Urgency achieved: Captain Bobby Wagner calls upon Seahawks teammates to bring it. Now.
It’s not every practice Bobby Wagner does this.
Then again, it’s not even week the Seahawks are coming off a 17-point home loss in their opener.
Days after their biggest blowout loss to begin a season in 15 years, Wagner demanded — then commanded — his teammates’ attention Wednesday.
The entire, 53-man active roster plus all of the 16-man practice squad gathered around their 33-year-old defensive captain in the middle of the field. Practice had yet to begin for this week and Seattle’s game Sunday at the Detroit Lions (1-0).
His talk was brief. It was fiery. It was impassioned.
It wasn’t G-rated.
Wagner ordered his teammates to rededicate themselves to bouncing back strongly this week. He made it clear he expects them to adhere to one standard: the one he had a large part in setting in his first 10 years winning a Super Bowl and becoming a six-time Seahawks All-Pro middle linebacker.
It was the best man for this job, this week.
Wagner’s cachet in Seattle’s locker room, within this franchise and around this city is unsurpassed. But he holds particular do-as-I-say-and-as-I-do cred this week: His talk came three days after he played all 81 defensive snaps and had 19 tackles, one short of his franchise record and career high, in the team’s opening loss to the Los Angeles Rams.
About an hour before he got on the field Wednesday, Wagner said in a far more controlled environment and tone of his approach to his team with 32 players 25 years old or younger, second-most in the NFL: “You try to let them know it’s a long season and that wasn’t the performance that we wanted to have for the first opening game, but we can’t let that drag into the next week. We have to be focused on this week.
“I feel confident we’ll get there.”
Both Wagner and wide receiver DK Metcalf used the same words to describe their team’s psyche after its 30-13 loss to the Rams in the opener:
“You have to get that bad taste out of your mouth,” Wagner said.
“You definitely didn’t want to perform that way. You see guys more focused. You see guys on the details. And that’s what it’s going to take to beat this Lions team.”
Metcalf said of being 0-1 in an ugly way: “Everybody is pretty much disappointed with how we played and how we went out there and performed during week one, after the great practices that we had during training camp. I think we’re all just prepared to get to Detroit and go out there ready to play Sunday, because it’s just a bad taste in our mouths right now.”
Like, bile.
Metcalf called the loss to the Rams in which the Seahawks gain just 12 yards after halftime while getting outscored 23-0 “a quick wake-up call.”
“We had expectations of what we wanted to be or what we wanted to look like,” Metcalf said, “and that wasn’t what transpired.
“The only thing I can say is: It was a good thing that it happened week one, a quick wake-up call that any Sunday you can get beat. ...Just happy it happened week one, that it’s not lingering around like week eight or week 10 where we really have to have an inner check of who we really want to be.
“We got that knockout punch early. We’re going to get back up and just keep fighting.”
This talk from team veterans is exactly what coach Pete Carroll is seeking this week.
He usually finds what he’s looking for in these situation.
Seattle is 42-19 in the game following an in-season loss since 2012. That .689 winning percentage is second-best in the league. Only New England’s .694 (34-15) is better.
But almost half the team wasn’t around for that. Nearly 45% of the Seahawks roster are first- and second-year players. Seattle added two more undrafted rookies Wednesday. The team signed Raiqwon O’Neal and McClendon Curtis to the 53-man roster at the injury-wrecked offensive-tackle spot.
Carroll said the younger Seahawks are looking at Wagner, quarterback Geno Smith, Pro Bowl safety Quandre Diggs, Metcalf and fellow wide receiver Tyler Lockett for how to proceed this week.
“They’re looking at the older guys, I think,” Carroll said.
“We’ve got a way that we practice on this day (Wednesday), in particular, that is designed to jump back regardless of what happened on the weekend before.
“So, we’ll see what happens. We’ll challenge them.”
The challenge is clear
The Lions are hosting Seattle in one of their more anticipated home openers to a season in memory around Detroit.
The team that hasn’t won a playoff game in 32 years and has been to the postseason just three times this century is coming off a win at the defending Super Bowl-champion Kansas City Chiefs on NFL opening night. That spawned headlines such as “The Detroit Lions are no longer a joke.”
Since a 1-6 start to last season that included a wild, 48-45 loss to Seattle inside Ford Field in October, Detroit has gone 9-2. One of those victories was at Green Bay in the regular-season finale in January. It sent the Seahawks into the playoffs as the NFC’s last wild card.
Lions coach Dan Campbell said this week he thinks the noise in Detroit’s stadium Sunday is going to be louder than it was in Kansas City’s renowned Arrowhead Stadium last week.
“I just know our fans,” Campbell told media in Michigan. “It’ll be to the point where you can’t hear yourself think.”
The Seahawks are aware this isn’t the easiest task from which to avoid an 0-2 start.
“It’s going to be a really challenging environment, which is great,” Carroll said. “We need to get in those situations and see how to handle the noise and how to handle just the ruckus of it all. It’s a really good match-up for us coming up.
“We need hard ones. We need tough ones. And so, here they come.”
NFL history and poor starts
No one is talking about it around the Seahawks this week, but the specter of possibly falling to 0-2 is lurking.
Yes, the conditions have changed the last two years with the league going to a 17-game regular season and expanding the playoffs by one, to seven teams in each conference. Yet this number still isn’t great: Since the NFL-AFL merger in 1970, 404 teams have started a season 0-2. Only 39 of those 0-2 teams made the playoffs, according to Stathead and The Sporting News.
That’s 9.7%.
Since the regular-season increased and the playoffs expanded in 2021, 11 teams have started 0-2. Only one of those 11 teams (9.1%) made the postseason. Last season Cincinnati did it, rallying from 0-2 to win 12 of 14 games and make the playoffs again.
Before that, the last times a team went from 0-2 to the playoffs were in 2018.
The good news for Seattle: The Seahawks were one of those teams. They went 0-2 In September 2018 after Russell Wilson threw an interception returned for a Bears touchdown in a Seattle loss at Chicago on a Monday night. They rallied to 10-6 that season and into the playoffs. Houston also did it that year.
In between 2018 and last year — including 2021, the first year with one more regular-season game and two more playoff entrants — 27 teams began the season 0-2. None made the playoffs.
Wagner did his sternest and best Wednesday to keep that from being relevant come Sunday night.
He is faulting himself for the loss to the Rams. He said he didn’t blitz correctly. He didn’t have the right targets to hit offensive linemen to effectively get past their blocks of him, and on other blitzes didn’t time them correctly. That, he said, contributed to Seattle getting no pass rush to affect Matthew Stafford. The Seahawks had no sacks and only two hits among 39 drop backs by the Rams’ quarterback last weekend.
“I honestly feel like if we just lock in and focus and do the things that we’re capable of doing,” Wagner said, “I think we’ll be just fine.”
This story was originally published September 14, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
