This ain't your Holmgrens Seahawks

Everybody likes having the smash mouth team, but I'm in the "let's not crap all over Holmgren" camp. The Holmgren era brought this team to relevance out of the dark ages, and he had a lot to do with that. I can't say a lot of good things about him as a GM but I liked this team when he was the coach.

Holmgren's anal tendency was most visible when he traded Ahman Green to Green Bay for Fred Vinson because the guy fumbled too much.

Fred Vinson, wow, blast from the past.

Just as patience was a virtue for Holmgren's offense, patience is a virtue for getting a young, NFL Pete Carroll team to learn the line between physicality and dumb. In year 3, Holmgren still had ALOT of explaining to do for his offense. More explaining than Pete has to do with his penalties, IMO.

The UR penalty against Breno was legal by the rulebook. It's the same block Browner got called for agaisnt the Bengals last year on a punt return. Breno will figure it out, just like Browner seemingly has.

Also, I dont think its something that'll ever go away completly. That's the cost of having a team which can just beat the isht out of someone.

bmorepunk":4yr7n5me said:

Everybody likes having the smash mouth team, but I'm in the "let's not crap all over Holmgren" camp. The Holmgren era brought this team to relevance out of the dark ages, and he had a lot to do with that. I can't say a lot of good things about him as a GM but I liked this team when he was the coach.

Holmgren's anal tendency was most visible when he traded Ahman Green to Green Bay for Fred Vinson because the guy fumbled too much.

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I'm not diss'n Holmgren, but he did have an O-line, RB, FB that was off the charts to work his mojo with while Carroll has to try'n get SB results with guys that have a lot of gumtion, but are nowhere near the potential at this juncture.
Let's just hope the Seahawks are lucky enough to have that lightning strike twice in the same place.
Pete's already got the RB & FB to get there, it's just a bit early to expect the O-line to get all their ducks in a row, and Wilson?, he's got all the tools, just needs a bit more Seasoning, because without sitting on the sidelines to learn some aspects of the NFL speed of play, he literaly has to learn on the run.
He's a smart kid with an uncanny aptitude for the game, just hopeing the lights come on sooner, rather than later.

Sgt. Largent":1a9bf5an said:

With me, I can forgive the defense picking up a personal foul penalty for being too aggressive, because they've backed it up by being the #1 defense in the league. You can't say the same for the same stupid offensive penalties. This offense is not good enough to overcome personal foul penalties yet.

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Well said and spot on. We're getting closer but in the meantime, with so little room for error, we can't be shooting ourselves in the foot.

The 2005 Seahawks were a smash-mouth offense. We could run the ball on ANYONE. The Stealers fans were all shocked that we ran on them so well. Mostly I recall that in 2005 defense went from sucking to average, and gelled near the end of the season to a little above average, courtesy of nice rookie pickups like Lofa Tatupu and Leroy Hill. With a top 5 offense, and an average defense, we were finally good enough to reach the Super Bowl. Remember the couple years before that, the Seahawks offense was so good we could move the ball on ANYONE consistently, and score, but our smallish defense consistently got bullied and beaten up by smash-mouth teams with large OL's.

I've honestly never seen labels like "soft" or "smashmouth" as having the final word on a team's quality. We were a finesse team from 2003-2007, but we still won because we executed. That's what it's about to me: execution.

Holmgren's team may not have had a "thuggish" reputation, but he was so fixated on execution and so demanding in practices that the team got it down to a science. Opponents knew exactly what we were going to do, stacked up against it, and it didn't make a lick of difference, because we executed. We didn't lose XL because the Steelers were the better team, we lost because we didn't execute, kept dropping crucial passes (and got rooked by the refs). And our team's decline didn't come because of some "soft" identity that was sitting on the back-burner waiting for its chance to bite us in the ass, it lost because our running attack collapsed from old age/injury/free agency, and got replaced by guys who didn't execute right away.

Similarly, I don't even think we're winning now purely because of our "smashmouth" identity. Our running game is getting a lot of traction because of the tenacity and strength of our O-line, yeah, I'll give y'all that. But on defense, it's not about the big hits or the sacks, it's technique. Our defense has terrific technique, awareness, tackling, and discipline all across the board. You can hit people hard all day, but if you blow an assignment the next play or allow leverage to a WR, there's no point. Our defense executes.

Same thing in Dallas. I suppose I can't disprove the idea that we had an undefinable psychological edge in that game, but we didn't win just because of that. We won because we executed better than Dallas, cut down on our penalties and made timely plays while Jason Witten and Dez Bryant kept dropping passes.