With Shane Waldron as OC, Seahawks seek to improve: Run, pass pro, Russell Wilson’s aches
The biggest beneficiaries of Rams’ pass-game coordinator Shane Waldron calling the plays for the Seahawks’ offense, if he installs the run-based, quick-passing game he knows?
It should be Seattle’s offensive linemen—and how Russell Wilson feels getting out of bed on Monday mornings during the season.
The Seahawks’ linemen should not have to pass block as long as they had to in 2020 for all of Wilson’s long-developing deep throws—too many in coach Pete Carroll’s mind. Wilson got sacked 48 times in 16 regular-season games. That was tied for third-most sacks absorbed in the NFL, as Seattle went 60-40 in pass-run play-call percentage. That was out of whack with what Carroll wants.
And it’s why Waldron is expected be named Carroll’s fourth offensive coordinator in his 11 years running the team. An announcement could come as soon as Wednesday.
So far, Wilson, now staying at his offseason vacation home in Mexico, hasn’t reacted publicly to Waldron replacing the QB’s friend Brian Schottenheimer as Seahawks offensive coordinator.
But Wilson should be smiling like the Mexican winter sun.
His body should take far fewer hits if he’s throwing the ball as quickly in Waldron’s passing game as Jared Goff did for Los Angeles in the three seasons Waldron was the Rams’ passing-game coordinator under head coach and play caller Sean McVay.
Consider: Wilson has been sacked the third-most, sixth-most and fifth-most times in the NFL with Schottenheimer as his play caller the last three seasons.
The Rams have taken the sixth-fewest, fewest and eighth-fewest sacks with Waldron as their quick-pass-game coordinator the last three years.
Wilson’s involvement
You can bet your number-3 jersey that Wilson approves of Waldron. He was involved in choosing him.
Wilson wasn’t going to sit this one out, not at this point in his career and with the stature he has within the franchise.
The $140 million quarterback, who signed the richest deal in league history in the spring of 2019, spoke two weeks ago of this OC choice being a “super-critical” hire. Wilson turns 33 during next season. He has three seasons remaining on his Seahawks contract.
“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 two weeks ago, while also saying he did not favor the firing of Schottenheimer.
“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.”
McVay’s offense is a system based on the run, on play-action passes and bootlegs off it, with short, quick throws with a ton of crossing routes. That scheme has given Carroll’s defense problems for years.
Carroll said in November, December and this month after NFC West-champion Seattle’s season-ending playoff loss to the Rams that the Seahawks’ offense needs to “adapt better” to how defenses played them over the latter half of 2020. That lack of adaptation is why Carroll fired Brian Schottenheimer Jan. 11 over what the Seahawks announced were “philosophical differences.”
Carroll wants to get defenses out of the two-high-safety schemes that largely shut down Wilson’s deep-passing game after it flourished during the first half of the 2020 season. Ways to do include more running and quicker, shorter throws.
Of Wilson’s 27 passes and season-low 11 completions against the Rams in Seattle’s loss in the wild-card playoffs Jan. 9, only three went for completions of 10-19 yards. That’s the range where Waldron’s passing game with Los Angeles has been focused the last few seasons.
Another issue Carroll is addressing by hiring Waldron: tight ends. All four of Seattle’s tight ends caught just 75 total passes for six touchdowns among Wilson’s 388 completions and team-record 40 TD throws in 2020. Rams tight ends Tyler Higbee and Gerald Everett had 85 catches and six TDs between just the two of them this season in the passing game Waldron coordinated with L.A. When Waldron was the Rams’ tight ends coach in 2017, Higbee and Everett combined for 539 yards, three touchdowns and averaged 13.1 yards per catch. Everett had a 69-yard reception in his second NFL game that year. That was the second-longest reception by any NFL tight end in 2017.
Waldron emerged as a known candidate this past weekend. He is a 41-year-old native of Portland. He moved from Rams tight ends coach to their passing game coordinator under McVay in 2018. That was after Matt LaFleur left to become offensive coordinator for the Tennessee Titans then head coach of the Green Bay Packers.
The risk of Carroll’s hiring his fourth offensive coordinator in his 11 years leading the Seahawks: Waldron has no experience in the job.
Well, that’s not entirely true. Waldron was the OC for Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, a day school in Cambridge, Mass., in 2011.
(Lack of) experience
Waldron is the first of the four Seahawks offensive coordinators Carroll has picked who doesn’t have true NFL play-calling experience. He brought Jeremy Bates, his quarterbacks coach from USC in 2009, with him to be his first play caller in Seattle. Carroll fired Bates after just one season on the job.
Schottenheimer (2018-20) and Darrell Bevell (2011-17) had established themselves as NFL coordinators for years before joining the Seahawks.
Yet this is the experience level Carroll was seeking—and likely could get.
Established, former head coaches and experienced play callers either said “Nah, I’ll sit this year out” (Doug Pederson) or took other play-caller jobs with first-time head coaches instead of with Carroll after the Seahawks asked (Anthony Lynn as Detroit’s new OC and Shane Steichen to the same job with the Chargers this week).
Waldron’s been on coach McVay’s staff since Los Angeles hired McVay in 2017. Waldron was first a tight ends coach with the Rams. He became McVay’s passing-game coordinator in 2018.
In that 2018 season, Waldron helped plan L.A.’s passing offense that finished fifth in the NFL in yards passing, fourth in yards per pass, and eighth in touchdowns. Jared Goff had a career year in his third season, and the Rams advanced to Super Bowl 53 in Waldron’s first season as Los Angeles’ passing-game coordinator.
In 2019 McVay made Waldron the quarterbacks coach for Goff, after Rams assistant Zac Taylor left to become the head man of the Cincinnati Bengals. In the 2019 preseason, McVay gave Waldron some experience calling plays in L.A.’s exhibition games.
That year, McVay told media covering the Detroit Lions (who were in the market for a new offensive coordinator at the time) that Waldron was “absolutely” ready then to be an NFL OC.
In 2020, Waldron went back to being the Rams’ passing-game coordinator, and Liam Coen became the Rams’ quarterbacks coach.
Waldron was a tight end and long snapper for Tufts through the 2001 season. His first NFL job was as an operations intern for the New England Patriots in 2002, which was also his senior year at Tufts. Tom Brady was in his second season as the Patriots’ starting quarterback that year.
This story was originally published January 27, 2021 at 7:00 AM.
