Lukewarm on the Red Bryant Re-Signing

DE Red Bryant is a favorite son of Seahawks fans. He's an exciting comeback story, an opportunistic playmaker in the mold of Carroll's perpetually overachieving "dirty defense", and certainly has a role in Seattle's lopsided scheme.

Today he finally signed an offer Seattle had on the table for a while, 5 years for $35 million. That was bigger than I was expecting. It was 40% bigger than Brandon Mebane's contract last year. I feel a bit like a stormtrooper in the midst of the celebration over Emperor Palpatine's death, but I have a few nagging reservations about this.


- First, it complicates efforts to sign DE Mario Williams. But this doesn't qualify as the foremost reason, because Williams to Seattle was never a certainty and perhaps never even a likelihood. I don't recall reading anything that really convinces me of drooling interest on Seattle's part. (While I was typing, Mike Sando confirmed this.) Outbidding four other teams to give him the largest DE contract in NFL history wouldn't exactly fit Carroll/Schneider's style. I'd qualify that by saying that Carroll/Schneider's style is to win at the end of the day, and Mario Williams would certainly service that. He'd have been a young, scheme-fitting, all-around superstar at a position of desperate need. But disappointment with Bryant over a free-agent signing that may never even have happened wouldn't be fair to our favorite relative of Jacob Green.


- Secondly, it takes the "Bryant experiment" and turns it into a long-term fixture. Red has a reputation of making life complicated for opponents' run games, but after two years I'm still not convinced that his impact is all that. What he did in 2010 was too circumstantial to trust, lambasting bad running teams in his first six games and happening to get hurt (along with the rest of the line) right as Seattle reached the worst part of its schedule. He stayed healthy in 2011, but Seattle's run defense didn't. It was declining towards the latter half of the season as speedier backs like Demarco Murray and Roy Helu found traction against them.

Something else that continues to decline is our pass rush. Everyone agrees that this is an issue, and while Bryant isn't an active part of the problem, he doesn't do much to help (and isn't intended to). He's a big guy with unusual quickness, but not enough agility or closing speed to harass quarterbacks, especially scrambling ones. This leaves our front pass rush up to one individual, which weakens it right away, as one of the elements of a successful pass rush is unpredictable origin. Carroll seemingly has plans to compensate with one hell of a blitzing linebacker corps, but that's not a catch-all...it requires blitzing lanes and still leaves coverage holes.

With due respect to wrinkles, if there are four players on the line when the ball is snapped, it's a 4-3, and a 4-3 mandates pressure from the 4. That isn't going to be Red, and any pass-rush specialist that spells him to get it will have to be cheap. That, even more than the cap hit, means no Mario - or anyone expensive, for that matter. You don't spend $22+ million annually on one position being shared by two players. Mario couldn't even displace Chris Clemons, because that would preserve the original problem - front QB pressure coming from only one place, a strategic disadvantage. To really blow this thing open, pass-rush reinforcements would need to go right where Red has just been entrenched, and not just on third down. "Hey look, Red's coming off the field, they must be gunning for Brady!"

Bryant's contract, however, signals Carroll's approval of a system that overemphasizes run-stopping ability in a passing league, keeps what pass rush we have constricted to LDE, and also tends to telegraph our intentions at the line by whomever appears at RDE. Reading similar complaints from me a year ago makes me cringe as to how simplistic they were, but Pete's habit last year of swapping Red out with pass-rush specialist(ishs) on 3rd down makes me think he agrees. Which leads me thirdly to...


- ...the statement that Red is worth $10 million more than Brandon Mebane. A lot of folks already disagree with this. 5Y/$35M is not insane for a DE, but it's awkward to justify for one who usually plays two downs, generates no QB pressure, doesn't take well to kicking inside, and should rightfully be playing in a 3-4. It's being said that Bryant's influence in the locker room explains the added value, as does the market - New England was supposed to be interested at one point, and possibly drove the price up.
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This certainly isn't a fatal signing or anywhere near a dangerous one. There are plenty of options, as some have theorized - an enterprising schemesmith like Carroll is no doubt still at his whiteboard right now. We are looking at pass-rushing linebacker types in the draft, as well as Jason Jones in free agency (a 3-tech at last! Yay!)

Let's call this what it is - somewhat overpaying for a one-dimensional specialist who's crucial to the team identity but whose usage paints the pass rush into a corner and potentially blocks any big draft investment in defensive end. It's silly to conclude that this front office is financially naive - they were willing to let this heavily valued player test the market rather than eat up (har har) the franchise tag - but some heads around Seattle are cocked.

I suppose we'll see where this goes. I do look forward to blocked field goals all year long. And while I wouldn't expect any pricey defensive ends to appear on Seattle's roster in the near future, money has never been an obstacle to Carroll finding talent. After all we've seen so far, Pete gets the benefit of a doubt from this blogger.

As if the title "blogger" made me any sort of authority on this stuff. Haha.

The Red Bryant Illusion And Why I'm So Hard On Our Defense

It's an exciting time for the Seahawks defense. It's coming into its own. Young future cornerstones like Brandon Mebane, Earl Thomas, and Kam Chancellor are flying around and delivering huge, shuddering hits. Wily veterans like Marcus Trufant, Leroy Hill, Chris Clemons and Raheem Brock are enjoying a high-impact resurgence. And other hopefuls like Walter Thurmond and KJ Wright are lurking around hinting promise. The speed is there, the physicality is there, and we're finally starting to see some of the instincts and discipline we've been lacking. There's no denying the talent on tape.

There's one guy on this defense who doesn't quite seem to fit into any of those categories, though. At first glance, the stats seem to support a top-notch performance from any 'Hawks lineup containing DE Red Bryant. As Hawk Blogger recently pointed out, opponents are converting only 32% of their third downs in the Bryant defense's nine games, 29% so far this season - lofty numbers indeed, worthy of top 5 in the NFL.

My response, as the token wet blanket of the Seahawks blogging network, is that you have to put this into context. I've written before about how the Bryant defense faced mostly mediocre-to-terrible rushing teams in 2010 and completely folded against the only two strong passing games it's faced (Denver and Pittsburgh) even when they could stop the run.

Which suggests two possibilities: that the success of the run-focused Bryant D is either irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, or that it's still relatively untested against better opponents - the real yardstick of NFL success. Maybe some of both.

State of the Seahawks: The Pete Carroll Wake-Up Call

Today's 24-0 loss to the Steelers was painful, but it may have been the healthiest thing for Seahawks fans to see. It's kind of like the cocky 16-year-old with the new drivers' license, who totals his new car while speeding down farm roads and walks away, but is shaken to learn that he's not indestructible. No lasting harm, but his eyes are opened to the reality of life and how lucky he's been so far. That kind of healthy.

Because we need to be reminded of what Pete Carroll's legacy actually is in Seattle. We saw it today: getting shellacked and completely dominated in every phase of the game by healthy contenders. His legacy is not last year's San Diego win, which people think was won by grit and tenacity. It's not the Bears win, which some hailed as the breaking of some vaguely defined "road curse". It's not the Rams win, which fans attribute to Carroll's savvy choice of Charlie Whitehurst. And it's not the playoff win against the Saints, which belongs to Matt Hasselbeck having an improbably good day against an injury-depleted Saints secondary.

So far, Carroll's only real accomplishment in Seattle - when all lucky bounces, useless stats, and misinterpreted contexts are swept aside - is winning a historically weak division by the margin of a pair of lucky Leon Washington kick returns against an awful San Diego special-teams unit and a series of easy dropped passes by Rams receivers who would be #4's on most teams. His legacy is the nine blowout losses that occurred between those tough wins and exposed them as unsustainable exceptions, fatal in any normal division.

That's his legacy so far. Why he's getting so much unquestioning goodwill from this fan base is beyond me.

Lockout Hangover: Defensive Line

Seattle's 2011 defensive line is impossible to predict. It could be a force to be reckoned with. There's also the potential for it to be the biggest surprise disappointment on the team.

The common perception is that Seattle's defensive line was top-caliber for the first six weeks of 2010. The context for that, which too many are ignoring, is that during that span Seattle faced some of the feeblest offenses in the league and crumbled against Kyle Orton. The collapse of our defense coincides with the injuries of most of the starting line (Red Bryant, Colin Cole, and Brandon Mebane, in order of perceived importance but not necessarily actual importance), so many people understandably blame that. But it also coincides with the point at which Seattle hit the respectable part of its schedule (i.e. the last 10 games). That rise in respectability was pretty steep.

So it's hard to say how good Seattle's D-line truly was last year. The evidence is circumstantial and could swing either way. The Denver game serves as a disturbing hint that the line may have been tremendously overrated; the starters were all on the field and provided zero pass disruption. Stopping a bottom-five rushing attack isn't that impressive. At no time anywhere in the season did the defense stop a strong passing attack or even come close, starters healthy or not.

The Overrated Red Bryant...Position?

"Say that to my face, skinny white boy."

He was the mini-Hutchinson of 2010, the one who got away. Most eulogies of Seattle's 2010 season mark the injury loss of DE Red Bryant as the point of collapse for Seattle's run defense, which ranked a surprising #2 by Week 7. It was a frustrating end to one of the offseason's most exciting stories, as training camp reports gushed about Bryant's experimental shift from tackle to end and the immediate improvement that followed.

Bryant, a fourth-round afterthought before the experiment, left such an indelible impression in his six games healthy that the run-stopping RDE in Carroll's scheme is now popularly named after him. With Red's future clouded by injury, the "Red Bryant position" is now seen as one of the team's foremost needs, the key to unlocking smashmouth defensive play. This has a lot of mock drafts, including this week's version from Rob Staton, handing Seattle a similar hulking-but-quick hybrid like Phil Taylor or Muhammad Wilkerson, who is set to visit with the Seahawks.

Here's the thing: the numbers don't support the idea that Seattle's early-season defense was all that amazing in the first place. In fact, it looks downright overrated upon close examination. And an overrated defense calls into question the value of, perhaps not Red Bryant himself, but the position he plays in Carroll's scheme.

I investigate this because it affects Seattle's draft board: where does a hulking-but-quick 5-tech like Taylor or Wilkerson really belong in the hierarchy of the Seahawks' needs?

This is a long one.

Looking Back on 2010, Part 6: Ominous October

Continuing a series of posts re-capturing the moods, debates, and plot twists of Pete Carroll's first year in Seattle. Links to previous installments available at the end of the page.

Seattle had gotten off to just good enough of a start in September to energize Seahawks fans, but there were still red flags.

Yes, Seattle was 2-1, but the opponents weren't all that impressive and the winning didn't look all that sustainable. San Diego had performed well against us and had lost due to a freak special-teams meltdown. The 49ers were, well, the 49ers. And the Denver Broncos, who would go on to finish the season 3-13, had whalloped us.

Part of judging a team is judging its opponents. I respected Seattle's 2-1 start more than I did its 2009 start, which featured a blowout against the bottom-dwelling Rams and Jaguars and then nothing else. The 49ers and Chargers were talented, the latter notorious for starting the season slow. So I wasn't about to dismiss the winning entirely, but I was nervous as October began as the Rams coming up. One of my colleagues at work was positive that St. Louis would beat us: "You can't keep a streak like that going forever".

She was right.

Player Types: The Pete Carroll Dictionary

No, I can't tell you who the Seahawks will be drafting, not specifically. But I can tell you what they will be like. Or, more correctly, I will let Pete tell you exactly what HE is looking for at every position.

All Carroll quotes are direct, and taken from the transcript of a coaching seminar on the 4-3 under defense that he has used for quite some time now.

First, the LEO, or Elephant position defensive end:

"The open side Defensive End has to be one of your best football players. Size does not matter as much. We want an athletic player who can move around."

This appears to be a fungible position to an extent. I am sure that if a truly special player who met this standard AND was both a special pass rusher and excellent run stopper was available, he would be selected early in the draft, but that seems unlikely this season. Key words to remember for the Leo position (stand up defensive end) are "one of your best football players" and " athletic player who can move around."
 

Second, the nose tackle:

Looking Back on 2010, Part 4: Competition

Continuing a series of posts re-capturing the moods, debates, and plot twists of Pete Carroll's first year in Seattle. You can find Part 3 here.

The 12th Man's winter was short and soon ended by the "spring" of training camp. As always, we were debilitated from the endless circular discussions and desperate to see some resolution and answers to the ongoing storylines. Where was the QB situation headed? Who would emerge at wide receiver? Was Pete Carroll's vaunted "competition" really going to make something out of a scrum pool of camp-body defensive ends? We were tired of talking about it. We had to know.

The annual worry over signing our draft picks arrived as surely as spring flowers do, only to be silenced within a week once they all signed unremarkably - as surely as spring flowers do. Also signing was Chester Pitts, another well-reputed, scheme-fitting O-lineman recovering from an injury. Pitts was another attempt to compensate for the Sims trade and had more football ahead of him than Ben Hamilton, but was Carroll starting to push his luck with all the injury gambling? It was immediately clear that Pitts would be a while in returning to full form.

Toward the end of June, Seattle had named Scot McCloughan a senior personnel executive. Many merely peg him as "the guy who brought us Kentwan Balmer" a couple of weeks later. Balmer, a first-round almost-bust who publicly grumped his way off the 49ers, has had little impact in Seattle, therefore casting apathy upon McCloughan for some reason. But McCloughan was a respected figure in San Francisco whose role in Seattle's personnel decisions and scouting may be underrated, and probably has yet to have its biggest impact. San Francisco is certainly not lacking talent because of him. Keep him on your radar.

Training camp finally launched, sending swarms of informed reporters and uninformed unlookers upon the VMAC to watch Kelly Jennings' usual strong camp. I was looking forward to the gossip and breakdowns as much as anyone, but cynical nonetheless. Why do these affairs always seem to be little more than bullet lists of WR catches, as if that sums up the work being done? There's always so little about the linemen, the running backs, the mechanics. Or perhaps...observers are just kind of ignoring the things that aren't looking so good.

The Brandon Mebane Conundrum

Hey, Kip here. You might remember me from Seahawks Draft Blog. I'm really tight on time this year, so I can't contribute terribly often either here or at SDB, but this is a topic I've had on my chest for a few weeks and since Brandon (Adams) asked me to contribute, I figured this would be a good place to start this topic.

When Pete Carroll brought his "Leo" defense to Seattle in 2010, it didn't officially change Seattle from a 4-3 to a 3-4 team, but in some ways, it was a step in that direction. Seattle's previous 4-3 defenses featured two pass rushing defensive ends who could perform reasonably well against the run, a pass rushing defensive tackle (known as the 3 tech), and a single gap run stuffing defensive tackle (known as the 1 tech).

Though technically still a 4-3, the "Leo" concept is a bit more unbalanced. The strong side (usually left) defensive end needs to be death to the run while also collapsing the pocket, but isn't expected to be a consistent pass rusher who generates sacks. The strong side defensive tackle, who manned the 3 tech in the previous defense, becomes a two gap player, something that is generally only found in 3-4 defenses. A two gap player does not shoot a gap, but instead directly engages a lineman and protects the gaps on both sides of him. The 3 tech role still exists, but was moved from the strong side to the weakside. Finally, you have the Leo position off the weak side end, and this is where almost all of the pass rush is generated from.

As with any scheme change, you will have players who benefit and others who suffer.