Search for new Seahawks offensive coordinator adds two names, one popular, one far less so
The holiday weekend saw two more entrants into the derby to become the Seahawks’ new offensive coordinator to replace fired Brian Schottenheimer.
The latest names spark polar-opposite reactions.
Mike Kafka intrigues many, as he should. He is the quarterback coach for Patrick Mahomes and the defending Super Bowl-champion Kansas City Chiefs. The Seahawks “intend to speak to” the 33-year-old Kafka “at some point,” according to ESPN’s Jeremy Fowler.
The Chiefs are playing in their second consecutive AFC championship game Sunday at home against Buffalo.
The other name on Seattle’s list: Adam Gase.
The Seahawks and coach Pete Carroll also “have spoken” to former, fired New York Jets and Miami Dolphins coach about Seattle’s offensive-coordinator job, Fowler reported Monday.
Um ...
The Jets fired Gase Jan. 3, the day their season ended with 2 wins and 14 losses. One of those defeats: a 40-3 loss at Seattle last month.
Gase was 9-23 in two seasons leading the Jets. He was 23-25 leading the Dolphins from 2016-18.
His best coaching success was in 2013 and ‘14 as the offensive coordinator for Denver. He had the Broncos ranked first in the NFL in offense and scoring. Of course, that was with Gase having the not-so-slight advantage of Peyton Manning as his quarterback.
The Seahawks annihilated Manning’s and Gase’s record-setting offense in Super Bowl 48 at the end of the 2013 season.
Gase’ record in the NFL without Manning as his QB — that is, as the 2015 Chicago Bears’ offensive coordinator, then as head coach of the Jets and Dolphins: 38 wins, 58 losses.
The Seahawks have faced a Gase-led offense and team three times over the last eight seasons. Seattle has won all three of those meetings by a combined score of 95-21.
Adams: not a huge fan
Jamal Adams likely noticed the Seahawks’ alleged interest in Gase.
Adams and Gase clashed before the Jets traded the All-Pro safety to Seattle last summer for two first-round draft choices and veteran starter Bradley McDougald. Adams criticized Gase for not being the right leader to get New York into the playoffs.
Last offseason Adams told New York media of Gase: “I don’t feel like he’s the right leader for this organization to reach the promised land. As a leader, what really bothers me is that he doesn’t have a relationship with everybody in the building.
“At the end of the day, he doesn’t address the team,” Adams said this spring. “If there’s a problem in the locker room, he lets another coach address the team. If we’re playing sh---y and we’re losing, he doesn’t address the entire team as a group at halftime. He’ll walk out of the locker room and let another coach handle it.”
Last month before the Seahawks beat the Jets 40-3, Adams said: “Adam Gase, you know, we had a solid relationship.
“I don’t hate Adam Gase.”
If that’s true, maybe Adams doesn’t hate that Carroll is talking to Gase about joining the Seahawks’ staff and being in the same building as him next season. It’s the last one of Adams’ contract.
Or, maybe Adams does in fact hate that Carroll is talking to Gase.
Carroll has stated in the aftermath of the Seahawks’ previously soaring offense with Russell Wilson’s deep passes crashing late this season and in a first-round playoff exit as a division champion that he wants to run more. Carroll believes that’s the way for Wilson to pass more easily and effectively.
Wilson said last week he views this hire, and his involvement in helping select his new play caller, as “super significant” at this point in his 10-year career.
That’s what earning $35 million per year as the highest-paid player in NFL history at the time he signed his current contract, in the spring of 2019, buys: heavy influence over who calls his plays.
“I think it’s huge. Obviously, going into the 10th year of my career, it’s a critical time of being able to be involved,” Wilson said Thursday, also saying he did not favor the firing of Schottenheimer, his play caller for the last three seasons.
“The next 10 years are super-critical, right, for everybody involved, the whole organization. And also myself and me as a player, the legacy that I want to create and do, to be able to set the tempo on, you know what I mean?
“So I think it’s vital, it’s critical, super-significant that obviously I am a part of that process.”
Wilson wants to play at a faster pace, including with no huddle, more. He said running more is one way to get teams out of two-deep-safety coverage. Wilson also said that as Mahomes and the Chiefs show, passing can beat two-high-safety looks, too, passing more quickly on shorter routes.
Seattle was 19th in the league in rush attempts this past season.
Gase’s Jets ran it five fewer times than the Seahawks did in 2020. New York was 22nd in NFL in rush attempts, with 37-year-old Frank Gore as its lead back.
That was one spot ahead of Kafka’s and coach Andy Reid’s Chiefs. They choose to feature Mahomes leading their offense to AFC title games and beyond.
In 2019, Gase’s Jets were 26th and Kafka’s Chiefs were 27th in rush attempts.
A Chiefs import?
Kafka doesn’t have any of Gase’s baggage.
He as a Super Bowl ring.
He is a former college quarterback at Northwestern then briefly for the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFL. He’s made a rapid rise from being a graduate assistant for Northwestern in 2016. Reid and the Chiefs hired him to be a quality-control assistant the following year.
Kansas City promoted Kafka to quarterbacks coach before the 2018 season. That was the year Mahomes became the NFL most valuable player, an All-Pro quarterback and the league’s offensive player of the year. Reid gave Kafka an additional title of the Chiefs’ passing game coordinator for this season.
The assumption in Kansas City has been that Kafka will become Reid’s offensive coordinator after highly praised coordinator Eric Bieniemy becomes a head coach elsewhere. Bieniemy hasn’t gotten that job yet.
Kafka has reportedly been in consideration by the Eagles for their head-coaching vacancy. Philadelphia created that by firing Doug Pederson last week.
Pederson, the Bellingham native and Ferndale High School graduate, is one of three former NFL head coaches the Seahawks are known to have interest in to possibly become Seattle’s next offensive coordinator. The others are Gase and Anthony Lynn, whom the Los Angeles Chargers recently fired.
Pederson’s Eagles were 10th in the NFL in rushing attempts his first season of 2016. They rose to sixth a year later when they won the Super Bowl. Over the next three years, they finished 20th, seventh and 24th.
The Eagles went 4-11-1 in 2020 with the fewest rushing attempts of Pederson’s head-coaching tenure.
Other candidates
With Shane Steichen calling plays for Lynn this season, the Chargers had the ninth-most rushing attempts in the NFL. That was with lead back Austin Ekeler missing six games with an injury. In 2019 Steichen was L.A.’s interim coordinator. The Chargers were 28th in rush attempts that season.
Lynn, 52, was a running back for the Broncos and San Francisco 49ers from 1993-99, he won two Super Bowls with Denver. He was a running backs coach for five teams from 2003-16: the Jaguars, Cowboys, Browns, Jets and Bills. In mid-September 2016 he became offensive coordinator after the Bills fired Greg Roman from that job. Lynn became interim head coach in late December 2016, for the final game of the regular season after Buffalo fired Rex Ryan.
So Lynn’s experience as an offensive coordinator is 13 games over three months in 2016.
Steichen and Pep Hamilton are also in the market for a job from Lynn’s fired Chargers staff.
Hamilton was L.A.’s quarterbacks coach for rookie Justin Herbert’s smashing debut season in 2020. He was the offensive coordinator at Stanford (2011-12), when Andrew Luck was Stanford’s quarterback, and for the Indianapolis Colts (2013-15). For years, Stanford has been known as one of the run-heaviest teams in college football. The Colts were 22nd, 17th and 21st in rushing attempts with Luck at quarterback during Hamilton’s years as their coordinator.
Because he talks about such prehistoric (to many) football concepts as balance and running the ball to help the passing game, Carroll is widely viewed as a run-first coach.
That’s not entirely accurate.
Carroll is more run-based than run-first. He wants to run enough, and effectively enough, to take defenses out of two-high-safety coverage that make deep passes so difficult.
“Frankly, I’d like to not play against two-deep looks next year, all season long,” Carroll said.
He wants to see more of the coverages with a single safety deep that Seattle saw in its Super Bowl seasons of 2013 and ‘14, and in 2019.
That was the season after the Seahawks led the NFL in rushing in 2018, Schottenheimer’s first season calling Seattle’s plays.
“We need to run more with focus and direction and count on it a little bit differently than we did,” Carroll said Monday. “It isn’t going to be 50 runs a game. We’re not doing that. I don’t want to do that. I want to explode with a throwing game.
“But we need to dictate to the way we’re being played, and better, and see if we can do that.”
This story was originally published January 19, 2021 at 7:20 AM.
