Tyler Lockett’s freedom, unprecedented success catching TD passes in Seahawks’ run-first scheme
Tyler Lockett is liberated. He’s bold. He’s reassured.
He’s the best he’s been yet for the Seahawks.
Little, darting Lockett is challenging bigger, opposing defensive backs chest-to-chest this season. Then he is separating from them and pulling down touchdown passes at an unprecedented rate, as if he was a dominant physical specimen instead of his (generously) listed 5-feet-10 and 182 pounds.
“He plays bigger than you think,” Brian Schottenheimer, Lockett’s offensive coordinator, said this week after practice for Sunday’s huge game for NFC playoff-positioning at Carolina (6-4).
The wide receiver was better known before this year for his threat to score on kick returns. He made the Pro Bowl for that in his rookie season of 2015. But with how Lockett’s been catching TD passes this season, the Seahawks (5-5) no longer needed big-body Brandon Marshall at wide receiver. They released the 6-foot-5, 240-pound veteran of six Pro Bowls last month; Marshall is now with the New Orleans Saints.
And Lockett is now among the best receivers in the NFL. He has seven TD catches in 10 games this season. It’s already his career high for an entire year.
His TD grab last month in the win at Detroit exemplified how skilled Lockett has become bringing down passes with a defender in his mug. It also showed how Russell Wilson now trusts Lockett so much, the notoriously risk-averse quarterback is increasingly throwing the ball up to his little big man whether he’s covered or not.
Against Detroit Lockett glided into Lions cornerback Nevin Lawson in the end zone as Wilson scrambled left. Wilson threw to his covered target from the 32-yard line. Lockett leaned into Lawson; he almost deked him that the ball wasn’t coming, like an infielder to an approaching base runner in baseball. Then Lockett abruptly accelerated away from Lawson for an instant as the ball arrived.
It was the deft move of a veteran perhaps a decade older than Lockett, to get decisive separation at the most important moment of the throw. Wilson’s pass plopped perfectly over Lockett’s shoulder, past the stunned Lawson, for the score.
Those were the first of 28 unanswered points that turned Seattle’s 7-0 deficit early into a 28-7 runaway, and eventually a 28-14 victory.
“Unless they’re looking back at the ball and when a DB is playing you, you make them do what you want them to do,” he said. “Usually, they play (your) hands. Sometimes you do late hands. Sometimes you just jump for it and catch it at the highest point. Or sometimes you shield them and be able to catch it over your shoulder.
“I think just looking at last year, a lot of the plays that I left out on the field were a lot of contested passes, which could have been 50-50 balls. So the one thing that I decided to get back to working on was being able to work on some of those contested catches that I used to do back in the day (at Kansas State).”
Earlier last month, at home against the Rams, Lockett showed he’s still got his speed, too, even after a broken leg. He zoomed past cornerback Marcus Peters across the field to meet Wilson’s rainbow throw for a 39-yard touchdown.
Schottenheimer is a veteran of 19 seasons as an NFL assistant coach. He said he’s surprised at how Lockett has been going up making contested catches over bigger defenders.
“I think so. I think, a lot of credit to him, he knows how to use his body to kind of shield people and hold them off,” Schottenheimer said.
“When you’re out here watching him run around, he doesn’t maybe look as big. But, yeah, the Detroit play... he’s just got an uncanny ability to kind of hold the guy off at bay. We call it ‘late hands.’ He shows his hands late and he’s been terrific on those plays.
“First year being around him, I’m sure he’s probably done it maybe before, but I’ve been pleased by that. When you look at the size, you think the big, tall guys are the guys that leap up and take it, but that’s not the case. It’s all based on fundamentals and your ability to hold them off.”
Those “late hands” were on time to collect from the Seahawks in August.
Seattle rewarded Lockett’s three years of Pro Bowl kick returning, emerging play-making, a gruesome broken leg on Christmas Eve 2016 that had teammate Doug Baldwin praying for him on the field then Lockett’s return last year.
Lockett wasn’t fully healed during the 2017 season. Yet he had 45 catches, the second-most of his career, with two touchdowns and a career-high 10 rushes on end-arounds.
“Some people always ask me like, man, they see what I’m doing this year. But they don’t understand that I lot of this stuff came from last year,” Lockett said. “I was still getting open, running 75 percent. I was still beating people downfield.
“I wasn’t at the place that I could be at (physically).”
The Seahawks saw that. They gave him a three-year, $31.8-million extension with $20 million guaranteed this August, on the eve of him starting the final season of his rookie deal.
“It just gives you a peace of mind that you know you are going to be OK,” Lockett said. “(It) allowed me to be able to help out my family.”
He is proud to say he now has “generational wealth for all my kids, and all my kids’ kids—when I decide to have them.”
Yes, ladies, the 26-year-old Lockett remains never married.
That’s not the only freedom he’s enjoying.
He says he’s been set free by Schottenheimer. He’s back to playing more how he did at Kansas State, while breaking his father Kevin’s and uncle Aaron’s school receiving records they set preceding him at K-State.
“When I was here at first, I had to get used to the scheme, understanding the scheme and ways that I could be able to freestyle in my routes,” Tyler Lockett said. “When I was at Kansas State, I used to freestyle a lot because it was easy to understand the scheme and my progression and if I was the third read or the fourth read and how much time that I had in my head to be able to run a certain route. I was able to do a lot of things that were unique in our offense at Kansas State.
“And then when I got here, I had to figure out what it is that I could do, what it is that I couldn’t do, had to learn how to adjust to different things like that.”
That was under previous Seahawks coordinator Darrell Bevell. Coach Pete Carroll fired him in January after seven seasons and replaced him with Schottenheimer, the former play caller for the Rams and Jets.
“Schotty being able to come in, he allows me to be able to be more free, to be able to do some of the things that I used to do back in the day to set people up,” Lockett said. “And I’m starting to get back to the game that I used to play.”
Lockett has far more than football going for him. He’s big into recording spoken-word performances.
And he already has an eye on what he wants to do after he’s done playing—or soon, while still in the league.
“For me, I like real estate. I watch ‘Flip or Flop,’” he said of the HGTV show hosted by a husband-wife pair of real-estate agents.
He says he remains open on what area of the country to invest his new millions. Perhaps here in the Pacific Northwest. Perhaps back home in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Or in Texas.
“I’m going to wait until I get married, and base it off of that,” he said.
Invest where the wife may be from or wants to live. Yet another smart move by Lockett.
“I could see myself coaching, as well,” he said. “I’d love to coach. I’ll probably go coach basketball and football, at high school. ...I may try to coach out here, depending on how it continues to go. I’m meeting a lot of people out here.
“Who knows? Someone might decide to get me a job out here, to coach, when I decide that I’m done playing.”
He also wants to travel, to experience life in other countries. He particularly wants to go to Iceland in the winter, to see the brilliant northern lights that decorate the sky there.
“There are a lot of things I want to see, what creation has for itself when I’m done,” he said.
His father is a venture capitalist in the Kansas City suburb of Leawood, Kan. He sees football remaining Tyler’s primary occupation for a long time.
“He’s doing what we raised him to do,” Kevin Lockett said in 2015, when Tyler was in his first months as a Seahawks rookie.
When Tyler was 5 through 12 years old his father was an NFL wide receiver. He played for Kansas City (1997-2000), Washington (2001-02), Jacksonville (’02) and the New York Jets (’03).
Tyler’s uncle Aaron also spent time in the NFL with Tampa Bay and San Francisco, and also played in the Canadian Football League.
“He really grew up learning football from inside an NFL locker room,” Kevin Lockett said of Tyler.
Now he’s flourishing in the league. In his fourth season he’s tied for the fourth-most touchdown receptions in the NFL. That’s while he plays in Carroll’s run-first system, on an offense that has thrown the ball fewer times than any other team (27.8 passes per game).
He says his new money has only continued his grind.
“For football, nothing changed,” he said. “You sign, and it’s still life. There’s still so much that can be improved every, single day. So when you come out here it’s still an interview; nothing changes just because you go paid. You still have to go out there and do what you’ve been doing.
“Yeah, you are going to have a lot of people saying stuff about you, that ‘You don’t deserve this, you don’t deserve that.’ But you aren’t living to make them happy.
“You are living to make yourself happy.”
This story was originally published November 22, 2018 at 8:20 AM.
