The Seattle Seahawks hit the midway point of the season with a mediocre offense, but there’s potential for the unit to receive a boost with the return of two of its best players.
Seattle is 11th in the NFC with playoff odds at 5 percent, according to The Athletic’s projection model. The team’s most likely path to the postseason is winning the NFC West; those odds are at 3 percent. The good news for the Seahawks is that seven of their final eight games are against the teams ahead of them in the standings. The lone exception is a Week 13 road game against the 3-7 Jets.
With a 1-4 conference record, the Seahawks aren’t in a good place to win many tiebreakers, but it helps to have three remaining games against the NFC North, which has three teams in the playoff hunt (the 4-5 Bears are not out of it, but they’re trending the wrong direction).
Seattle must be nearly flawless to save itself from a second straight season of disappointment. The return of receiver DK Metcalf and right tackle Abe Lucas from injury should help significantly.
In a news conference Monday afternoon, coach Mike Macdonald said he expects Metcalf to practice Wednesday, which would put him on track to play against the San Francisco 49ers on Sunday. Metcalf hasn’t practiced or played since suffering an MCL sprain in Seattle’s Week 7 win over Atlanta. Metcalf and Jaxon Smith-Njigba are tied with a team-high 568 receiving yards (tied for 16th leaguewide) and three touchdowns. Smith-Njigba leads Seattle with 50 receptions; Metcalf has 35.
Lucas hasn’t played since Week 17 of last season because of a knee injury that required offseason surgery, but the 2022 third-round pick began practicing in a limited capacity on Oct. 23. He has not officially been a full participant, but he did practice Monday, Macdonald said. However, the team is not required to issue a report from that session as the team comes off its bye week. Macdonald said it is realistic to expect Lucas to play against the 49ers.
Lucas might not immediately return to form after so much time away, but even a rusty Lucas might be an upgrade at the position. That was the case last season when he went 12 weeks between starts because of an injury to that same knee and was an upgrade over Jake Curhan, Stone Forsythe and Jason Peters. In a perfect world, Lucas would get back in the lineup and look like a stud the same way he did in the first half of his rookie season, but if he’s just better than Forsythe and Michael Jerrell — two players among the league leaders in pressure rate allowed — the offense might dramatically improve.
“The best version of Abe is going to give us the best version of our offensive line,” Macdonald said Monday. “We want to make sure that he’s ready to go, but from what I saw today, it looked really good. He looked good last week. There’s a timeline here that we’re kind of abiding by, and there are certain milestones and hurdles you need to cross in order for him to play his best ball. So, hopefully, that’s this week.”
One way for Lucas to be better than his fill-ins would be to simply play a clean game. As a rookie, he committed seven penalties in 16 games and had some of the same issues Jerrell is currently having. In 2022, Lucas committed four false starts, and his three other flags negated explosive plays: a 23-yard run by Rashaad Penny, a 49-yard reception by Metcalf and a 22-yard reception by Dareke Young.
Teams have accepted four penalties against Jerrell in as many games this season. Two of them were false starts. The other two were holding calls against the Rams that wiped out Smith-Njigba receptions of 40 and 38 yards.
Last season, Lucas played 261 snaps across six games without committing a penalty. That doesn’t mean he is incapable of drawing a flag, especially when you factor in working with a new center in Connor Williams, but there’s reason to believe a more experienced player like Lucas might play cleaner football than a sixth-round rookie.
The Seahawks rank second in offensive penalties and third in penalty EPA, which measures the impact of those flags (all stats provided by TruMedia unless stated otherwise). Sloppy play is one reason Seattle averages 8.9 yards to gain on third down, which not only leads the league but would be the highest season average of this century. Lucas can immediately help the Seahawks in that area.
Better pass protection will undoubtedly help Geno Smith, who has been pressured at the fifth-highest rate in the league yet ranks 16th in dropback EPA. It’ll also help offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb, the play caller for a unit that is ill-equipped to deal with third-and-longs yet faces them quite often. In those obvious passing situations, Grubb likes the numbers to be in his favor up front, meaning he wants Seattle to have more blockers than the defense has rushers. Whether that requires adding the running back into the protection or giving help via chip blocks to both tackles, Grubb believes in prioritizing time in the pocket for his quarterback.
Grubb has spent most of the season with an unreliable offensive line, particularly on the right side. If Lucas can at the very least shore up that side of the line, Grubb should have more options on those critical downs, and left tackle Charles Cross won’t be isolated in pass protection as often. Plugging in a reliable player on the weakest side of the team’s most important position group could provide a significant boost.
The Seahawks rank 18th in points per drive, 19th in EPA per play and 22nd in red zone efficiency. But they’ve also had the ball with the chance to tie the game or take the lead in the fourth quarter or overtime in four of their five losses (Week 8 against Buffalo is the exception). Any sort of offensive improvement could theoretically lead to more wins.
Metcalf’s ability to impact the passing game is obvious. He’s probably going to be Seattle’s only Pro Bowler. Although the Seahawks were able to stress the defense vertically in the loss to the Rams and struggled against the Bills primarily because of their run game, there’s simply no one on the roster who dictates coverage the way Metcalf does. He’s a valuable offensive weapon whether he has the ball or not based on the way defenses respect his ability to run through their secondary.
The simultaneous return of Metcalf and Lucas also has the potential to revive Seattle’s run game. Lucas is a great athlete and a finisher when run blocking. Those same attributes describe Metcalf, though he often lines up out wide on designed runs while Smith-Njigba is in the slot and more likely to be near the point of attack in Seattle’s blocking schemes. But there’s more alignment flexibility when Metcalf is on the field, and putting him closer to the action when the Seahawks are trying to establish the run while Smith-Njiba operates more out wide is something Grubb could experiment with to avoid being one-dimensional.
It’ll take more than just two players to fix Seattle’s offense. The entire unit has lacked discipline and committed tons of operational errors, issues that can largely be blamed on the new coaching staff. Perhaps a week to self-scout the operation will lead to a cleaner product.
Beyond the operational problems, Seattle hasn’t established an identity on offense, Kenneth Walker III has been occasionally treated like an afterthought, the short-yardage run game has been inconsistent and the blocking from nearly every position group has been unreliable. There’s a lot for Grubb and his assistants to correct in a short amount of time.
But if there’s any reason to be optimistic about these final eight games, it’s the return of two of the offense’s best players. Metcalf and Lucas positively impact both facets of the game, and they are significant upgrades over the players who replaced them in the lineup. Getting them back ahead of an eight-game stretch in which the Seahawks have hardly any margin for error is the best they can ask for as they try and save their season.
(Photo of DK Metcalf: Joe Nicholson / Imagn Images)
