterans who wonder why the Seahawks won’t bring in free-agent competition or promote other players to challenge him.
Retaining wide receiver Tanner McEvoy at the expense of Kasen Williams in 2017 angered the defensive backs and some receivers who were intimately familiar with the abilities of both. Three leaders even went to Seahawks management in protest. “Like, what the f--- are y’all doing?” says one. “Because you’re not building a winning team when you’re making those decisions.” (The Seahawks cut McEvoy this summer; he signed with the Dolphins. Williams is currently a free agent.)
It’s not unusual, of course, for players to take issue when their favorite teammates are released. It’s possible, too, that Carroll figured Wilson would be at his best when protected, that he needed more protection than the brash members of his defense, who could reasonably be expected to perform no matter what.
Also possible: that Seattle looked at its roster, saw an aging defense, and decided to build around a young, in-his-prime QB. But even then, that’s not how the moves went over to those critical of Wilson in the locker room. Stitched together, they became something else, something bigger: a broken system.
“Everything they preached about competition stopped being true,” says one former Seahawk. “It wasn’t like that anymore. The Kasen Williams move was one. The way they treated the running back situation for years, the offensive line. They would draft offensive lineman high and tell them, You’re a leader now. No, you earn that. It all became artificial.”
Getty Images
Those decisions, on top of Carroll’s refusal to publicly check Wilson in any setting, public or private, chipped away at the coach’s once-renowned ability to motivate a wide range of personalities, according to the players who spoke to SI. Carroll’s mantras, which consistently buttressed his motivational talks—“Always Compete,” “Practice is Everything”—began to ring hollow.
Players who lamented the shift focused on Wilson, which other Seahawks believed was unfounded and unfair. Did Thomas still have to earn his spot? they ask. Did Sherman? The week following a December 2016 loss to the Packers, Sherman and Bennett nearly came to blows over Wilson.
The quarterback threw five interceptions against a defense that finished 31st in passing yards allowed that season, and Sherman, a member of the unofficial player leadership huddle of which Wilson was not a part, proposed confronting Wilson in a private setting to ask what the issue was, as they'd routinely do with other players when performance dipped.
“That was a common thing to do, because often it was some outside factor affecting guys, family stuff, and you’d work through that,” one former player says. But Bennett took issue, reminding Sherman that they only had one quarterback. The confrontation escalated to the point where the two needed to be separated. Toward the end of that ’16 season, Sherman’s complaints became louder and more public, and they clearly dated back to what had happened in the Super Bowl defeat. In private, what he said was even worse.
The notion that quarterbacks will be treated differently, even should be, is not new. But Aaron Rodgers goes out of his way to include teammates in promotional spots, and Bill Belichick regularly shoots verbal barbs at Tom Brady during film sessions. Incidentally, neither of those teams fielded defenses with as many stars as the Seahawks once boasted, and that’s why the dynamic in Seattle was different than in New England or Green Bay.
“You’re not going to talk crazy to Tom Brady at practice,” Avril says. “You’re not going to talk crazy to Aaron Rodgers at practice. You might get kicked out of practice if you do that. To me it’s absurd to think a quarterback will be treated the same all the time. There’s a hierarchy in every thing. So why wouldn’t they expect the same for this guy?
“The problem is,” Avril continues, “at one point we were allowed, people were allowed to talk trash to him.” Then, after 2014, they weren’t.
For years, Avril says, he warned his teammates, friends and acquaintances alike. All the public and private complaints, the sideline antics, the defensive players calling out the offensive coordinator—the personalities that Carroll sometimes referred to as the Seahawks’ “celebration of uniqueness”—all that would only be tolerated to a point.
“When you start losing, people feel like they’re losing control of the team,” Avril says. “Or they feel like they’re losing control of people on the team. You get away with that when you’re winning.” If not, change. Hence the 2018 offseason.
Of course, the Seahawks dropped five of their last nine games in 2017, as the young Rams ascended to the top of an NFC West division that had long been controlled by Seattle and its mighty defense. Players who had grown accustomed to the old way admittedly started to check out.
Bennett took to reading books in some team meetings. Sherman’s sideline exclamations became increasingly animated. “Too many people with opinions,” says one former defensive starter. That’s when some players took to referring to the Seahawks as the Titanic. Then, as predicted, ship hit iceberg.
Sherman strained his Achilles in practice before a Thursday night game in November against Arizona, then tore it in the third quarter while accelerating out of a break. That night would mark both Sherman’s and Chancellor’s last game in a Seahawks uniform; for Chancellor, his last in any uniform.
That the injuries happened on the same field where the Seahawks had lost to the Patriots in the Super Bowl was not lost on some players; not only had a potential dynasty died on a football field in Glendale, Ariz., now the Legion of Boom had, too. “I just remember feeling so demoralized, like f---,” one Seahawk says.
Getty Images
On that night in Arizona, an era ended. “It was like, it’s over,” that Seahawk says. Change came, as predicted. After the Sherman injury, veteran players even began preparing for their exits. Bennett repeatedly told his best friend, Avril, that he expected to be traded or released. In December, during what he thought was a private moment with Cowboys coach Jason Garrett after a game against Dallas, Thomas was caught on camera telling the coach, “If y’all got the chance to come get me, come get me.”
To his credit, Wilson played well down the stretch, without much help from his offensive line. His 34 touchdown passes matched his career high from 2015, and he threw for 3,983 yards and ran for 575 more, the second-highest total of his career. In his first six seasons, he’d thrown for more touchdowns (161) than Matt Ryan (153) or Cam Newton (136) had in that same timeframe. As teammates complained, Wilson received MVP consideration.
They’d argue that they weren’t complaining about Wilson’s statistics or production, but rather how Carroll handled him and how that changed the locker room dynamic, making the Seahawks less competitive and leading several prominent players to question their head coach. “All good things come to an end,” Bennett told Avril more than once last fall.
He was right. The season finished, and the playoffs started without the Seahawks for the first time since the 2011 season. Carroll fired his offensive coordinator, longtime fan non-favorite Bevell, and his defensive coordinator, Legion of Boom favorite Kris Richard, along with several other coaches.
Many in the locker room wondered if Brian Schottenheimer had been named offensive coordinator specifically to better align Wilson with his teammates. Then, the purge. One Seahawk felt it necessary to tell Duane Brown, the left tackle Seattle traded for last season and signed to an extension this spring, “It’s not usually like this.”
Ultimately, the Seahawks made the same bet as Carroll. They bet on Wilson, at least for the next two years, when he’s under contract, then built around him, hoping to gain by what they subtracted from their locker room, to get younger, more cohesive, to recapture the magic they found in 2012. Some of Wilson’s greatest critics, and even some of his defenders, are gone now, and these Seahawks are clearly his team moving forward.
Remaining Seahawks argue that keeping the core of the defense intact this season would have been impossible, regardless, with Bennett turning 32 and Sherman turning 30 and Avril and Chancellor forced into retirement. All players think they can play five years longer than they actually can, they argue, citing the longer prime that Wilson has left. But that doesn’t make the end of an era any less sudden—or lessen the pain of what could have been.
“Hell, no,” Wright says, when asked if he expected the defense would be dismantled as quickly as it came apart. “I thought we were going to ride off into the sunset together. I definitely didn’t see it falling apart that fast. I thought it would last another three or four years.”
Publicly, the principals remaining in Seattle—Schneider, Carroll and Wilson—have maintained that there’s been no shift in philosophy, no effort to empower and insulate the quarterback, and that their current roster is a group on the rise, much like the 2012 Seahawks. Asked by SI in general terms about the upcoming season and all the turnover back in August, all sounded optimistic.
The expectation for excellence, Wilson said then, hasn’t waned as the veterans who helped establish it have departed. “The standard was set a long time ago,” Wilson told SI, “and it’s still there from Day 1 when we started practicing this year. The standard is super high. The standard is to practice at the highest level, and do everything we can to win.”
Asked in training camp whether 2018 feels different at team headquarters, Wilson said then that not much had changed. “There are definitely some different faces out there, but it really doesn’t [feel different]. Coach Carroll does a tremendous job of being consistent every day. He does a tremendous job of making sure the culture is the way that we want it to be—a culture of excellence, a culture of love, a culture of guys who love the game.”
Carroll told SI as part of those earlier August interviews he believes the Seahawks can build a champion with the guys in the locker room right now, and that some are destined to become household names, and that Wilson is “the best he’s ever been,” on and off the field.
“Nobody knew who Richard was or who Kam was back in the day,” Carroll said then, “and there are guys in that room right now that they’re going to know about in time. It’s thrilling. … We’ve got extraordinary performance and leadership ability from the QB spot. I don’t know what [the critics] are thinking.”
“It’s a dope opportunity, in my opinion,” Wagner said then, echoing his coach.
The answers will come in 2018. Winning, as Avril says, masks deficiencies in the process. If Carroll deliberately shifted the power from a locker room full of outspoken Pro Bowlers to the talented passer who didn’t have the full respect of that locker room—as many current and former players believe he has done—the one and only thing that will justify that transition is to win. “Now you’re tied to him,” one Seahawk told management this spring.
Just four years removed from reaching the pinnacle of the sport, this the state of Seattle’s NFL team, on the verge of another season. Blame the salary cap. Blame ego. Blame age and injury. Blame success. Just know that many of the principals, especially those who remain, don’t think this version of the Titanic is foundering just yet.
“Wait and see,” the ever-optimistic Carroll told SI. “I ain’t worried one bit.”
With reporting from Albert Breer.
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https://www.si.com/nfl/2018/09/07/seattle-seahawks-dismantling-rift-russell-wilson-pete-carroll
The Dynasty That Never Was: Inside the Unraveling of the Seattle Seahawks
As they grew into Super Bowl contenders, the Seahawks—especially the Legion of Boom defense—prided themselves on a ruthless internal competitiveness that lifted everyone and was the foundation of an NFL championship.
But some former and current Seattle players say a growing rift developed, based largely on the special treatment some felt was afforded quarterback Russell Wilson. Now the team they believed was set up for a long run of success has been torn up and rebuilt around Wilson. Did it have to go down like this?
By Greg Bishop and Robert Klemko
TMZ.com
Back in March, three weeks after the Seahawks released him and he signed with their division rival, All-Pro cornerback Richard Sherman married his longtime girlfriend Ashley Moss in the Dominican Republic. The soirée doubled as a reunion for the best defense in recent history, a unit that allowed the fewest points annually from 2012 to ’15, that won one Super Bowl and nearly won another, that gave the NFL the Legion of Boom.
Sherman invited his closest friends and family to the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Punta Cana. The ceremony took place on the beach, the happy couple encased in a glass frame, the structure adorned with white roses. A turquoise ocean sparkled behind them. Waves lapped onto the beach.
Members of those mighty Seahawks defenses spent that weekend drinking and gambling and celebrating Sherman’s good fortune, which cut two ways. Because they weren’t simply toasting his nuptials in paradise; some were also saluting his escape to San Francisco, away from the Seattle organization a handful of players had referred to in private as “the Titanic” for the better part of a year.
Even on the happiest weekend of Sherman’s life, inside his sprawling suite at the Hard Rock or at one of the resort’s blackjack tables, the conversations inevitably turned back in the same direction, to what one Seahawk describes as the “dynasty that never was” and some players’ lingering disdain for quarterback Russell Wilson.
The complaints current and former players bandied about spoke to the way an era had ended this offseason, with the Seahawks removed from their once dynastic ambitions, restarting, trying to reclaim what had been lost.
Seattle had ascended to the precipice of becoming the NFL’s latest dynasty, behind arguably one of the greatest defenses of all time and a quarterback who was young and sometimes great but also inconsistent. And it was an ethos that held them all together—the notion that ruthless, unsparing competition would prevail above all else.
These wedding discussions usually started in a good place, with players reminiscing about the glory days, the way the Seahawks had battered Peyton Manning and the Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII. “I was telling the guys I never thought of us as being that elite,” says Cliff Avril, a defensive end on those teams. “It was just a bunch of bad dudes having fun and playing for each other. I was like, we were pretty awesome.”
Rod Mar for Sports Illustrated
All that was over now. The Seahawks had released Sherman, traded Pro Bowl defensive end Michael Bennett (and a seventh-round pick) for a fifth-rounder and an unknown receiver, and refused to meet safety Earl Thomas’s demands for a contract extension. Avril and hard-hitting safety Kam Chancellor were forced into retirement from spine and neck injuries. Cornerback DeShawn Shead and defensive tackle Sheldon Richardson departed in free agency. Corner Jeremy Lane was also released.
The final tally: six Pro Bowl-caliber players and eight contributors who departed, could not return or did not report to camp. (Thomas did report, on Wednesday of this week.) As a new season kicks off this Sunday when the Seahawks play the Broncos, only five players remain from their championship team—Wilson, Thomas, receiver Doug Baldwin, and linebackers Bobby Wagner and K.J. Wright. “I would never have thought this would unravel the way it has unraveled,” Avril says. “Pretty much everyone who left was a Pro Bowler, if you think about it.”
What kept coming back up at Sherman’s wedding wasn’t the massive overhaul the Seahawks had made. What kept coming back up was why. The less disgruntled members of the audience acknowledged that age and injuries played a role, that change in the NFL is inevitable, that teams, even great ones, eventually come undone in one way or another.
But a dozen sources with direct knowledge of the Seahawks’ internal dynamics who spoke to Sports Illustrated this summer also pointed to a locker room they contend had fractured last season, with private spats spilling into public view and a rift deepening between those who supported Wilson and those who felt the coaches held him to a different standard.
The overhaul, those sources maintain, was a direct result of that dissension. It was the management in Seattle deciding to “take the power back,” according to two departed Seahawks, with that notion confirmed by three other current or former players. If everything that happened after their loss to the Patriots in Super Bowl XLIX was done in attempt to rebuild faith and trust in one another, this summer marked a pivot toward something else.
The Seahawks rebuilt around Wilson, their most prolific and polarizing remaining player, for at least the next two seasons, when he’s under contract—and they’re hoping to capture lightning with their roster, the way they did in 2012.
Several current and former Seahawks say that coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider can “feel the pressure mounting.” Rather than wait for further erosion, for the divide to deepen, for the defense to get older, they acted decisively this spring, after that defense fell from third in points allowed in 2016 to 13th (tied) last year.
But those who left, and even some who remain, wonder if the changes ignore what they see as the more fundamental issue: that what made Seattle great—the highest of expectations, the unrelenting competition—is over, too.
“This is a crucial year, marking a new era of Seahawks football,” Baldwin says. “The jury is still out on what’s to come.”
The dismantling of a great defense dates back to one random 2014 practice, which ESPN first reported last summer as a catalyst for the Seahawks’ rift. That afternoon, Sherman intercepted Wilson, the two traded words and Sherman yelled “you f------ suck” as he flipped the ball back at the quarterback.
The pick itself wasn’t as important as what happened afterward, when several players who spoke to SI said Carroll gathered his offensive and defensive leaders and told them they needed to protect Wilson, to treat him more gently than they would their other teammates.
Those same players had been indoctrinated into the NFL the exact way they were trying to teach Wilson, with merciless competition as the way to bring out the best in each other, by never letting a lapse slide, by talking s--- after interceptions, even in practice. In the meeting, they told Carroll exactly that. “This is making him one of our own,” one player said, while several others nodded, according to two who were in the room. “He’s got to go through the process.”
No, Carroll told them. Not Wilson. “He protected him,” one Seahawk says. “And we hated that. Any time he f----- up, Pete would never say anything. Not in a team meeting, not publicly, never. If Russ had a terrible game, he would always talk about how resilient he was. We’re like, what the f--- are you talking about?”
That Seahawk uses a pack of wolves as an analogy to explain his thinking. It’s as if Carroll sent his pack out to hunt but kept one wolf back, and that wolf still ate when the others returned with food. “We talked about that,” says Tony McDaniel, a defensive tackle with Seattle in 2013, ’14 and ’16. “Russell had his f----ups; he never got called out. If I was Pete Carroll, I’d tell Russell, I have to call you out in front of the team so there won’t be any problems.”
One former Seahawk says he and a handful of teammates speculated that Carroll judged Wilson too emotionally fragile to handle the criticism, be it from them or his coaches. That presented Carroll with a difficult choice: between the environment he’d fostered and the franchise quarterback he’d found in the third round. He chose the quarterback, the former player says—a choice many coaches would have made—adding “[Carroll] realized Russ couldn’t handle being part of the dynamic we had.”
Not every teammate felt that way. Some noted that it’s in Carroll’s nature to stress the positive, quarterback or not. But roughly half the locker room had issues, according to its inhabitants. Some complaints were pettier than others: that Wilson had his own space for treatment in the facility, which some thought was off-limits to his teammates and others insist was not; or that he didn’t interact with other players at the team’s annual Christmas party.
Jonathan Ferrey for Sports Illustrated
All these accusations, though, spoke to the same theme: that Wilson was both treated differently than his teammates and, in some instances, willingly stood apart from them. When McDaniel arrived in Seattle in ’13, he went to dinner with several defensive players and asked them why things seemed off between the defense and the quarterback. He was told by those players to be careful speaking frankly when Wilson was around, because they believed what they said could wind up on Carroll’s desk.
The players said that had already happened—subjects that had been discussed in the QB’s presence had come to the attention of Carroll, an assertion four other players who spoke to SI also made. “When guys would talk candidly in front of Russell, somehow all that stuff got up to Pete,” one player said. “And after a while, after a few instances, everyone started noticing that, and everyone made sure not to talk about anything that could be misconstrued near Russell.”
Some also dispute that Wilson puts in the work necessary to earn his status with the team and in NFL at large, believing he has prioritized his business interests over football. Others at Seahawks headquarters disavow that characterization. Their opposition speaks to the sort of polarizing presence Wilson had become in Renton.
(Asked to comment on all specific incidents in this story, Wilson declined through the team and his representatives. The Seahawks also declined to comment.)
CBS Sports
The same players also cite much larger, more pertinent issues. Such as after the 2014 NFC Championship Game against the Packers, when Wilson was invited to the podium at the 50-yard-line after having thrown four interceptions in the game. The Seahawks had just pulled off a miracle comeback, with the defense limiting Aaron Rodgers to 178 passing yards and intercepting him twice.
Multiple defensive players had gutted through injuries, and yet it was Wilson who received the most praise, and Wilson whom Carroll saluted in team meetings that next week as having saved the season. “That’s when guys really started to notice the lack of accountability,” says one former player. “Before that, if guys made mistakes or we lost games, guys took responsibility for it, for good or for bad. We started losing that.”
All of this came, remarkably, before the crushing Super Bowl defeat, before Wilson drove the Seahawks to the 1-yard-line in the game’s final minute against the Patriots, giving Seattle a chance to win. That Wilson threw an interception mattered less than the fact that the Seahawks had called a pass play on second down.
Many who lamented how Wilson was treated differently now believed, truly believed, that Carroll had called a pass play to give Wilson a better chance to win the Super Bowl MVP award and decrease Marshawn Lynch’s chances, perhaps conveniently ignoring that offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell might have actually called the play.
Regardless, the players say, that call contradicted what Carroll always said publicly: that he wanted to run the ball and play great defense, that that’s how he built the Seahawks—to be tough and stop foes and let Lynch bulldoze Seattle to victory after victory.
Again, several players felt that Carroll said one thing and did another, and this time it had cost them a repeat Super Bowl title. (Such a view disregards the fact that the Seahawks defense missed 18 tackles and allowed the Patriots 196 yards-after-catch in the game.)
“That’s when some guys started to openly question whether [Carroll] believed in his philosophy,” says Avril, who says he still trusted the coach at that point. “Guys started to be like, do you even believe what you’re saying?”
Some Seahawks still remember every detail from that night. Sherman pacing back and forth, wearing his frustration into the carpet in that locker room in Arizona. Lynch, fully dressed, downing a bottle of cognac, saying “These motherf------ robbed me,” and “f--- this,” over and over. “If we gave the ball to the soul of our team and we lose, f--- it, we lose,” one Seahawk says. “Point-blank, period. You lost doing what you do best. But he gave it to Russ. I didn’t believe the MVP thing at first. But now I wonder. It’s at least plausible.”
YouTube
“That one play changed the whole locker room,” McDaniel says. “When Pete would give a speech or try for a heart-to-heart, people just stopped responding. They didn’t know who to trust anymore.”
Rather than acknowledge the rift, though, these Seahawks say Carroll doubled down on Wilson in 2015. The quarterback took members of the offense and defense to Hawaii for a retreat before that season, to, according to sources, repair any lingering issues. But some lingered. “A lot of people felt like he was doing that to save face,” says one player who was there. “We were like, What is this? Why are we here? He was disingenuous."
It wasn’t just Seattle’s handling of Wilson that irked the locker room. The Seahawks had previously made difficult decisions around the likes of Bruce Irvin, Red Bryant, Brandon Mebane and Malcolm Smith, among other key contributors.
Many of those moves were accepted as part of routine NFL business—the team did have to pay Sherman, Thomas, Baldwin, Wilson and many others, after all —but over time, after the Seahawks released or dealt several of their top leaders, the sense that competition would prevail over all else began to fade. What had felt so unique to Seattle for players who had spent time elsewhere—a true sense of meritocracy, absent favoritism for high-priced free agents or high draft picks—was eroding.
An early move that bothered some was the release of McDaniel, a favorite of the defensive vets, after the 2014 season. “Tony did all this dirty work,” says one former Seahawks defensive starter. “I don’t think people on the outside really recognized how valuable he was. Nobody in that locker room understood why we cut him.”
McDaniel was eventually brought back, in 2016, finding himself in a time-share with other players whom he argues he was outperforming. “I was one of the guys who came in, put my hat on and went to work. Didn’t complain, didn’t say much,” he says. “The eye in the sky don’t lie. They started letting guys in front of me who I knew clearly weren’t better than me play. It frustrated me that they were favoring guys they drafted. I came off an eight-tackle game and they would bench me.”
Players who spoke to Sports Illustrated said the preference for younger, underperforming players over quality veterans was most apparent in the career arc of one lineman: Germain Ifedi, the Texas A&M offensive tackle whom Schneider and Carroll drafted 31st overall in 2016. The opportunities Ifedi has enjoyed while consistently grading out poorly have irked veterans who wonder why the Seahawks won’t bring in free-agent competition or promote other players to challenge him.
Retaining wide receiver Tanner McEvoy at the expense of Kasen Williams in 2017 angered the defensive backs and some receivers who were intimately familiar with the abilities of both. Three leaders even went to Seahawks management in protest. “Like, what the f--- are y’all doing?” says one. “Because you’re not building a winning team when you’re making those decisions.” (The Seahawks cut McEvoy this summer; he signed with the Dolphins. Williams is currently a free agent.)
It’s not unusual, of course, for players to take issue when their favorite teammates are released. It’s possible, too, that Carroll figured Wilson would be at his best when protected, that he needed more protection than the brash members of his defense, who could reasonably be expected to perform no matter what.
Also possible: that Seattle looked at its roster, saw an aging defense, and decided to build around a young, in-his-prime QB. But even then, that’s not how the moves went over to those critical of Wilson in the locker room. Stitched together, they became something else, something bigger: a broken system.
“Everything they preached about competition stopped being true,” says one former Seahawk. “It wasn’t like that anymore. The Kasen Williams move was one. The way they treated the running back situation for years, the offensive line. They would draft offensive lineman high and tell them, You’re a leader now. No, you earn that. It all became artificial.”
Getty Images
Those decisions, on top of Carroll’s refusal to publicly check Wilson in any setting, public or private, chipped away at the coach’s once-renowned ability to motivate a wide range of personalities, according to the players who spoke to SI. Carroll’s mantras, which consistently buttressed his motivational talks—“Always Compete,” “Practice is Everything”—began to ring hollow.
Players who lamented the shift focused on Wilson, which other Seahawks believed was unfounded and unfair. Did Thomas still have to earn his spot? they ask. Did Sherman? The week following a December 2016 loss to the Packers, Sherman and Bennett nearly came to blows over Wilson.
The quarterback threw five interceptions against a defense that finished 31st in passing yards allowed that season, and Sherman, a member of the unofficial player leadership huddle of which Wilson was not a part, proposed confronting Wilson in a private setting to ask what the issue was, as they'd routinely do with other players when performance dipped.
“That was a common thing to do, because often it was some outside factor affecting guys, family stuff, and you’d work through that,” one former player says. But Bennett took issue, reminding Sherman that they only had one quarterback. The confrontation escalated to the point where the two needed to be separated. Toward the end of that ’16 season, Sherman’s complaints became louder and more public, and they clearly dated back to what had happened in the Super Bowl defeat. In private, what he said was even worse.
The notion that quarterbacks will be treated differently, even should be, is not new. But Aaron Rodgers goes out of his way to include teammates in promotional spots, and Bill Belichick regularly shoots verbal barbs at Tom Brady during film sessions. Incidentally, neither of those teams fielded defenses with as many stars as the Seahawks once boasted, and that’s why the dynamic in Seattle was different than in New England or Green Bay.
“You’re not going to talk crazy to Tom Brady at practice,” Avril says. “You’re not going to talk crazy to Aaron Rodgers at practice. You might get kicked out of practice if you do that. To me it’s absurd to think a quarterback will be treated the same all the time. There’s a hierarchy in every thing. So why wouldn’t they expect the same for this guy?
“The problem is,” Avril continues, “at one point we were allowed, people were allowed to talk trash to him.” Then, after 2014, they weren’t.
For years, Avril says, he warned his teammates, friends and acquaintances alike. All the public and private complaints, the sideline antics, the defensive players calling out the offensive coordinator—the personalities that Carroll sometimes referred to as the Seahawks’ “celebration of uniqueness”—all that would only be tolerated to a point.
“When you start losing, people feel like they’re losing control of the team,” Avril says. “Or they feel like they’re losing control of people on the team. You get away with that when you’re winning.” If not, change. Hence the 2018 offseason.
Of course, the Seahawks dropped five of their last nine games in 2017, as the young Rams ascended to the top of an NFC West division that had long been controlled by Seattle and its mighty defense. Players who had grown accustomed to the old way admittedly started to check out.
Bennett took to reading books in some team meetings. Sherman’s sideline exclamations became increasingly animated. “Too many people with opinions,” says one former defensive starter. That’s when some players took to referring to the Seahawks as the Titanic. Then, as predicted, ship hit iceberg.
Sherman strained his Achilles in practice before a Thursday night game in November against Arizona, then tore it in the third quarter while accelerating out of a break. That night would mark both Sherman’s and Chancellor’s last game in a Seahawks uniform; for Chancellor, his last in any uniform.
That the injuries happened on the same field where the Seahawks had lost to the Patriots in the Super Bowl was not lost on some players; not only had a potential dynasty died on a football field in Glendale, Ariz., now the Legion of Boom had, too. “I just remember feeling so demoralized, like f---,” one Seahawk says.
Getty Images
On that night in Arizona, an era ended. “It was like, it’s over,” that Seahawk says. Change came, as predicted. After the Sherman injury, veteran players even began preparing for their exits. Bennett repeatedly told his best friend, Avril, that he expected to be traded or released. In December, during what he thought was a private moment with Cowboys coach Jason Garrett after a game against Dallas, Thomas was caught on camera telling the coach, “If y’all got the chance to come get me, come get me.”
To his credit, Wilson played well down the stretch, without much help from his offensive line. His 34 touchdown passes matched his career high from 2015, and he threw for 3,983 yards and ran for 575 more, the second-highest total of his career. In his first six seasons, he’d thrown for more touchdowns (161) than Matt Ryan (153) or Cam Newton (136) had in that same timeframe. As teammates complained, Wilson received MVP consideration.
They’d argue that they weren’t complaining about Wilson’s statistics or production, but rather how Carroll handled him and how that changed the locker room dynamic, making the Seahawks less competitive and leading several prominent players to question their head coach. “All good things come to an end,” Bennett told Avril more than once last fall.
He was right. The season finished, and the playoffs started without the Seahawks for the first time since the 2011 season. Carroll fired his offensive coordinator, longtime fan non-favorite Bevell, and his defensive coordinator, Legion of Boom favorite Kris Richard, along with several other coaches.
Many in the locker room wondered if Brian Schottenheimer had been named offensive coordinator specifically to better align Wilson with his teammates. Then, the purge. One Seahawk felt it necessary to tell Duane Brown, the left tackle Seattle traded for last season and signed to an extension this spring, “It’s not usually like this.”
Ultimately, the Seahawks made the same bet as Carroll. They bet on Wilson, at least for the next two years, when he’s under contract, then built around him, hoping to gain by what they subtracted from their locker room, to get younger, more cohesive, to recapture the magic they found in 2012. Some of Wilson’s greatest critics, and even some of his defenders, are gone now, and these Seahawks are clearly his team moving forward.
Remaining Seahawks argue that keeping the core of the defense intact this season would have been impossible, regardless, with Bennett turning 32 and Sherman turning 30 and Avril and Chancellor forced into retirement. All players think they can play five years longer than they actually can, they argue, citing the longer prime that Wilson has left. But that doesn’t make the end of an era any less sudden—or lessen the pain of what could have been.
“Hell, no,” Wright says, when asked if he expected the defense would be dismantled as quickly as it came apart. “I thought we were going to ride off into the sunset together. I definitely didn’t see it falling apart that fast. I thought it would last another three or four years.”
Publicly, the principals remaining in Seattle—Schneider, Carroll and Wilson—have maintained that there’s been no shift in philosophy, no effort to empower and insulate the quarterback, and that their current roster is a group on the rise, much like the 2012 Seahawks. Asked by SI in general terms about the upcoming season and all the turnover back in August, all sounded optimistic.
The expectation for excellence, Wilson said then, hasn’t waned as the veterans who helped establish it have departed. “The standard was set a long time ago,” Wilson told SI, “and it’s still there from Day 1 when we started practicing this year. The standard is super high. The standard is to practice at the highest level, and do everything we can to win.”
Asked in training camp whether 2018 feels different at team headquarters, Wilson said then that not much had changed. “There are definitely some different faces out there, but it really doesn’t [feel different]. Coach Carroll does a tremendous job of being consistent every day. He does a tremendous job of making sure the culture is the way that we want it to be—a culture of excellence, a culture of love, a culture of guys who love the game.”
Carroll told SI as part of those earlier August interviews he believes the Seahawks can build a champion with the guys in the locker room right now, and that some are destined to become household names, and that Wilson is “the best he’s ever been,” on and off the field.
“Nobody knew who Richard was or who Kam was back in the day,” Carroll said then, “and there are guys in that room right now that they’re going to know about in time. It’s thrilling. … We’ve got extraordinary performance and leadership ability from the QB spot. I don’t know what [the critics] are thinking.”
“It’s a dope opportunity, in my opinion,” Wagner said then, echoing his coach.
The answers will come in 2018. Winning, as Avril says, masks deficiencies in the process. If Carroll deliberately shifted the power from a locker room full of outspoken Pro Bowlers to the talented passer who didn’t have the full respect of that locker room—as many current and former players believe he has done—the one and only thing that will justify that transition is to win. “Now you’re tied to him,” one Seahawk told management this spring.
Just four years removed from reaching the pinnacle of the sport, this the state of Seattle’s NFL team, on the verge of another season. Blame the salary cap. Blame ego. Blame age and injury. Blame success. Just know that many of the principals, especially those who remain, don’t think this version of the Titanic is foundering just yet.
“Wait and see,” the ever-optimistic Carroll told SI. “I ain’t worried one bit.”
With reporting from Albert Breer.
Blythe Ready to Fill In at Right Guard
- By tomas
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 37 Replies
Thursday, Sep 06, 2018
Blythe Ready to Fill In at Right Guard
https://www.therams.com/news/blythe-ready-to-fill-in-at-right-guard
Myles Simmons
RAMS INSIDER
When the league announced that right guard Jamon Brown had been suspended for Los Angeles’ first two games of the regular season, there was one clear candidate to replace him.
Offensive lineman Austin Blythe has been with the Rams since the 2017 offseason program when the club claimed him off waivers from the Colts. He appeared in a few games last season, successfully subbing in as a center or guard when needed.
Brown still took the vast majority of reps at right guard during training camp — indicating that he’ll reclaim that starting role once his suspension ends in Week 3 — Blythe will be the man between center John Sullivan and right tackle Rob Havenstien on the Rams’ offensive line until that time.
Head coach Sean McVay indicated as much in somewhat of an offhand way on Sunday, when he mentioned Los Angeles is “expecting Austin Blythe to step in and do a great job at that right guard spot.” And the Rams’ unofficial depth chart — released on Wednesday — seemed to confirm that, as it has Blythe listed as the starting right guard with no one behind him s a backup.
Prior to Thursday’s practice, run game coordinator/offensive line coach Aaron Kromer said the Rams “have the ultimate confidence in Austin Blythe.”
Why is that?
“When he’s had to fill in in the past, it's been at guard. He's been training at center and he's been doing a good job training in a multi-position situation where he's left guard, center and right guard,” Kromer said. “This is going to give him the opportunity to play at right guard and we expect a lot of good things out of Austin. We think he can run and pass protect.”
Blythe has started two games in his career — one as a rookie for the Colts back in 2016, and then the Week 17 contest against the 49ers last year. Plus, Blythe was often practicing with the first-team offensive line early in the week in 2017 because Los Angeles would rest the veteran Sullivan to keep him fresh for gameday.
Blythe and Havenstein both said that work has made the transition fairly seamless.
“I think that helps a lot,” Blythe said. “I can slow myself down at guard knowing what I’m supposed to do before John even says the idea and stuff like that. So being able to learn from those guys and take those reps was huge for me in my development.”
“It’s not like he’s a brand-new guy. So, obviously, the comfort is there,” Havenstein said. “Plus, the fact that he has played center, too, so he knows what all the calls are and everything like that. So he’s a guy you can really rely on. So I think that’s a testament to him. He’s done a great job this year of evolving his game, and I think it’s really going to show.”
In a recent interview with therams.com, Kromer credited Sullivan for taking Blythe under his wing and teaching Blythe the nuances of the game. According to Kromer, that veteran mentorship helped to advance Blythe’s game in a short amount of time.
And then there’s the skillset and technique that Blythe has displayed over the course of his time with the Rams. Kromer says that is what sets Blythe apart.
“Austin’s extremely quick, and for a guy that’s not 330 pounds, he has a lot of power and leverage,” Kromer told therams.com. “And you wouldn’t consider him powerful until you watch him play, and watch him use his leverage to his advantage, and get under players, and be able to control bigger guys that just seeing him, you wouldn’t think he’d be able to do. But he has the combination of quickness, smarts, and strength.”
While Los Angeles’ first-team offensive line did not receive any snaps during the preseason, Kromer said the Rams have created stressful conditions in practice to get the unit to jell with Blythe in place.
“What we've done in practice is this, we've amped up the volume to a point where it's louder than most stadiums — where we can't hear the call next to us and we can't communicate verbally, but we can communicate visually,” Kromer said Thursday. “I think with all that work that we are hardened to a point like we've played in games due to the practice style that we've had.”
All that adds up to Blythe feeling like he’ll be able to excel at right guard starting with the Week 1 contest in Oakland.
“I feel really good, really confident,” Blythe said. “I think it’s a testament to coach Kromer and the guys in the room. I just feel prepared. I feel confident in my abilities, the techniques that we’re taught. And I’m really excited for Monday night.
Blythe Ready to Fill In at Right Guard
https://www.therams.com/news/blythe-ready-to-fill-in-at-right-guard
Myles Simmons
RAMS INSIDER
When the league announced that right guard Jamon Brown had been suspended for Los Angeles’ first two games of the regular season, there was one clear candidate to replace him.
Offensive lineman Austin Blythe has been with the Rams since the 2017 offseason program when the club claimed him off waivers from the Colts. He appeared in a few games last season, successfully subbing in as a center or guard when needed.
Brown still took the vast majority of reps at right guard during training camp — indicating that he’ll reclaim that starting role once his suspension ends in Week 3 — Blythe will be the man between center John Sullivan and right tackle Rob Havenstien on the Rams’ offensive line until that time.
Head coach Sean McVay indicated as much in somewhat of an offhand way on Sunday, when he mentioned Los Angeles is “expecting Austin Blythe to step in and do a great job at that right guard spot.” And the Rams’ unofficial depth chart — released on Wednesday — seemed to confirm that, as it has Blythe listed as the starting right guard with no one behind him s a backup.
Prior to Thursday’s practice, run game coordinator/offensive line coach Aaron Kromer said the Rams “have the ultimate confidence in Austin Blythe.”
Why is that?
“When he’s had to fill in in the past, it's been at guard. He's been training at center and he's been doing a good job training in a multi-position situation where he's left guard, center and right guard,” Kromer said. “This is going to give him the opportunity to play at right guard and we expect a lot of good things out of Austin. We think he can run and pass protect.”
Blythe has started two games in his career — one as a rookie for the Colts back in 2016, and then the Week 17 contest against the 49ers last year. Plus, Blythe was often practicing with the first-team offensive line early in the week in 2017 because Los Angeles would rest the veteran Sullivan to keep him fresh for gameday.
Blythe and Havenstein both said that work has made the transition fairly seamless.
“I think that helps a lot,” Blythe said. “I can slow myself down at guard knowing what I’m supposed to do before John even says the idea and stuff like that. So being able to learn from those guys and take those reps was huge for me in my development.”
“It’s not like he’s a brand-new guy. So, obviously, the comfort is there,” Havenstein said. “Plus, the fact that he has played center, too, so he knows what all the calls are and everything like that. So he’s a guy you can really rely on. So I think that’s a testament to him. He’s done a great job this year of evolving his game, and I think it’s really going to show.”
In a recent interview with therams.com, Kromer credited Sullivan for taking Blythe under his wing and teaching Blythe the nuances of the game. According to Kromer, that veteran mentorship helped to advance Blythe’s game in a short amount of time.
And then there’s the skillset and technique that Blythe has displayed over the course of his time with the Rams. Kromer says that is what sets Blythe apart.
“Austin’s extremely quick, and for a guy that’s not 330 pounds, he has a lot of power and leverage,” Kromer told therams.com. “And you wouldn’t consider him powerful until you watch him play, and watch him use his leverage to his advantage, and get under players, and be able to control bigger guys that just seeing him, you wouldn’t think he’d be able to do. But he has the combination of quickness, smarts, and strength.”
While Los Angeles’ first-team offensive line did not receive any snaps during the preseason, Kromer said the Rams have created stressful conditions in practice to get the unit to jell with Blythe in place.
“What we've done in practice is this, we've amped up the volume to a point where it's louder than most stadiums — where we can't hear the call next to us and we can't communicate verbally, but we can communicate visually,” Kromer said Thursday. “I think with all that work that we are hardened to a point like we've played in games due to the practice style that we've had.”
All that adds up to Blythe feeling like he’ll be able to excel at right guard starting with the Week 1 contest in Oakland.
“I feel really good, really confident,” Blythe said. “I think it’s a testament to coach Kromer and the guys in the room. I just feel prepared. I feel confident in my abilities, the techniques that we’re taught. And I’m really excited for Monday night.
Grading every position on the Rams roster in 2018
- By Prime Time
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 7 Replies
https://theramswire.usatoday.com/2018/09/06/nfl-los-angeles-rams-roster-grade-position-2018/
Grading every position on the Rams roster in 2018
By: Cameron DaSilva
Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images
The Los Angeles Rams have one of the best rosters in the NFL heading into 2018, particularly after re-tooling and revamping many parts of the depth chart.
With the regular season upon us, we’ve decided to grade every position on the 53-man roster, from quarterback to special teams.
Quarterback: B
Even though he made the Pro Bowl last season, and even though he posted a passer rating above 100, Goff hasn’t yet cemented his spot among the NFL’s elite – among the “A” class quarterbacks. He’s well on his way to reaching that plateau after throwing 28 touchdown passes and seven interceptions, but he’s just not there yet. This season could be the one where he takes a massive step forward and becomes one of the best passers in the NFL.
This group’s grade takes a hit because of the lack of talent behind Goff, too. Sean Mannion and Brandon Allen offer very little as backups, giving fans and the coaching staff very little confidence if Goff were to go down.
Running back: A+
Gurley proved any remaining doubters wrong last season after a rough 2016 campaign, leading the league in yards from scrimmage and touchdowns. He’s established as one of the three or four best backs in the NFL, which earns the Rams’ backfield an A+ grade on its own. Gurley can catch passes out of the backfield, line up as a wide receiver, carry the ball 25 times a game. Oh, and he didn’t miss a single block in pass protection last year.
Behind Gurley are Malcolm Brown, John Kelly and Justin Davis. They each offer their own skill sets, but Kelly is the best of the bunch. He should be RB2 by season’s end and could have a significant impact this year.
Wide receiver: A-
The Rams may not have a dominant No. 1 receiver like DeAndre Hopkins, Antonio Brown or Julio Jones, but the group as a whole is one of the best in the NFL. Brandin Cooks will be a big upgrade over Sammy Watkins, while Robert Woods and Cooper Kupp will both be good for 60-plus catches and 700 yards each.
Few teams are as set at the top of their wide receiver depth chart the way the Rams are, but they also have good backups in Josh Reynolds, Mike Thomas and Pharoh Cooper. Cooks still has to show he’s worth the big contract he just signed, but even if he doesn’t produce at an elite level, the Rams’ other receivers will step up.
Tight end: C+
The only weak link on offense is at tight end. Tyler Higbee could be poised for a breakout season, as might Gerald Everett, but neither has established himself as a true No. 1 tight end. Everett’s shoulder injury set him back quite a bit this offseason, putting a hold on his potential breakout season.
With Watkins gone, Higbee and Everett could both become go-to red zone weapons for Goff. They’re the only big-bodied receivers not named Josh Reynolds and Goff could take advantage of their size in the tight quarters around the end zone.
Offensive line: A-
Andrew Whitworth isn’t as good as he once was, but he still plays at a very high level given his age. Rodger Saffold might be the Rams’ best offensive lineman despite not getting much credit as such, proving to be an outstanding run blocker last season.
At center, John Sullivan continues to plug along as a veteran leader in the middle of the offense, helping Goff with pre-snap signals and reads at the line. Jamon Brown is the weakest lineman on the team, but he’ll be swapped out for Austin Blythe the first two weeks of the season and isn’t guaranteed to get his job back when he returns from suspension.
Rob Havenstein is freshly signed to an extension, earning the trust of the front office and coaching staff as a quality right tackle.
As for the backups, they’re filled with rookies Joseph Noteboom will be the swing tackle, Jamil Demby can play just about any position and Brian Allen will back up Sullivan at center. This is a deep group with long-term potential.
Defensive line: A+
Good luck finding a better defensive line than the Rams’. Aaron Donald and Ndamukong Suh will come together at each tackle spot to generate pressure from the interior, giving the Rams arguably the best tandem in the league. At defensive end, Michael Brockers often goes overlooked but is consistently a force against the run and pass.
The Rams probably don’t have as much depth as they would like, but John Franklin-Myers and Sebastian Joseph-Day are both rookies, while Ethan Westbrooks had a standout preseason. Their starters alone make this one of the best defensive lines in the league, be it a 3-4 or 4-3 scheme.
Inside linebacker: C+
As good as Los Angeles is in the middle of its front, the second level isn’t quite as strong. Mark Barron and Cory Littleton will be the staring inside linebackers, which should concern some fans given Barron’s durability questions and Littleton’s inexperience. If they can both progress and step up, the Rams’ defense will be substantially better against the run than it was in 2017.
Micah Kiser, Ramik Wilson and Bryce Hager are solid insurance policies as backups and could find themselves starting at some point this season. There are a lot of just average players in this group, but at least the Rams have solid depth to work with.
Outside linebacker: C
Few people outside of Los Angeles even know who Samson Ebukam and Matt Longacre are, but they’ll be the Rams’ starting outside linebackers. Ebukam has a boatload of potential with his athleticism and speed on the edge, but he didn’t record a single sack in the preseason despite being used heavily.
Longacre battled a biceps injury during camp and the preseason and has had durability issues in the past, so there’s a good chance he won’t be able to start all 16 games. The Rams’ backups don’t offer much, either. Ogbonnia Okoronkwo is on the PUP list, Trevon Young and Justin Lawler are unproven rookies and Dominique Easley is just now trying to transition to outside linebacker from defensive tackle.
Cornerback: A
The cornerback group has a similar feel to the defensive line in the way that it’s loaded with talent. Marcus Peters and Aqib Talib join forces after offseason trades, while Nickell Robey-Coleman will continue to man the slot. That’s as good as a trio gets at cornerback, assuming everyone stays healthy and plays up to standards.
Sam Shields and Troy Hill will be the primary backups despite being capable of starting for a bunch of other teams in the NFL. That’s how stacked the Rams’ secondary is.
Safety: A-
Even though some may not know the names of Lamarcus Joyner and John Johnson, don’t let their lack of star power lead you to believe the Rams are weak at safety. Joyner and Johnson can hold up against any safety tandem in the league right now despite them only having one season together in the secondary.
They can each play free or strong safety, cover receivers in the slot and lay the wood on ball carriers. Really, there’s nothing they can’t do, which is why they were both graded as top-15 safeties by PFF last season.
Marqui Christian is a hybrid safety-linebacker while Blake Countess can also play safety, but neither are players you want starting on defense.
Special teams: A+
From kicker to long snapper, the Rams are loaded on special teams. All four players on this unit made the Pro Bowl last season – Johnny Hekker, Greg Zuerlein, Pharoh Cooper and Jake McQuaide – proving to be arguably the best special teams group in the league. This unit remains completely intact for 2018.
Grading every position on the Rams roster in 2018
By: Cameron DaSilva
Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images
The Los Angeles Rams have one of the best rosters in the NFL heading into 2018, particularly after re-tooling and revamping many parts of the depth chart.
With the regular season upon us, we’ve decided to grade every position on the 53-man roster, from quarterback to special teams.
Quarterback: B
Even though he made the Pro Bowl last season, and even though he posted a passer rating above 100, Goff hasn’t yet cemented his spot among the NFL’s elite – among the “A” class quarterbacks. He’s well on his way to reaching that plateau after throwing 28 touchdown passes and seven interceptions, but he’s just not there yet. This season could be the one where he takes a massive step forward and becomes one of the best passers in the NFL.
This group’s grade takes a hit because of the lack of talent behind Goff, too. Sean Mannion and Brandon Allen offer very little as backups, giving fans and the coaching staff very little confidence if Goff were to go down.
Running back: A+
Gurley proved any remaining doubters wrong last season after a rough 2016 campaign, leading the league in yards from scrimmage and touchdowns. He’s established as one of the three or four best backs in the NFL, which earns the Rams’ backfield an A+ grade on its own. Gurley can catch passes out of the backfield, line up as a wide receiver, carry the ball 25 times a game. Oh, and he didn’t miss a single block in pass protection last year.
Behind Gurley are Malcolm Brown, John Kelly and Justin Davis. They each offer their own skill sets, but Kelly is the best of the bunch. He should be RB2 by season’s end and could have a significant impact this year.
Wide receiver: A-
The Rams may not have a dominant No. 1 receiver like DeAndre Hopkins, Antonio Brown or Julio Jones, but the group as a whole is one of the best in the NFL. Brandin Cooks will be a big upgrade over Sammy Watkins, while Robert Woods and Cooper Kupp will both be good for 60-plus catches and 700 yards each.
Few teams are as set at the top of their wide receiver depth chart the way the Rams are, but they also have good backups in Josh Reynolds, Mike Thomas and Pharoh Cooper. Cooks still has to show he’s worth the big contract he just signed, but even if he doesn’t produce at an elite level, the Rams’ other receivers will step up.
Tight end: C+
The only weak link on offense is at tight end. Tyler Higbee could be poised for a breakout season, as might Gerald Everett, but neither has established himself as a true No. 1 tight end. Everett’s shoulder injury set him back quite a bit this offseason, putting a hold on his potential breakout season.
With Watkins gone, Higbee and Everett could both become go-to red zone weapons for Goff. They’re the only big-bodied receivers not named Josh Reynolds and Goff could take advantage of their size in the tight quarters around the end zone.
Offensive line: A-
Andrew Whitworth isn’t as good as he once was, but he still plays at a very high level given his age. Rodger Saffold might be the Rams’ best offensive lineman despite not getting much credit as such, proving to be an outstanding run blocker last season.
At center, John Sullivan continues to plug along as a veteran leader in the middle of the offense, helping Goff with pre-snap signals and reads at the line. Jamon Brown is the weakest lineman on the team, but he’ll be swapped out for Austin Blythe the first two weeks of the season and isn’t guaranteed to get his job back when he returns from suspension.
Rob Havenstein is freshly signed to an extension, earning the trust of the front office and coaching staff as a quality right tackle.
As for the backups, they’re filled with rookies Joseph Noteboom will be the swing tackle, Jamil Demby can play just about any position and Brian Allen will back up Sullivan at center. This is a deep group with long-term potential.
Defensive line: A+
Good luck finding a better defensive line than the Rams’. Aaron Donald and Ndamukong Suh will come together at each tackle spot to generate pressure from the interior, giving the Rams arguably the best tandem in the league. At defensive end, Michael Brockers often goes overlooked but is consistently a force against the run and pass.
The Rams probably don’t have as much depth as they would like, but John Franklin-Myers and Sebastian Joseph-Day are both rookies, while Ethan Westbrooks had a standout preseason. Their starters alone make this one of the best defensive lines in the league, be it a 3-4 or 4-3 scheme.
Inside linebacker: C+
As good as Los Angeles is in the middle of its front, the second level isn’t quite as strong. Mark Barron and Cory Littleton will be the staring inside linebackers, which should concern some fans given Barron’s durability questions and Littleton’s inexperience. If they can both progress and step up, the Rams’ defense will be substantially better against the run than it was in 2017.
Micah Kiser, Ramik Wilson and Bryce Hager are solid insurance policies as backups and could find themselves starting at some point this season. There are a lot of just average players in this group, but at least the Rams have solid depth to work with.
Outside linebacker: C
Few people outside of Los Angeles even know who Samson Ebukam and Matt Longacre are, but they’ll be the Rams’ starting outside linebackers. Ebukam has a boatload of potential with his athleticism and speed on the edge, but he didn’t record a single sack in the preseason despite being used heavily.
Longacre battled a biceps injury during camp and the preseason and has had durability issues in the past, so there’s a good chance he won’t be able to start all 16 games. The Rams’ backups don’t offer much, either. Ogbonnia Okoronkwo is on the PUP list, Trevon Young and Justin Lawler are unproven rookies and Dominique Easley is just now trying to transition to outside linebacker from defensive tackle.
Cornerback: A
The cornerback group has a similar feel to the defensive line in the way that it’s loaded with talent. Marcus Peters and Aqib Talib join forces after offseason trades, while Nickell Robey-Coleman will continue to man the slot. That’s as good as a trio gets at cornerback, assuming everyone stays healthy and plays up to standards.
Sam Shields and Troy Hill will be the primary backups despite being capable of starting for a bunch of other teams in the NFL. That’s how stacked the Rams’ secondary is.
Safety: A-
Even though some may not know the names of Lamarcus Joyner and John Johnson, don’t let their lack of star power lead you to believe the Rams are weak at safety. Joyner and Johnson can hold up against any safety tandem in the league right now despite them only having one season together in the secondary.
They can each play free or strong safety, cover receivers in the slot and lay the wood on ball carriers. Really, there’s nothing they can’t do, which is why they were both graded as top-15 safeties by PFF last season.
Marqui Christian is a hybrid safety-linebacker while Blake Countess can also play safety, but neither are players you want starting on defense.
Special teams: A+
From kicker to long snapper, the Rams are loaded on special teams. All four players on this unit made the Pro Bowl last season – Johnny Hekker, Greg Zuerlein, Pharoh Cooper and Jake McQuaide – proving to be arguably the best special teams group in the league. This unit remains completely intact for 2018.
The Genius of Bill Walsh
- By Prime Time
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 12 Replies
As a Rams fan I absolutely detested this man. But major respect for what he did to turn around that franchise while he was there.
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https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/9/6/17822756/gridiron-genius-mike-lombardi-bill-walsh
The Genius of Bill Walsh
In an excerpt from his new book, ‘Gridiron Genius,’ former NFL general manager Michael Lombardi recalls the lasting insight of the former San Francisco 49ers head coach’s football philosophies
By Michael Lombardi
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AP Images/Ringer illustration
Bill wants a meeting.
Combine those two words — Bill and wants — and stuff happened; everyone who worked for the 49ers perked up, paying close attention to whatever came next. “Bill wants” could move mountains. “Bill wants” could make or break careers.
Just days before the critical 1987 draft, what Bill wanted was everyone on the 49ers staff crammed inside a second-floor office facility for an emergency meeting. The tiny impromptu conference room was no match for a “Bill wants” all-points bulletin. At my utterance of those two words every assistant in the building came running, which meant there weren’t nearly enough seats for everyone.
Luckily, Walsh was quick and to the point.
Bill wanted Steve Young.
We were all highly skeptical but also intrigued. A big part of Walsh’s genius was his uncanny ability to spot a quarterback in a crowd. Even from a distance and after only a few throws, he could sense immediately if a quarterback could run his offense. Guys like Walsh and Belichick are unusual this way: They can visualize how skill sets fit in their schemes in a way that both maximizes those abilities and fuels the system.
Walsh was secretive about that particular gift of his; he never shared what he saw. So he seemed like a railbird at the track who could discern the best horses just by studying their gait around the paddock. It might have been footwork, a kinetically clean throwing motion, the way a quarterback carried himself in the pocket, or, more likely, some mystical balance of several QB qualities floating around in his head — but whatever it was, Walsh knew it when he saw it.
In Walsh’s first season as the head coach and GM of the 49ers, in 1979, he took a trip to UCLA to work out Olympic hurdler turned wide receiver James Owens. Owens was incredibly fast, but Walsh wanted to see if he had the other skills necessary to be an NFL receiver. He forgot one small thing, though: He needed an arm to throw to the guy. As luck would have it Notre Dame’s quarterback, Joe Montana, was working out nearby, preparing for the draft, too. Walsh asked him to stop by.
I’m not exactly sure what Walsh zeroed in on that day with Montana, but after a few throws he was so focused on the quarterback that he practically forgot Owens was there. (As a talent evaluator you never want to rely on this kind of divine, or dumb, luck — accidentally borrowing a future Hall of Fame quarterback as a workout passer or, say, drafting Tom Brady in the sixth round — but you don’t want to be closed off to it, either. Heck, as great as he was and as seriously as he took his profession, Walsh wasn’t above a little scouting serendipity.)
Before the workout at UCLA began, Walsh was leaning toward drafting Stanford quarterback Steve Dils, who had played for Walsh and knew his offense inside and out. But after one or two routes at UCLA that day, Walsh knew he had found what he was looking for: his franchise quarterback.
Nearly a decade later, he needed to find another.
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Crown Archetype
Prior to the 1987 draft, I traveled to Indianapolis with Walsh for the NFL Combine. Part of my duties at my first NFL stop was to caddy around Walsh’s notebooks. This was the mid-1980s, and backpacks were an accessory for Marty McFly in Back to the Future, no one else. Coach Walsh was not a backpack kind of guy, anyway. But that was okay. It meant I had a good job — lugging around a huge briefcase stuffed with his things and mine — and lots of one-on-one time with “the man.”
As we entered the old Hoosier Dome that day, Walsh was in a hurry, striding with purpose toward our coaches in the stands who were there to evaluate the rookie class of quarterbacks. The whole idea of having to look for a quarterback put Walsh in a sour mood. The 1986 Niners had been injury plagued, especially at quarterback, and Walsh wasn’t sure how Montana would recover from back surgery. Walsh would never actually say it, but he sensed Montana was nearing the end.
As we hurried to our seats in the stands, Walsh stopped short and turned to stare at the field. Across the stadium a few of the rookie quarterbacks, including an unknown passer from Delaware, were already on the field working out. Walsh stood like a statue, as if he had gone into a trance.
I had no idea who or what was holding his attention until he turned to me and barked, “Make sure Holmgren goes to see that quarterback throwing right now.” In one glimpse across a field, Walsh had seen a level of athleticism and timing from Rich Gannon that it would take the rest of the NFL a decade to figure out.
When I relayed the news to our quarterbacks coach, Mike Holmgren, about Bill wanting (once again, “Bill wants”) him to travel to Newark, Delaware, he was none too happy, blaming mefor his itinerary, as he thought I had promoted the local boy. The charge was utterly false. Sure, as a South Jersey kid I had a fondness for all things from the Philadelphia area, but I wasn’t nearly bold enough to sell a Blue Hen quarterback to Walsh even if I wanted to. Walsh was the expert.
Holmgren did eventually go to Delaware, and he liked Gannon. But he didn’t love him (Gannon had prototype size and arm strength, but Delaware’s wing-T offense and the old Yankee Conference weren’t exactly ideal preparation for the NFL), and so Gannon was selected by the Patriots — to play defensive back.
Gannon had no interest in that, and after bouncing around the league from New England to Minnesota to Washington to Kansas City, he ended up paying off with the Raiders, under Jon Gruden, who finally inserted Gannon into the scheme that perfectly fit his skills: Walsh’s West Coast offense. In 2002, Gannon was named the NFL’s MVP after leading the Raiders out of nearly a decade of mediocrity and back to the Super Bowl.
I was with the Raiders staff at the time, and remembering how Walsh had spotted Gannon’s talent in an instant that day in Indiana, I couldn’t help but wonder just how many potentially great quarterbacks have wasted away in the wrong system. Would Gannon’s late-career success have happened much earlier if we had drafted him in San Francisco?
At the time, of course, Walsh really only had eyes for Steve Young.
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NFL
That was the message he wanted to relay to our entire staff inside that crowded second-floor conference room. As Walsh made his announcement, the faces of the assembled football minds were those of schoolboys who had sipped sour milk. Steve Young? The running QB? Steve Young who was a disaster as the quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers? That Steve Young?
A little background: Young’s college career was sensational. After leading the Brigham Young Cougars as a senior to an 11–1 record that included an impressive win over Missouri in theHoliday Bowl, he was the consensus top quarterback in the draft. But before that could happen J. William Oldenburg bought the Los Angeles team in the upstart United States Football League and gave Young one of the biggest sports contracts ever to lead it.
(The four-year deal negotiated by Young’s agent, Leigh Steinberg, appeared to be worth $40 million.) But then the league folded and Young signed with the Bucs, who selected him with the first pick in the 1984 supplemental draft of USFL talent. In two years in Tampa, though, Young displayed better running skills than passing skills, and the Bucs had seen enough to decide it was time to try someone new.
That meant Young would be a relatively cheap pickup (essentially costing a second rounder and a fourth rounder plus some of owner Edward DeBartolo Jr.’s hard-earned cash). Yes, the former most-sought-after player in football was on the bargain rack, mainly because every other “expert” in the league felt he would never fit the traditional role.
That included 99 percent of our staff. Now that Young is in Canton, there’s a lot of revisionist history about how he came to be a 49er. For starters, Walsh has said that once he informed DeBartolo about Young, the deal was done in “minutes.” The truth is that he labored over the decision. In fact, he eventually held that emergency meeting to get his staff’s opinion on the trade.
And though lots of people will claim they knew all along that Young was destined for greatness in the NFL, I’m here to tell you that when Walsh asked for a show of hands of those who supported making the deal, none went up.
Not one.
Walsh actually stormed out of the room — and made the deal anyway.
What Walsh knew better than anyone in the game was that the key to success in the passing era of the NFL was to marry the right quarterback to the right scheme. (It’s much harder than it sounds, trust me.) Most of the time, when the quarterback and the system clash, it’s the quarterback who goes. Walsh approached challenges like this one from an entirely different perspective. That’s why he had such a huge impact on the game.
Early on in his coaching career, when faced with a quarterback in Cincinnati who didn’t match his offense, Walsh flipped the script: He kept the quarterback and changed the offense instead, transforming the NFL along the way.
In 1968 Walsh was an assistant coach for the expansion Bengals. Besides his talent as an evaluator, Walsh was a deep thinker, a student of the game, and a problem solver. His specialty was counterintuition, and it helped him solve what appeared to be an insurmountable problem in Cincinnati: a roster of castoffs that featured much less talent than every other team in the league.
At that time, the NFL was still a run-dominated league; passing was a tactic of last resort. As former Ohio State coach Woody Hayes said, “Three things can happen when you attempt a pass, and two of them are bad.” Reliance on the forward pass was actually considered a bit cowardly. But the expansion Bengals had an undersized line and not much hope of generating a productive ground game. Walsh took a look at the dire situation and saw one thing: opportunity.
Whereas most coaches would have thought that moving the ball in Cincinnati would depend on either compiling a stronger roster or throwing the ball more often, Walsh sought a less obvious solution — and, most important, one that was likely to work. He had a player pool of parts — some good, some bad — and no chance in the short term to add anyone else to the mix. But if he couldn’t change his players, maybe he could change the offense.
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AP
In a story Walsh repeated many times, including in his posthumous book The Score Takes Care of Itself, the inspiration for his West Coast offense was the Bengals quarterback Virgil Carter. Carter was one of the first in the long line of great quarterbacks who played at Brigham Young.
At just over six feet, he was not an impressive physical specimen, yet he still set a host of school, conference, and NCAA records and led the Cougars to their first-ever conference title in 1965. Drafted by the Bears in 1967, he played 10 games in Chicago over two seasons, throwing 193 passes with 6 touchdowns and 10 interceptions, before being traded to the Bengals after the 1969 season.
Carter did not have a particularly strong arm, and that was a deal breaker for most teams. Much of the league gravitated toward cannon-armed throwers because passing attacks back then almost always came down to “everybody go long.” To this day, a quarterback who can’t throw with velocity usually doesn’t last. But Carter had a different kind of skill set and a demeanor that intrigued Walsh.
He was deadly accurate on short passes, physically and mentally nimble, and impervious to pressure. Walsh thought he could develop an offense around such a combination, one that would control the ball despite a useless running game. And controlling the ball enough — say, gaining 25 first downs a game — and playing well on special teams would put them in position to find a way to win at the end.
The Bengals couldn’t attack the defense vertically with strength the way everyone else did, so they would attack it horizontally with speed, using an intricately timed short passing game that essentially turned short passes into long handoffs. And just like that, as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak changed the world from inside that small garage in northern California, Walsh ushered in the future of football from a cramped office in Cincinnati.
A future that would come to be known as the West Coast offense: the last and perhaps greatest innovation in pro football, conceived in Middle America.
Weirdly, Walsh’s offensive success — and his unique perspective on the passing attack — stemmed in part from his experience as a defensive coach. (He was a defensive coordinator for Marv Levy at California and the defensive backfield coach at Stanford under John Ralston.) Belichick also used his defensive knowledge to design one of the most prolific offenses in modern football.
Both men understood the checks and adjustments that occurred within defensive schemes. They built a counterattack by knowing their enemy. Most coaches today have been trained on only one side of the ball. Because they don’t know both, they can’t always effectively game-plan against what the opposition is attempting.
Through his defensive lens, Walsh built a system that took into account the things Carter could offer: his football intelligence first and foremost. Football intelligence is way different from book smarts, but in this case Carter, an academic All American, had both. He quickly grasped the ins and outs of complex schemes, knowing what every defender was likely to do. He could do that because he was able to transfer what he learned in the classroom to the field.
That is what’s known as football smarts. Anyone can memorize a playbook. That’s checkers. The West Coast offense is chess, and it requires a quarterback who can instantly react, without thinking, to any of the dozen or so twists and disguises a defense throws at him before and after the snap. With his football smarts, after internalizing opponents’ tendencies in tape sessions, Carter could make those game-speed decisions and adjustments that are in and of themselves the nervous system of Walsh’s offense.
If Walsh’s quarterbacks needed to be quick-witted, they also needed to be quick-footed. The ability to throw in rhythm was the essential ingredient in his system. You see it when a quarterback releases the ball on the proper step of his drop, quickly, accurately, and in synchrony with the receiver’s route. In the West Coast offense, the passer’s and receiver’s footwork is synced up like that of dance partners.
As soon as Carter’s back foot planted at the end of his drop, his intended target would be coming out of his break. Think of the way an orchestra depends on each section of instruments working off the others. The attack that Walsh invented needed to be as finely tuned. He was forever reminding the quarterbacks to focus on their footwork, with each pass play requiring its own precise mechanics.
Walsh let the rest of the football world focus on a quarterback’s arm. He was focused on the feet. It was a paradigm shift born from his lifelong love of boxing. Walsh often shadowboxed his way down the halls of Niners headquarters, and whenever he found a fitting boxing metaphor to motivate his team, he was happy.
He broke down boxers as he watched fights: their footwork, their quickness, how they moved, timing, balance. Like a boxer who can throw a flurry of punches as he deftly shuffles his feet, Walsh’s quarterbacks needed their body parts to work in a similarly surgical unison. Quick feet, quick arm. Balanced feet, balanced arm. Coordinated feet, coordinated attack.
Every play in Walsh’s offense was designed around precise timing. All routes were synchronized such that as the quarterback hit his third (or fifth) step, the ball would be out of his hand and on to a ball catcher. That quick-hit rhythm solved one of the Bengals’ main weaknesses — blocking — by relieving the offensive line of having to hold blocks too long.
It also allowed the receiver to become a runner beyond the line of scrimmage, in stride and in the open field. As a result, Walsh’s offensive schemes elevated the relevance of yards after catch as they slowly transformed a run-first league into a pass-happy one.
Once again, though, Walsh and his new offense were the beneficiary of great luck: Just as the West Coast was developing, the NFL made several rule changes to encourage more passing and scoring. Offensive linemen were now allowed to extend their arms and use their hands in pass blocking (essentially legalized holding) to protect the passer, and defenders no longer could redirect receivers once they got beyond five yards of the line of scrimmage.
With more time to throw and with pass catchers free to run across the shallow part of the field — the bread and butter of Walsh’s scheme — the West Coast offense began to thrive and expand.
Walsh drew up one play after another, and before long he had a binder full of short passes that quickly got the ball out of Carter’s hand and to his receivers just as they reached an open seam in the defense. He sent all his skill position players out on routes, lining them up in unusual and changeable spots to stretch the field horizontally rather than vertically, the league norm. The alignments gave Carter a better presnap view of the defense. Walsh had created the ideal situation for a guy with a diagnostic mind and a quick, accurate arm.
I have come to believe that all great coaches think alike regardless of what sport they’re in. Basketball Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson made his fame with the triangle offense. Created by Sam Barry at the University of Southern California and enhanced by Tex Winter, an assistant on Jackson’s staff in Chicago and Los Angeles, the triangle was basketball’s way of creating clear passing lanes.
Simply described, when the ball is thrown into the post, that player and two others on the same side of the ball form the points of a well-spaced triangle. Walsh’s passing game was essentially the triangle on turf.
When you break down any of the fundamental plays of the West Coast offense, the same geometric shape forms inside the defense: a triangle. For example, say you have two backs in split formation in the backfield and the tight end on the line to the right.
Now, the Z receiver (the one on the tight end’s side) runs a 12-yard curl while the tight end runs to a spot that is exactly in front of the location of the snap when the play started, at a depth of five yards, where he can’t be legally bumped off his route. Meanwhile, one back swings out toward the sideline of the Z receiver’s curl. Hit pause and draw a line from that back to the Z receiver to the tight end and what do you get? An isosceles triangle.
The formation means the West Coast quarterback is never looking at a particular receiver. Rather, he looks toward the apex of the triangle and then decides where the ball should go, depending on the coverage or the spacing. Walsh hated to see quarterbacks locking in on a receiver early in his route because defenses can see that, too.
But when quarterbacks instead key on an area of the field — the triangle — defenders don’t quite know what or who they are guarding, especially if a receiver makes a late break, coming free just as the quarterback hits the launch step in his drop.
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Spacing, timing, and rhythm. Seems simple enough, but it actually put stagnant, slow defenses, unaccustomed to adaptation, at a huge disadvantage. So much so, in fact, that in the first year of the new offense — just the third year of the team’s existence — Carter, Walsh, and the Bengals won the AFC Central.
In so doing, Walsh had proved something revolutionary in the typically risk and innovation-averse NFL: that quarterbacks with a different skill set could lead successful attacks so long as the passer matched the scheme. When it comes to evaluating quarterbacks, pedigree and prototypical size, speed, and arm strength will always matter, but thanks to Walsh, things such as intelligence, poise, and precision also became important.
More than anything, Walsh coveted accuracy from his passers; it’s what allowed receivers the opportunity to run with the ball after the catch. If a tight end with his back turned to the defense was open in an empty zone, Walsh expected the quarterback to throw away from an oncoming defender to let the pass catcher know where that defender was and which way he should run to avoid him.
Fans of a certain age have the play known simply as “the Catch” indelibly etched in the part of their brain reserved for important historical moments. In the 1981 NFC championship game against the Cowboys, 49ers quarterback Joe Montana threw the ball so high and toward the back of the end zone that it almost appeared to be a throwaway. But that throwaway was in fact precisely where Walsh wanted it, because the only person who could catch it was receiver Dwight Clark.
For Walsh, throwing to the back end line always meant throwing high, whereas throwing near the goal line meant throwing low because, in both cases, the ball could be caught by a 49er or it would be incomplete. High throws near the goal line could be tipped and intercepted. For similar reasons, he was never a big believer in small receivers, because wing span and catch radius could only help the quarterback. He left no detail to chance, and all those details were harmoniously linked.
To push the game forward Walsh was constantly looking back through history for guidance and inspiration. Walsh pored over the old tapes of teams coached by Clark Shaughnessy, a longtime college mainstay and a big believer in the T formation — quarterback behind center, two running backs spread perpendicularly behind him — finding them intriguing even though there were few forward passes in any of them.
Rather, he watched for the blocking schemes, which set off offensive linemen at angles to defenders instead of having them face the rush head-on. Those side blocks made it easier for less talented players to seal off defenders while providing a more unobstructed path for the back to follow. Many disparaged the West Coast offense as more finesse than power, partially because angle blocks outnumbered drive blocks.
But helping players get an edge is not finesse; it’s just smart. Similarly, with the old T formation, the ball handling confused the linebackers, as they watched the ball instead of the blocking scheme, causing them to be slightly out of position. And in the run game, being even a little bit in the wrong spot can create a lane big enough for a back to scoot through.
In the end, though, the most significant influence for Walsh was his time spent with the Raiders. Oakland’s passing game — which, to be fair, was preceded by Sid Gillman’s air attack — was a precursor to the West Coast offense in the way it freed the linemen from having to protect the quarterback for too long through the use of short passes and quick releases.
Yes, Davis much preferred throwing the ball down the field, but he, too, believed strongly in the timing between quarterback and receiver. Everybody had to be in sync. That included tight ends and running backs, which in those days was a rarity. With those players involved, there were often five route runners who had to be covered, thus overwhelming defenses.
Of course, that was when things worked just right — which they rarely do. But even in the typical chaos that takes place on a football field, Walsh still managed to find something useful. In another story that Walsh loved to tell and write about, Cincinnati’s tight end Bob Trumpy, facing the Raiders, once broke the huddle and lined up on the right side instead of on the left, where the play called for him to be.
The quarterback shifted him to the other side in time to run the play correctly, and when Trumpy came to the sideline when the series was over, he was apologetic. The Bengals coaches, though, particularly the offensive line coach, Bill Johnson, barely heard him because they were still marveling at the fact that when Trumpy moved, four defenders followed him (and actually ran into one another in the confusion), which meant that when he ran back to where he was supposed to be, the Raiders were not where they were supposed to be.
Defenses always set their fronts and coverage packages against the strength of the offense — that is, the side on which the tight end lines up. When Trumpy moved, the strength of the defense moved, too, and when he moved back, it had to realign.
The shift added another complicated layer to the defense’s communication while forcing the defense to tip its hand just before the snap. Once Johnson and Walsh saw this, they knew they could mess with the defense — get it out of position and confuse its communication.
Thus, out of a broken play the shift was reborn as a major weapon in the West Coast offense.
Believe it or not, the run was also a weapon in Walsh’s new scheme. Walsh was weaned in a time when establishing the run was agreed to be the most critical component of winning football. But he was the first to realize that everyone was chasing a lie. He correctly understood that teams interested only in establishing the run were creating nothing more than a chance to kick a field goal.
Think about it: The odds of covering 80 yards, more or less, on the ground are not good; one negative play pretty much stalls a drive. One pass play of, say, 20 yards, though, dramatically changes field position and a team’s chances of driving to a touchdown. Walsh’s West Coast offense wasn’t anti-run.
He just wanted to run the ball with a creativity that would give the players the best chance to succeed. Running every play between the tackles was not for him. In fact, he saw the traditional run game as the lazy coach’s way, putting the onus on players to execute or rely on brute force for yardage. That was something Walsh always wanted to avoid.
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AP
That’s why Walsh’s teams — not to mention the best teams in football today — came out throwing. If you were to plot the rushing attempts of recent playoff teams by quarter, it would look like this: first quarter, a rush-to-pass percentage in the bottom third of the league; second quarter, same; third quarter, middle of the pack; fourth quarter, top third, more or less. Examine the regular-season breakdowns of the teams that made it to the Super Bowl after the 2016 season.
In the first half, the Patriots threw the ball 57 percent of the time and ran it 43 percent. The Falcons threw 61 percent of the time and rushed just 39 percent. But in the second half, the Pats were more 50/50, and the Falcons 54/46. Walsh was the first NFL coach to foresee the paradigm shift on offense and how the run one day would become more about preserving the lead than establishing it. (Maybe if the Falcons had stuck to the plan andrun the ball more in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LI they would have won the game.)
Old schoolers think establishing the run is a quarterback’s best friend. But what kind of a friend is third and long when everyone in the stadium knows you have to pass the ball? In truth, conservative play calling is a quarterback’s worst enemy.
The best thing an offense can do for its quarterback is throw on traditional run downs so that the QB doesn’t have to deal with obvious passing situations. Throwing the ball makes running the ball easier, and that’s how Walsh succeeded with the Bengals.
In the first few years of what was derisively called the dink-and-dunk offense, Walsh found success not so much in scoring points but in getting first downs and keeping the ball away from the opponent. Defenses were slow to adjust, continuing to play as if they were expecting the Bengals to throw down the field.
Pretty soon the defenses found themselves in even worse trouble as the Bengals added more talented pieces to the offense, receivers such as Isaac Curtis, Charlie Joiner, and Chip Myers, whose speed allowed Walsh to add a downfield element to his short game. The first-down machine had been transformed into a scoring machine.
Thanks to what Walsh did in Cincinnati, NFL teams started to think of their offenses the way baseball executives think of their stadiums. Baseball teams collect talent that makes the most sense for the quirks of their home parks. The Red Sox stockpile right-handed hitters because the Green Monster in left is so close. More cavernous stadiums become homes to speedier players. Stadiums dictate style. Same thing for football offenses.
Quarterbacks have to be slipped into systems that best feature their skills. Very, very few players can make a bad fit work. Too often, though, teams think that the player makes the system rather than the other way around. It sends them hunting for a guy with obvious tools — a gun for an arm, mobility — around whom they figure they will build an offense.
Walsh and his West Coast offense have proved that’s just not how it works.
Walsh always cautioned me: “Very few people can coach the quarterback, and even fewer can evaluate them.” After more than 30 years in football I can verify that that statement is 100 percent accurate. When it comes to the most important position in sports, biases, rationalizations, and willful ignorance all get in the way of dispassionate and accurate analysis. Even a genius like Walsh knew that it was an imperfect science with exceptions to every rule.
Adapted from GRIDIRON GENIUS: A MASTER CLASS IN WINNING CHAMPIONSHIPS AND BUILDING DYNASTIES IN THE NFL by Michael Lombardi. Copyright © 2018 by RFK LLC. To be published by Crown Archetype on September 11.
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https://www.theringer.com/nfl/2018/9/6/17822756/gridiron-genius-mike-lombardi-bill-walsh
The Genius of Bill Walsh
In an excerpt from his new book, ‘Gridiron Genius,’ former NFL general manager Michael Lombardi recalls the lasting insight of the former San Francisco 49ers head coach’s football philosophies
By Michael Lombardi
AP Images/Ringer illustration
Bill wants a meeting.
Combine those two words — Bill and wants — and stuff happened; everyone who worked for the 49ers perked up, paying close attention to whatever came next. “Bill wants” could move mountains. “Bill wants” could make or break careers.
Just days before the critical 1987 draft, what Bill wanted was everyone on the 49ers staff crammed inside a second-floor office facility for an emergency meeting. The tiny impromptu conference room was no match for a “Bill wants” all-points bulletin. At my utterance of those two words every assistant in the building came running, which meant there weren’t nearly enough seats for everyone.
Luckily, Walsh was quick and to the point.
Bill wanted Steve Young.
We were all highly skeptical but also intrigued. A big part of Walsh’s genius was his uncanny ability to spot a quarterback in a crowd. Even from a distance and after only a few throws, he could sense immediately if a quarterback could run his offense. Guys like Walsh and Belichick are unusual this way: They can visualize how skill sets fit in their schemes in a way that both maximizes those abilities and fuels the system.
Walsh was secretive about that particular gift of his; he never shared what he saw. So he seemed like a railbird at the track who could discern the best horses just by studying their gait around the paddock. It might have been footwork, a kinetically clean throwing motion, the way a quarterback carried himself in the pocket, or, more likely, some mystical balance of several QB qualities floating around in his head — but whatever it was, Walsh knew it when he saw it.
In Walsh’s first season as the head coach and GM of the 49ers, in 1979, he took a trip to UCLA to work out Olympic hurdler turned wide receiver James Owens. Owens was incredibly fast, but Walsh wanted to see if he had the other skills necessary to be an NFL receiver. He forgot one small thing, though: He needed an arm to throw to the guy. As luck would have it Notre Dame’s quarterback, Joe Montana, was working out nearby, preparing for the draft, too. Walsh asked him to stop by.
I’m not exactly sure what Walsh zeroed in on that day with Montana, but after a few throws he was so focused on the quarterback that he practically forgot Owens was there. (As a talent evaluator you never want to rely on this kind of divine, or dumb, luck — accidentally borrowing a future Hall of Fame quarterback as a workout passer or, say, drafting Tom Brady in the sixth round — but you don’t want to be closed off to it, either. Heck, as great as he was and as seriously as he took his profession, Walsh wasn’t above a little scouting serendipity.)
Before the workout at UCLA began, Walsh was leaning toward drafting Stanford quarterback Steve Dils, who had played for Walsh and knew his offense inside and out. But after one or two routes at UCLA that day, Walsh knew he had found what he was looking for: his franchise quarterback.
Nearly a decade later, he needed to find another.
Crown Archetype
Prior to the 1987 draft, I traveled to Indianapolis with Walsh for the NFL Combine. Part of my duties at my first NFL stop was to caddy around Walsh’s notebooks. This was the mid-1980s, and backpacks were an accessory for Marty McFly in Back to the Future, no one else. Coach Walsh was not a backpack kind of guy, anyway. But that was okay. It meant I had a good job — lugging around a huge briefcase stuffed with his things and mine — and lots of one-on-one time with “the man.”
As we entered the old Hoosier Dome that day, Walsh was in a hurry, striding with purpose toward our coaches in the stands who were there to evaluate the rookie class of quarterbacks. The whole idea of having to look for a quarterback put Walsh in a sour mood. The 1986 Niners had been injury plagued, especially at quarterback, and Walsh wasn’t sure how Montana would recover from back surgery. Walsh would never actually say it, but he sensed Montana was nearing the end.
As we hurried to our seats in the stands, Walsh stopped short and turned to stare at the field. Across the stadium a few of the rookie quarterbacks, including an unknown passer from Delaware, were already on the field working out. Walsh stood like a statue, as if he had gone into a trance.
I had no idea who or what was holding his attention until he turned to me and barked, “Make sure Holmgren goes to see that quarterback throwing right now.” In one glimpse across a field, Walsh had seen a level of athleticism and timing from Rich Gannon that it would take the rest of the NFL a decade to figure out.
When I relayed the news to our quarterbacks coach, Mike Holmgren, about Bill wanting (once again, “Bill wants”) him to travel to Newark, Delaware, he was none too happy, blaming mefor his itinerary, as he thought I had promoted the local boy. The charge was utterly false. Sure, as a South Jersey kid I had a fondness for all things from the Philadelphia area, but I wasn’t nearly bold enough to sell a Blue Hen quarterback to Walsh even if I wanted to. Walsh was the expert.
Holmgren did eventually go to Delaware, and he liked Gannon. But he didn’t love him (Gannon had prototype size and arm strength, but Delaware’s wing-T offense and the old Yankee Conference weren’t exactly ideal preparation for the NFL), and so Gannon was selected by the Patriots — to play defensive back.
Gannon had no interest in that, and after bouncing around the league from New England to Minnesota to Washington to Kansas City, he ended up paying off with the Raiders, under Jon Gruden, who finally inserted Gannon into the scheme that perfectly fit his skills: Walsh’s West Coast offense. In 2002, Gannon was named the NFL’s MVP after leading the Raiders out of nearly a decade of mediocrity and back to the Super Bowl.
I was with the Raiders staff at the time, and remembering how Walsh had spotted Gannon’s talent in an instant that day in Indiana, I couldn’t help but wonder just how many potentially great quarterbacks have wasted away in the wrong system. Would Gannon’s late-career success have happened much earlier if we had drafted him in San Francisco?
At the time, of course, Walsh really only had eyes for Steve Young.
NFL
That was the message he wanted to relay to our entire staff inside that crowded second-floor conference room. As Walsh made his announcement, the faces of the assembled football minds were those of schoolboys who had sipped sour milk. Steve Young? The running QB? Steve Young who was a disaster as the quarterback of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers? That Steve Young?
A little background: Young’s college career was sensational. After leading the Brigham Young Cougars as a senior to an 11–1 record that included an impressive win over Missouri in theHoliday Bowl, he was the consensus top quarterback in the draft. But before that could happen J. William Oldenburg bought the Los Angeles team in the upstart United States Football League and gave Young one of the biggest sports contracts ever to lead it.
(The four-year deal negotiated by Young’s agent, Leigh Steinberg, appeared to be worth $40 million.) But then the league folded and Young signed with the Bucs, who selected him with the first pick in the 1984 supplemental draft of USFL talent. In two years in Tampa, though, Young displayed better running skills than passing skills, and the Bucs had seen enough to decide it was time to try someone new.
That meant Young would be a relatively cheap pickup (essentially costing a second rounder and a fourth rounder plus some of owner Edward DeBartolo Jr.’s hard-earned cash). Yes, the former most-sought-after player in football was on the bargain rack, mainly because every other “expert” in the league felt he would never fit the traditional role.
That included 99 percent of our staff. Now that Young is in Canton, there’s a lot of revisionist history about how he came to be a 49er. For starters, Walsh has said that once he informed DeBartolo about Young, the deal was done in “minutes.” The truth is that he labored over the decision. In fact, he eventually held that emergency meeting to get his staff’s opinion on the trade.
And though lots of people will claim they knew all along that Young was destined for greatness in the NFL, I’m here to tell you that when Walsh asked for a show of hands of those who supported making the deal, none went up.
Not one.
Walsh actually stormed out of the room — and made the deal anyway.
What Walsh knew better than anyone in the game was that the key to success in the passing era of the NFL was to marry the right quarterback to the right scheme. (It’s much harder than it sounds, trust me.) Most of the time, when the quarterback and the system clash, it’s the quarterback who goes. Walsh approached challenges like this one from an entirely different perspective. That’s why he had such a huge impact on the game.
Early on in his coaching career, when faced with a quarterback in Cincinnati who didn’t match his offense, Walsh flipped the script: He kept the quarterback and changed the offense instead, transforming the NFL along the way.
In 1968 Walsh was an assistant coach for the expansion Bengals. Besides his talent as an evaluator, Walsh was a deep thinker, a student of the game, and a problem solver. His specialty was counterintuition, and it helped him solve what appeared to be an insurmountable problem in Cincinnati: a roster of castoffs that featured much less talent than every other team in the league.
At that time, the NFL was still a run-dominated league; passing was a tactic of last resort. As former Ohio State coach Woody Hayes said, “Three things can happen when you attempt a pass, and two of them are bad.” Reliance on the forward pass was actually considered a bit cowardly. But the expansion Bengals had an undersized line and not much hope of generating a productive ground game. Walsh took a look at the dire situation and saw one thing: opportunity.
Whereas most coaches would have thought that moving the ball in Cincinnati would depend on either compiling a stronger roster or throwing the ball more often, Walsh sought a less obvious solution — and, most important, one that was likely to work. He had a player pool of parts — some good, some bad — and no chance in the short term to add anyone else to the mix. But if he couldn’t change his players, maybe he could change the offense.
AP
In a story Walsh repeated many times, including in his posthumous book The Score Takes Care of Itself, the inspiration for his West Coast offense was the Bengals quarterback Virgil Carter. Carter was one of the first in the long line of great quarterbacks who played at Brigham Young.
At just over six feet, he was not an impressive physical specimen, yet he still set a host of school, conference, and NCAA records and led the Cougars to their first-ever conference title in 1965. Drafted by the Bears in 1967, he played 10 games in Chicago over two seasons, throwing 193 passes with 6 touchdowns and 10 interceptions, before being traded to the Bengals after the 1969 season.
Carter did not have a particularly strong arm, and that was a deal breaker for most teams. Much of the league gravitated toward cannon-armed throwers because passing attacks back then almost always came down to “everybody go long.” To this day, a quarterback who can’t throw with velocity usually doesn’t last. But Carter had a different kind of skill set and a demeanor that intrigued Walsh.
He was deadly accurate on short passes, physically and mentally nimble, and impervious to pressure. Walsh thought he could develop an offense around such a combination, one that would control the ball despite a useless running game. And controlling the ball enough — say, gaining 25 first downs a game — and playing well on special teams would put them in position to find a way to win at the end.
The Bengals couldn’t attack the defense vertically with strength the way everyone else did, so they would attack it horizontally with speed, using an intricately timed short passing game that essentially turned short passes into long handoffs. And just like that, as Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak changed the world from inside that small garage in northern California, Walsh ushered in the future of football from a cramped office in Cincinnati.
A future that would come to be known as the West Coast offense: the last and perhaps greatest innovation in pro football, conceived in Middle America.
Weirdly, Walsh’s offensive success — and his unique perspective on the passing attack — stemmed in part from his experience as a defensive coach. (He was a defensive coordinator for Marv Levy at California and the defensive backfield coach at Stanford under John Ralston.) Belichick also used his defensive knowledge to design one of the most prolific offenses in modern football.
Both men understood the checks and adjustments that occurred within defensive schemes. They built a counterattack by knowing their enemy. Most coaches today have been trained on only one side of the ball. Because they don’t know both, they can’t always effectively game-plan against what the opposition is attempting.
Through his defensive lens, Walsh built a system that took into account the things Carter could offer: his football intelligence first and foremost. Football intelligence is way different from book smarts, but in this case Carter, an academic All American, had both. He quickly grasped the ins and outs of complex schemes, knowing what every defender was likely to do. He could do that because he was able to transfer what he learned in the classroom to the field.
That is what’s known as football smarts. Anyone can memorize a playbook. That’s checkers. The West Coast offense is chess, and it requires a quarterback who can instantly react, without thinking, to any of the dozen or so twists and disguises a defense throws at him before and after the snap. With his football smarts, after internalizing opponents’ tendencies in tape sessions, Carter could make those game-speed decisions and adjustments that are in and of themselves the nervous system of Walsh’s offense.
If Walsh’s quarterbacks needed to be quick-witted, they also needed to be quick-footed. The ability to throw in rhythm was the essential ingredient in his system. You see it when a quarterback releases the ball on the proper step of his drop, quickly, accurately, and in synchrony with the receiver’s route. In the West Coast offense, the passer’s and receiver’s footwork is synced up like that of dance partners.
As soon as Carter’s back foot planted at the end of his drop, his intended target would be coming out of his break. Think of the way an orchestra depends on each section of instruments working off the others. The attack that Walsh invented needed to be as finely tuned. He was forever reminding the quarterbacks to focus on their footwork, with each pass play requiring its own precise mechanics.
Walsh let the rest of the football world focus on a quarterback’s arm. He was focused on the feet. It was a paradigm shift born from his lifelong love of boxing. Walsh often shadowboxed his way down the halls of Niners headquarters, and whenever he found a fitting boxing metaphor to motivate his team, he was happy.
He broke down boxers as he watched fights: their footwork, their quickness, how they moved, timing, balance. Like a boxer who can throw a flurry of punches as he deftly shuffles his feet, Walsh’s quarterbacks needed their body parts to work in a similarly surgical unison. Quick feet, quick arm. Balanced feet, balanced arm. Coordinated feet, coordinated attack.
Every play in Walsh’s offense was designed around precise timing. All routes were synchronized such that as the quarterback hit his third (or fifth) step, the ball would be out of his hand and on to a ball catcher. That quick-hit rhythm solved one of the Bengals’ main weaknesses — blocking — by relieving the offensive line of having to hold blocks too long.
It also allowed the receiver to become a runner beyond the line of scrimmage, in stride and in the open field. As a result, Walsh’s offensive schemes elevated the relevance of yards after catch as they slowly transformed a run-first league into a pass-happy one.
Once again, though, Walsh and his new offense were the beneficiary of great luck: Just as the West Coast was developing, the NFL made several rule changes to encourage more passing and scoring. Offensive linemen were now allowed to extend their arms and use their hands in pass blocking (essentially legalized holding) to protect the passer, and defenders no longer could redirect receivers once they got beyond five yards of the line of scrimmage.
With more time to throw and with pass catchers free to run across the shallow part of the field — the bread and butter of Walsh’s scheme — the West Coast offense began to thrive and expand.
Walsh drew up one play after another, and before long he had a binder full of short passes that quickly got the ball out of Carter’s hand and to his receivers just as they reached an open seam in the defense. He sent all his skill position players out on routes, lining them up in unusual and changeable spots to stretch the field horizontally rather than vertically, the league norm. The alignments gave Carter a better presnap view of the defense. Walsh had created the ideal situation for a guy with a diagnostic mind and a quick, accurate arm.
I have come to believe that all great coaches think alike regardless of what sport they’re in. Basketball Hall of Fame coach Phil Jackson made his fame with the triangle offense. Created by Sam Barry at the University of Southern California and enhanced by Tex Winter, an assistant on Jackson’s staff in Chicago and Los Angeles, the triangle was basketball’s way of creating clear passing lanes.
Simply described, when the ball is thrown into the post, that player and two others on the same side of the ball form the points of a well-spaced triangle. Walsh’s passing game was essentially the triangle on turf.
When you break down any of the fundamental plays of the West Coast offense, the same geometric shape forms inside the defense: a triangle. For example, say you have two backs in split formation in the backfield and the tight end on the line to the right.
Now, the Z receiver (the one on the tight end’s side) runs a 12-yard curl while the tight end runs to a spot that is exactly in front of the location of the snap when the play started, at a depth of five yards, where he can’t be legally bumped off his route. Meanwhile, one back swings out toward the sideline of the Z receiver’s curl. Hit pause and draw a line from that back to the Z receiver to the tight end and what do you get? An isosceles triangle.
The formation means the West Coast quarterback is never looking at a particular receiver. Rather, he looks toward the apex of the triangle and then decides where the ball should go, depending on the coverage or the spacing. Walsh hated to see quarterbacks locking in on a receiver early in his route because defenses can see that, too.
But when quarterbacks instead key on an area of the field — the triangle — defenders don’t quite know what or who they are guarding, especially if a receiver makes a late break, coming free just as the quarterback hits the launch step in his drop.
Spacing, timing, and rhythm. Seems simple enough, but it actually put stagnant, slow defenses, unaccustomed to adaptation, at a huge disadvantage. So much so, in fact, that in the first year of the new offense — just the third year of the team’s existence — Carter, Walsh, and the Bengals won the AFC Central.
In so doing, Walsh had proved something revolutionary in the typically risk and innovation-averse NFL: that quarterbacks with a different skill set could lead successful attacks so long as the passer matched the scheme. When it comes to evaluating quarterbacks, pedigree and prototypical size, speed, and arm strength will always matter, but thanks to Walsh, things such as intelligence, poise, and precision also became important.
More than anything, Walsh coveted accuracy from his passers; it’s what allowed receivers the opportunity to run with the ball after the catch. If a tight end with his back turned to the defense was open in an empty zone, Walsh expected the quarterback to throw away from an oncoming defender to let the pass catcher know where that defender was and which way he should run to avoid him.
Fans of a certain age have the play known simply as “the Catch” indelibly etched in the part of their brain reserved for important historical moments. In the 1981 NFC championship game against the Cowboys, 49ers quarterback Joe Montana threw the ball so high and toward the back of the end zone that it almost appeared to be a throwaway. But that throwaway was in fact precisely where Walsh wanted it, because the only person who could catch it was receiver Dwight Clark.
For Walsh, throwing to the back end line always meant throwing high, whereas throwing near the goal line meant throwing low because, in both cases, the ball could be caught by a 49er or it would be incomplete. High throws near the goal line could be tipped and intercepted. For similar reasons, he was never a big believer in small receivers, because wing span and catch radius could only help the quarterback. He left no detail to chance, and all those details were harmoniously linked.
To push the game forward Walsh was constantly looking back through history for guidance and inspiration. Walsh pored over the old tapes of teams coached by Clark Shaughnessy, a longtime college mainstay and a big believer in the T formation — quarterback behind center, two running backs spread perpendicularly behind him — finding them intriguing even though there were few forward passes in any of them.
Rather, he watched for the blocking schemes, which set off offensive linemen at angles to defenders instead of having them face the rush head-on. Those side blocks made it easier for less talented players to seal off defenders while providing a more unobstructed path for the back to follow. Many disparaged the West Coast offense as more finesse than power, partially because angle blocks outnumbered drive blocks.
But helping players get an edge is not finesse; it’s just smart. Similarly, with the old T formation, the ball handling confused the linebackers, as they watched the ball instead of the blocking scheme, causing them to be slightly out of position. And in the run game, being even a little bit in the wrong spot can create a lane big enough for a back to scoot through.
In the end, though, the most significant influence for Walsh was his time spent with the Raiders. Oakland’s passing game — which, to be fair, was preceded by Sid Gillman’s air attack — was a precursor to the West Coast offense in the way it freed the linemen from having to protect the quarterback for too long through the use of short passes and quick releases.
Yes, Davis much preferred throwing the ball down the field, but he, too, believed strongly in the timing between quarterback and receiver. Everybody had to be in sync. That included tight ends and running backs, which in those days was a rarity. With those players involved, there were often five route runners who had to be covered, thus overwhelming defenses.
Of course, that was when things worked just right — which they rarely do. But even in the typical chaos that takes place on a football field, Walsh still managed to find something useful. In another story that Walsh loved to tell and write about, Cincinnati’s tight end Bob Trumpy, facing the Raiders, once broke the huddle and lined up on the right side instead of on the left, where the play called for him to be.
The quarterback shifted him to the other side in time to run the play correctly, and when Trumpy came to the sideline when the series was over, he was apologetic. The Bengals coaches, though, particularly the offensive line coach, Bill Johnson, barely heard him because they were still marveling at the fact that when Trumpy moved, four defenders followed him (and actually ran into one another in the confusion), which meant that when he ran back to where he was supposed to be, the Raiders were not where they were supposed to be.
Defenses always set their fronts and coverage packages against the strength of the offense — that is, the side on which the tight end lines up. When Trumpy moved, the strength of the defense moved, too, and when he moved back, it had to realign.
The shift added another complicated layer to the defense’s communication while forcing the defense to tip its hand just before the snap. Once Johnson and Walsh saw this, they knew they could mess with the defense — get it out of position and confuse its communication.
Thus, out of a broken play the shift was reborn as a major weapon in the West Coast offense.
Believe it or not, the run was also a weapon in Walsh’s new scheme. Walsh was weaned in a time when establishing the run was agreed to be the most critical component of winning football. But he was the first to realize that everyone was chasing a lie. He correctly understood that teams interested only in establishing the run were creating nothing more than a chance to kick a field goal.
Think about it: The odds of covering 80 yards, more or less, on the ground are not good; one negative play pretty much stalls a drive. One pass play of, say, 20 yards, though, dramatically changes field position and a team’s chances of driving to a touchdown. Walsh’s West Coast offense wasn’t anti-run.
He just wanted to run the ball with a creativity that would give the players the best chance to succeed. Running every play between the tackles was not for him. In fact, he saw the traditional run game as the lazy coach’s way, putting the onus on players to execute or rely on brute force for yardage. That was something Walsh always wanted to avoid.
AP
That’s why Walsh’s teams — not to mention the best teams in football today — came out throwing. If you were to plot the rushing attempts of recent playoff teams by quarter, it would look like this: first quarter, a rush-to-pass percentage in the bottom third of the league; second quarter, same; third quarter, middle of the pack; fourth quarter, top third, more or less. Examine the regular-season breakdowns of the teams that made it to the Super Bowl after the 2016 season.
In the first half, the Patriots threw the ball 57 percent of the time and ran it 43 percent. The Falcons threw 61 percent of the time and rushed just 39 percent. But in the second half, the Pats were more 50/50, and the Falcons 54/46. Walsh was the first NFL coach to foresee the paradigm shift on offense and how the run one day would become more about preserving the lead than establishing it. (Maybe if the Falcons had stuck to the plan andrun the ball more in the fourth quarter of Super Bowl LI they would have won the game.)
Old schoolers think establishing the run is a quarterback’s best friend. But what kind of a friend is third and long when everyone in the stadium knows you have to pass the ball? In truth, conservative play calling is a quarterback’s worst enemy.
The best thing an offense can do for its quarterback is throw on traditional run downs so that the QB doesn’t have to deal with obvious passing situations. Throwing the ball makes running the ball easier, and that’s how Walsh succeeded with the Bengals.
In the first few years of what was derisively called the dink-and-dunk offense, Walsh found success not so much in scoring points but in getting first downs and keeping the ball away from the opponent. Defenses were slow to adjust, continuing to play as if they were expecting the Bengals to throw down the field.
Pretty soon the defenses found themselves in even worse trouble as the Bengals added more talented pieces to the offense, receivers such as Isaac Curtis, Charlie Joiner, and Chip Myers, whose speed allowed Walsh to add a downfield element to his short game. The first-down machine had been transformed into a scoring machine.
Thanks to what Walsh did in Cincinnati, NFL teams started to think of their offenses the way baseball executives think of their stadiums. Baseball teams collect talent that makes the most sense for the quirks of their home parks. The Red Sox stockpile right-handed hitters because the Green Monster in left is so close. More cavernous stadiums become homes to speedier players. Stadiums dictate style. Same thing for football offenses.
Quarterbacks have to be slipped into systems that best feature their skills. Very, very few players can make a bad fit work. Too often, though, teams think that the player makes the system rather than the other way around. It sends them hunting for a guy with obvious tools — a gun for an arm, mobility — around whom they figure they will build an offense.
Walsh and his West Coast offense have proved that’s just not how it works.
Walsh always cautioned me: “Very few people can coach the quarterback, and even fewer can evaluate them.” After more than 30 years in football I can verify that that statement is 100 percent accurate. When it comes to the most important position in sports, biases, rationalizations, and willful ignorance all get in the way of dispassionate and accurate analysis. Even a genius like Walsh knew that it was an imperfect science with exceptions to every rule.
Adapted from GRIDIRON GENIUS: A MASTER CLASS IN WINNING CHAMPIONSHIPS AND BUILDING DYNASTIES IN THE NFL by Michael Lombardi. Copyright © 2018 by RFK LLC. To be published by Crown Archetype on September 11.
Sam Bradford Embraces Another Chance To Start
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- RAMS / NFL TALK
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https://www.azcardinals.com/news/sam-bradford-embraces-another-chance-to-start
Sam Bradford Embraces Another Chance To Start
Kyle Odegard
Photo by Arizona Cardinals
Sam Bradford looked youthful as he strolled to a press conference podium at the Cardinals’ practice facility on Wednesday afternoon.
The veteran quarterback – who is only 30, after all, despite his years in the league -- had a freshly shorn haircut and wore an amenable smile.
As the regular season approaches, he has good reason to flash those pearly whites.
Bradford suffered through another knee ailment with the Vikings last year – one that robbed him of all but six quarters on the field – and in the midst of it, he questioned whether his playing career might be over.
The Cardinals gave him that answer, signing Bradford in free agency and keeping him locked in as the starter after selecting Josh Rosen with the No. 10 overall pick in the draft. Bradford will make his debut on Sunday afternoon against the Redskins, hoping to revitalize his career while also appreciating that he made it back at all.
“At this point,” Bradford said, “you just realize how special each game is.”
Bradford has experienced some of the highest highs in football, winning the Heisman Trophy and becoming the No. 1 overall pick in the draft. He has also dealt with the lowest of the lows, missing the majority of three seasons because of knee injuries, including a pair of torn ACLs.
Bradford played all 16 games only twice in his first eight seasons. He has missed 48 games in his career, while playing in 80.
The Cardinals were abundantly cautious with him early, as Bradford was more observer than active participant in offseason work. The activity level increased in training camp and he made it through the preseason unscathed.
“I know that right now (the knee) does feel as good as it’s felt in a long time,” Bradford said. “I’ve done everything in my power to put myself in this position. If something happens and I get injured, or if something happens and it doesn’t hold up, I’m going to hold my head high knowing that I put my body and myself in the best position to succeed. I think that’s all you can do.”
Bradford has not reached his potential in the NFL because of injuries, but the natural talent is still evident. Practice squad quarterback Charles Kanoff said Bradford would go entire days this offseason without throwing an incomplete pass.
While Bradford only played one full game last season, it was enough to capture Washington coach Jay Gruden’s attention. Bradford threw for 346 yards and three touchdowns in Minnesota’s season-opening win over the Saints.
“If you protect Sam Bradford and you give him time to throw, he’s as good as anybody, really,” Gruden said Wednesday in a conference call with Arizona reporters.
The Cardinals have designed an offense that allows Bradford to get the ball out of his hand quickly. When he does need more time, the offensive line must keep him upright.
“We’re the only position where our responsibility is to keep another human being healthy,” guard Justin Pugh said. “We’re looking forward to going out there and doing our job and protecting Sam, as well as all the other guys that are out there.”
Bradford showed off his arm talent in the preseason and in training camp, finding wide receivers with precision. While the injury concern is well founded, coach Steve Wilks is feeling optimistic about his quarterback.
“He’s at a great place right now,” Wilks said.
Bradford is his ninth season, and with a career passer rating of 85.1, maybe he’s a finished product. Then again, maybe there is more.
Bradford set a single-season completion record in 2016 with the Vikings and seemed at ease during training camp in yet another new offense. Like everyone else in the locker room, Pugh would love to see what Bradford is capable of with a full year of health.
“He’s a guy that’s been through a lot of trials and tribulations,” Pugh said. “You always cheer for those guys to come back and play well. Let’s get Sam to come back and show everyone how talented and how good of a player he is. I would love to be a part of that ride. We’re looking forward to doing that with him.”
Sam Bradford Embraces Another Chance To Start
Kyle Odegard
Photo by Arizona Cardinals
Sam Bradford looked youthful as he strolled to a press conference podium at the Cardinals’ practice facility on Wednesday afternoon.
The veteran quarterback – who is only 30, after all, despite his years in the league -- had a freshly shorn haircut and wore an amenable smile.
As the regular season approaches, he has good reason to flash those pearly whites.
Bradford suffered through another knee ailment with the Vikings last year – one that robbed him of all but six quarters on the field – and in the midst of it, he questioned whether his playing career might be over.
The Cardinals gave him that answer, signing Bradford in free agency and keeping him locked in as the starter after selecting Josh Rosen with the No. 10 overall pick in the draft. Bradford will make his debut on Sunday afternoon against the Redskins, hoping to revitalize his career while also appreciating that he made it back at all.
“At this point,” Bradford said, “you just realize how special each game is.”
Bradford has experienced some of the highest highs in football, winning the Heisman Trophy and becoming the No. 1 overall pick in the draft. He has also dealt with the lowest of the lows, missing the majority of three seasons because of knee injuries, including a pair of torn ACLs.
Bradford played all 16 games only twice in his first eight seasons. He has missed 48 games in his career, while playing in 80.
The Cardinals were abundantly cautious with him early, as Bradford was more observer than active participant in offseason work. The activity level increased in training camp and he made it through the preseason unscathed.
“I know that right now (the knee) does feel as good as it’s felt in a long time,” Bradford said. “I’ve done everything in my power to put myself in this position. If something happens and I get injured, or if something happens and it doesn’t hold up, I’m going to hold my head high knowing that I put my body and myself in the best position to succeed. I think that’s all you can do.”
Bradford has not reached his potential in the NFL because of injuries, but the natural talent is still evident. Practice squad quarterback Charles Kanoff said Bradford would go entire days this offseason without throwing an incomplete pass.
While Bradford only played one full game last season, it was enough to capture Washington coach Jay Gruden’s attention. Bradford threw for 346 yards and three touchdowns in Minnesota’s season-opening win over the Saints.
“If you protect Sam Bradford and you give him time to throw, he’s as good as anybody, really,” Gruden said Wednesday in a conference call with Arizona reporters.
The Cardinals have designed an offense that allows Bradford to get the ball out of his hand quickly. When he does need more time, the offensive line must keep him upright.
“We’re the only position where our responsibility is to keep another human being healthy,” guard Justin Pugh said. “We’re looking forward to going out there and doing our job and protecting Sam, as well as all the other guys that are out there.”
Bradford showed off his arm talent in the preseason and in training camp, finding wide receivers with precision. While the injury concern is well founded, coach Steve Wilks is feeling optimistic about his quarterback.
“He’s at a great place right now,” Wilks said.
Bradford is his ninth season, and with a career passer rating of 85.1, maybe he’s a finished product. Then again, maybe there is more.
Bradford set a single-season completion record in 2016 with the Vikings and seemed at ease during training camp in yet another new offense. Like everyone else in the locker room, Pugh would love to see what Bradford is capable of with a full year of health.
“He’s a guy that’s been through a lot of trials and tribulations,” Pugh said. “You always cheer for those guys to come back and play well. Let’s get Sam to come back and show everyone how talented and how good of a player he is. I would love to be a part of that ride. We’re looking forward to doing that with him.”
FiveThirtyEight gives Rams 39% chance to make playoffs, less than Seattle
- By tomas
- RAMS / NFL TALK
- 52 Replies
FiveThirtyEight gives Rams 39% chance to make playoffs, less than
Seattle
By: Cameron DaSilva | 1 hour ago
Last season, for the first time in more than a decade, the Los Angeles Rams made the playoffs. They did so by winning 11 games and taking home the NFC West title, supplanting the Seahawks atop the division.
It was a campaign that caught everyone off guard, one that almost no one predicted for the Rams. Yet, as good as they were in 2017, the Rams should be even better this season after adding Ndamukong Suh, Marcus Peters, Aqib Talib and Brandin Cooks.
Analytics website FiveThirtyEight isn’t quite as high on Los Angeles this season as fans and media members are. According to the site, the Rams have just a 39 percent chance to make the playoffs with a projected win total of only 8.2, which ranks 15th in the NFL.
To deflate fans’ hopes even more, FiveThirtyEight gives the Seahawks a better chance to make the playoffs (48 percent) and win the division (37 percent) than the Rams. Seattle’s projected win total is 8.9, nearly a full point higher than the Rams’.
Brace Hemmelgarn-USA TODAY Sports
Based on Seattle’s crumbling defense and lack of stability on offense, it would seem the Rams are the runaway favorites in the NFC West. If anything, the 49ers seem like the next-best team in the division, not the Seahawks. However, FiveThirtyEight puts San Francisco’s win total at 7.3 games, less than the Cardinals’ projected total (7.4). The 49ers have a 25 percent chance to make the postseason, while Arizona’s odds sit at 27 percent.
No matter how you cut it, FiveThirtyEight is going against the grain out West. The Rams appear to be Super Bowl contenders, but the site believes it’s more likely that they miss the playoffs than making it.
https://theramswire.usatoday.com/2018/09/05/nfl-rams-playoff-odds-seahawks-fivethirtyeight/
Seattle
By: Cameron DaSilva | 1 hour ago
Last season, for the first time in more than a decade, the Los Angeles Rams made the playoffs. They did so by winning 11 games and taking home the NFC West title, supplanting the Seahawks atop the division.
It was a campaign that caught everyone off guard, one that almost no one predicted for the Rams. Yet, as good as they were in 2017, the Rams should be even better this season after adding Ndamukong Suh, Marcus Peters, Aqib Talib and Brandin Cooks.
Analytics website FiveThirtyEight isn’t quite as high on Los Angeles this season as fans and media members are. According to the site, the Rams have just a 39 percent chance to make the playoffs with a projected win total of only 8.2, which ranks 15th in the NFL.
To deflate fans’ hopes even more, FiveThirtyEight gives the Seahawks a better chance to make the playoffs (48 percent) and win the division (37 percent) than the Rams. Seattle’s projected win total is 8.9, nearly a full point higher than the Rams’.
Brace Hemmelgarn-USA TODAY Sports
Based on Seattle’s crumbling defense and lack of stability on offense, it would seem the Rams are the runaway favorites in the NFC West. If anything, the 49ers seem like the next-best team in the division, not the Seahawks. However, FiveThirtyEight puts San Francisco’s win total at 7.3 games, less than the Cardinals’ projected total (7.4). The 49ers have a 25 percent chance to make the postseason, while Arizona’s odds sit at 27 percent.
No matter how you cut it, FiveThirtyEight is going against the grain out West. The Rams appear to be Super Bowl contenders, but the site believes it’s more likely that they miss the playoffs than making it.
https://theramswire.usatoday.com/2018/09/05/nfl-rams-playoff-odds-seahawks-fivethirtyeight/
