With Sam Darnold playing like the Pro Bowl QB of 2024 and a recharged offensive line blowing their opponents off the ball, the Seattle Seahawks looked awfully good in their second preseason game against Kansas City on Friday night.
Several marquee defenders were sitting out, but it barely mattered. The offensive and defensive dominance showed up on the stat sheet to the tune of a 477-156 Seahawks’ advantage in total yards.
That is a stone-cold beatdown. No sacks allowed. No turnovers. They didn’t even punt until the fourth quarter. You have to look long and hard to find something to complain about.
The Seahawks' special teams were the one blemish on an otherwise perfect night
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Or maybe you don’t. There was one area in which Seattle underperformed. It is an area that was problematic last season, though those problems were overshadowed by the more obvious turmoil on offense.
Now that the offense seems to be headed in the right direction, it’s time for Mike Macdonald to address Seattle’s substandard special teams. And that might mean it’s time to end the Jay Harbaugh experiment.
How bad was it? Well, I suppose if you are a glass-half-full kind of fan, you could take comfort in the fact that [George Holani took the opening](https://12thmanrising.com/unexpected-seattle-seahawks-shocked-everyone-training-camp) kickoff 50 yards, setting up the offense in Kansas City territory for Sam Darnold’s first-ever snap in navy blue.
But then the realistic fan would have to point out that a holding penalty on Drake Thomas put the ball back inside Seattle’s 20. Holding on to the first kickoff. No biggie.
But then there was also holding on the last kickoff, this time on Marshall Lang. Maybe you can’t blame holding calls on the coordinator. That’s a heat-of-the-battle type of thing. You’d like to think a good coordinator would work on eliminating those calls, but they are bound to crop up in an NFL game.
But the first time Seattle punted, they lined up wrong. It ended up being offset by a hold on KC and didn’t hurt the Hawks, but that is the kind of thing that could have a major impact in the regular season. Pre-snap penalties – especially alignment miscues – do land on the coach. That simply cannot happen.
And here’s something else that can’t happen. An opposing player cannot take a perfectly-placed punt that had him pinned right against his own sideline and run 88 yards through your punt coverage for a touchdown. That’s exactly what Skyy Moore – a player who looked like he was in danger of being cut before the game was even over – did to Seattle’s punt coverage unit in the fourth quarter.
The kickoff coverage was scarcely better. The Chiefs returned five Jason Myers kickoffs on the night. They averaged 33.4 yards per return, almost ten yards better than what Seattle managed. It wasn’t one dynamic player running roughshod. Those five kicks were returned by five different players.
Nor was the number skewed by one huge return. The longest was 49 yards. The shortest was 24. Three returns went for at least 34 yards.
That simply is not tenable for a team that intends to compete for a division title.
Last year, the Seahawks’ special team units were largely uninspired. Statistically, they hovered around the middle of the pack. Pretty good in terms of punting, largely due to Michael Dickson. Not very good at punt returns. Kickoff returns were helped by Laviska Shenault’s one TD, but otherwise, both kickoff units were mediocre.
Most significantly, punt and kickoff coverage units and punt returns all regressed from their 2023 numbers. The only improvement came in kickoff returns, but that was due to a league-wide uptick owing to rule changes. If you factor that in, Seattle’s kickoff returns fell below the league average and resulted in an actual regression as well.
I don’t mean to [pick on Jay Harbaugh](https://12thmanrising.com/latest-seahawks-move-proves-jay-harbaugh-wrong-coach-job), who may develop into a fine coach. I did question his hiring last season and suggested perhaps he was in over his head at midseason. He had never even held a position coach role in the NFL when Mike Macdonald tabbed him to be a coordinator. If he is going to learn on the job, let him do it somewhere else
Macdonald pulled the plug on a similarly inexperienced coordinator when he fired OC Ryan Grubb at the end of the 2024 season. It may be time to make the same move on special teams.
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