As anyone vaguely familiar with the Seattle Seahawks 2018 season knows, Pete Carroll loves to run the ball—and a lot of Seahawks fans aren’t happy about it.
The debate of run versus pass is generating attention in Seattle right now, but it exists across the NFL landscape. It basically boils down to this: old school football minds want to “establish the run” and “impose their will” on the defense. The running game is “smashmouth football” and it “turns boys into men”… blah blah blah.
The problem with all of that nonsense is it sounds better in a movie, coming from a crusty old coach trying to motivate his haphazard high school underdogs than it does when we’re talking about some of the best athletes on the planet. In the real world, data consistently demonstrates that, as long as you have a competent quarterback, your offense needs to be designed around the forward pass.
Five Thirty Eight’s Josh Hermsmeyer very bluntly addressnzed this issue in regards to Carroll’s run habits in his article titled: “You Called a Run on First Down, You’re Already Screwed.”
One of the interesting nuggets in Hermsmeyer’s piece was this note: “The Seahawks called rush-rush-pass 26 percent of the time, a rate 10 percentage points higher than league average.”
Hermsmeyer focused on how the Seahawks run tendencies limited their ability to convert first downs, but this particular note made me wonder about its impact on Russell Wilson. If the Seahawks are running the ball on first and second down at a disturbingly high rate, that likely means Wilson is attempting a disproportionate amount of his passes in unfavorable third-and-long situations.
As it turns out, this theory was correct. According to Sports Info Solutions, among 36 quarterbacks with at least 200 dropbacks this season, only three dropped back to pass in situations of third-and-five (or more) at a higher rate than Wilson:
The fact that Wilson appears on this list with Jeff Driskel and a crew of rookies is telling. In order to attempt this many passes in third-and-long, your coaching staff needs to be actively trying to keep the ball out of the quarterback’s hand until it becomes absolutely necessary. That makes perfect sense if you’re the Bengals and are just running out the clock on a lost season with Driskel, or you have an underdeveloped rookie taking snaps. But why on earth would the Seahawks be actively trying to prevent Wilson from throwing in more favorable situations?
Nearly a quarter of Wilson’s total dropbacks occurred in these scenarios where the defense knew, with a high degree of certainty, that he was going to drop back to pass—which obviously creates a higher degree of difficulty for Wilson.
Putting Wilson in these situations also impacts the Seahawks playcalling ability (or at least their perceived ability to draw from the entire playbook). For example, in Wilson’s 121 dropbacks on third-and-five-or-more, only three were play action, according to Sports Info Solutions. Wilson had an Independent Quarterback Rating of 137.1 on play-action passes this year, per SIS, the second highest rate in the league behind Drew Brees, yet Carroll’s run-heavy approach took that option away from them on nearly a quarter of his dropbacks.
Carroll has previously been an open-minded coach in many ways, so there is the potential for him to modernize his offense in 2019. But if he doesn’t, it appears as though Seattle is missing out on the best of Russell Wilson.
