Pete Carroll believes Seahawks defense made stride forward in victory over Arizona
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON - OCTOBER 16: Eno Benjamin #26 of the Arizona Cardinals runs against Seattle Seahawks during the first half at Lumen Field on October 16, 2022 in Seattle, Washington. (Photo by Tom Hauck/Getty Images)
RENTON, Wash. - The Seattle Seahawks put together their best defensive performance of the year in Sunday's 19-9 win over the Arizona Cardinals.
The Cardinals scored just three points offensively in the game, were held to just 4-of-16 on third down and 1-of-5 on fourth down chances, and Eno Benjamin and Keaontay Ingram managed just 44 combined yards on 17 carries from the running back position.
Given the success that Cordarelle Patterson, Jamaal Williams and Alvin Kamara had seen over the previous three weeks, the ground game success in particular was a massive improvement for Seattle's defense.
Head coach Pete Carroll said Sunday night that the team had made some schematic changed to try and fix the issues they'd seen over the first five weeks of the season. The changes included asking their defensive linemen to return to a more aggressive technique of crashing gaps instead of reading and reacting at the line of scrimmage.
"It’s been a few weeks we haven’t been playing in the way we want to play," Carroll said on Monday. "It just didn’t happen, and it wasn’t a one-day thing. We’ve been working at it, and we’ve been tweaking some stuff and we finally just made a declaration into a particular direction that everybody took to, and they wanted it to work out too. They wanted to play the way played yesterday, and they did it."
The changes paid off in a big way for the Seahawks. Even without nose tackle Al Woods in the lineup, Seattle's defense authored its best showing of the year. Poona Ford and Darrell Taylor – two players that had been pretty absent of significant contribution through five games – had their best games of the year. Bryan Mone filled Woods' shoes admirably at nose tackle as well. And the unit as a whole managed six sacks of the slippery Kyler Murray.
"That’s a big accomplishment for us. I know you all have been waiting for, ‘Okay, when is something going to happen?’ Well, this was a big step and I’m hoping that we will continue. It’s just one game. The whole world didn’t change for us, but it put us in the right direction," Carroll said.
What did Carroll see in reviewing the game to give him confidence this kind of performance will be sustainable?
"Everything," he said. "Really everything. It started up front, guys got off of the ball really well.
"That was part of the big adjustment that we thought, to make sure that they can utilize their strengths. Really, after assessing it, I think our guys are better in that mode. That is the choice that we made, the decision was one part of the adjustment that we did this week. I thought that the coaches did a great job of recognizing it and the players used good communication to make sense of it and they took full advantage of it."
Given the success of the outing against the Cardinals, is the change up front something that will continue for the defense?
"Oh no, we are going to go back to screwing it up," Carroll joked. "Yeah, we are going to keep growing. We are going to keep getting better. This is just a stage for us right now that we needed to adjust a bit and we’ll look forward to continuing to grow. There’s more stuff. There’s more stuff for us to keep working at."
Notes:
– Al Woods didn't play on Sunday due to a knee issue that surfaced last week against the New Orleans Saints. Carroll said that Woods wants to practice on Wednesday.
"He feels pretty good about it," Carroll said. "He needed the break. It was close for him to try, he could have tried, but we really didn’t want to force it thinking that it might cause the soreness that he had to linger a little bit. We will take it easy on him on Wednesday also, but he wants to go, so that’s a good sign."
– Defensive end L.J. Collier injured his thumb in practice last week, which thwarted any chances he'd be activated off injured reserve for the game against the Cardinals. Collier has been out since injuring his elbow in the team's scrimmage at Lumen Field in mid-August. He can practice for one more week before the team has to activate him or leave him on injured reserve for the rest of the year.
"He hurt his thumb last week, a little bit late in the week, and it just slowed him down a little bit," Carroll said. "It would have really forced the issue to have him play. It happened in Thursday’s practice. We will we have to wait and see, we have to see how it’s going."