Seahawks defensive end Michael Bennett and Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman took issue with Seth Wickersham’s ESPN The Magazine article regarding the dysfunction in Seattle. Others didn’t.
“I don’t blame him for having that reaction,” Wickersham said during a Friday visit to PFT Live regarding Bennett. “I’ve been doing this for a long time. I mean, he knows what’s going on. I got so many texts from players and people in the Seahawks building yesterday telling me how I nailed it.”
If anything, Wickersham is surprised by the idea that anyone would dispute the idea that there have been problems with the Seahawks.
“I was not being some sort of expert detective here,” Wickersham said. “I mean, this stuff is an open secret in the NFL, and I just spent a couple weeks trying to show it as best I could and talk to as many people as I could in the building; I took two trips out to Seattle.”
The deeper problem is that the offense hasn’t been taking enough trips to the end zone.
“You see [Russell] Wilson after games, he’s relentlessly positive and on message, and he’ll say, ‘You know we made a lot of great plays in this game, we just came up short.’ He said that after they played the Rams, and they scored three points. And here’s a defense, in an era of offense, keeping them in these games, thinking that they’re going to make everybody forget the Steel Curtain, and the offense is putting three points up on the board and he’s being treated in the building like he’s their Aaron Rodgers. That to me I think is the biggest deal. Those defensive players are smart, they’ve played against the best quarterbacks in the NFL, and they know the difference between very, very good and future Hall of Fame.”
The ability of some of those defensive players to make the Hall of Fame may hinge on winning more championships. If the offense isn’t pulling its weight, if the defense knows it, and if the coaching staff won’t do anything about it, it will be hard to keep everyone on the same page.