Encouraged by Recent Results, Bobby Wagner Seeks Consistency from Seahawks' Pass Rush
After struggling to create consistent pressure on quarterbacks last season, the Seahawks were determined to prevent those issues from carrying over into the 2020 campaign. But in terms of consistently, the defense has not been able to accomplish that through the first nine games of the season.
Despite opening the regular season with a pair of sacks against Atlanta, Seattle couldn’t find a way to surge into the backfield on a regular basis over the next five games, as they produced one sack or fewer in three of those contests. That being said, the pass rush has been much more effective over the last three games, creating 13.0 sacks with seven of them coming against Buffalo in Week 9.
While this recent surge has been very encouraging for the defense, work is far from over for the Seahawks, as they’ll need to find a way to maintain these impressive metrics through the rest of the season. Referencing his team’s sack totals over the last two games, linebacker Bobby Wagner admitted he’s very encouraged by the amount of pressure the pass rush has generated recently and also discussed how it’ll be vital to produce these results consistently moving forward.
“It’s definitely promising having 10.0 sacks and just building off that, we have to put it together and we have to put it together consistently,” Wagner explained. “I think that’s where we’re at with it. Everything that we do has to be consistent, it can’t be do it one time and not do it the next, it has to be consistent. So, I’m confident in our guys and we’ll get it.”
Considering Seattle's defense has been riddled with injuries throughout the season, it’s somewhat understandable why they haven’t been able to create much consistency up to this point. Still, the entire league has also been dealing with a plethora of injuries and the Seahawks will just need to persevere through this issue.
Though the pass rush has taken a positive step forward lately, the opposite has occurred with the defense’s overall performance, as they’ve allowed a combined 669 passing yards, 140 rushing yards, and eight total touchdowns (five rushing and three passing) since Week 9. Needing to turn things around rather quickly, Wagner explained how the entire roster must learn from their recent mistakes and mentioned how everyone must keep a positive mindset through this tough stretch.
“We have to learn how not to make the same mistakes twice and we have to be consistent,” Wagner discussed. “I think that’s the biggest thing, a lot of great defenses they learn from their mistakes and they don’t continue them. So I think it’s just being positive as well, understanding that we have to be positive in this situation. We understand that we’re not playing the way we want to play, but we can and we have the players to play the way we want to play."
“You have to keep having that belief. We’re sitting at 6-3, it’s not like it’s 3-6, and we really need to be consistent and do our jobs.”
Even though the Seahawks haven’t historically relied heavily on blitzing during the Pete Carroll era, this season has proven to be extremely different, which has resulted in the coaching staff calling the fourth-most blitzes (152) among all 32 teams in the league, according to Pro-Football-Reference.com.
While sending extra rushers has the defense sitting tied for the eighth-most sacks (22.0) and quarterback knockdowns (30) along with the eighth-most quarterback pressures (90) in the league, they’ve also recorded the 10th-lowest pressure rate (20.3 percent) and creating consistent havoc in the backfield should help increase this metric through the second half of the season.
Matching up against the Cardinals for the second time this season on Thursday, the defense is preparing for another extremely tough task and will need to find a way to slow down their high-powered offense. Since it’ll be important for the Seahawks to contain quarterback Kyler Murray, which is never an easy job, Wagner discussed how it’ll be critical for everyone to stay in their gaps in order to limit the explosive signal caller’s running ability.
“I think when you’re doing that against like Kyler Murray, you have to maintain your rush lanes because anytime he sees somebody out of their lane or somebody out of their gap he takes off,” Wagner detailed. “So that’s something that we have to be conscious of and we have to be ready for.”
