Brian Schottenheimer won’t be happy until the Seahawks finally ESTABLISH THE RUN. It may not have happened over the course of a 60-minute playoff game in Dallas — one that ended a promising Seahawks season — but that’s not going to stop the Seattle offensive coordinator from re-thinking his outdated run-first philosophy, which cost his team a win against the Cowboys.

During an appearance on The Brock and Salk Show on ESPN 710 in Seattle, Schottenheimer was asked about his run-first approach to calling plays. Here’s what he had to say…

“The mentality that we believe in is being physical. That doesn’t mean you have to run the ball every time. It doesn’t mean that. It means we’re going to be physical. It’s the way we run block. It’s the way we run routes. It’s Russell standing in the pocket. It’s the way we pass protect.”

OK, nothing wrong there. Being physical is good. Football is a physical sport, after all…

“For the play-caller, you have an identity of what you want to do. We obviously want to be a balanced team, but we know we need to establish the run.”

And there are the magic words: Establish the run. Schottenheimer was so fixated on establishing the run in Dallas, that he seemed to forget he had an All-Pro quarterback at his disposal. Russell Wilson averaged 8.1 yards-per-attempt but was rarely afforded the opportunity to throw on early downs. The Seahawks stayed committed to the run on first and second down despite average just 2.8 yards-per-carry. By the time Seattle was willing to hand the game over to Wilson, it was too late.

Schottenheimer was asked what went wrong in the game. The answer should have been obvious: We ran too much. That was not the response we got…

“The biggest issue that we had — and it was kind of the issue we had throughout the course of the year when we struggled — was third down. We weren’t able to convert on third down. We weren’t able to get momentum going. We’re kind of an offense — because we run the ball and throw the deep play passes — that when you’re struggling on third down, it kind of hurts your ability to get started… “There were thirteen third downs; I think four of them were 10 [yards] or more, seven of them were seven [yards] or more. We got behind the sticks. We gotta be better. We gotta have ‘get back on track’ calls. Calls that can get us into third-and-threes and -fours instead of third-and-nines and -tens … when I look back on the game, that was the biggest issue.”

Here’s a thought: How about avoiding third down altogether instead of striving to get into third-and-manageable with conservative calls on first and second? That’s what the best offenses around the league are doing, eschewing the “three yards and a cloud of dust” mentality that dominated football for decades for a more aggressive approach — an approach backed by statistics.

The Seahawks have yet to evolve with the rest of the sport, and the numbers bear that out.

Via FiveThirtyEight:

Over the course of the 2018 season, there was no three-play sequence that Seattle favored more than rush-rush-pass. The Seahawks called rush-rush-pass 26 percent of the time, a rate 10 percentage points higher than league average. Yet despite the high frequency with which Carroll and offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer used the pattern, they were not successful with it. Just 41.2 percent of their rush-rush-pass sequences ended in success. Meanwhile, on three-play sequences where the Seahawks started with a pass and mixed in a run afterward, they were successful 88.9 percent of the time (pass-rush-rush), 71.4 percent of the time (pass-pass-rush) and 50 percent (pass-rush-pass) of the time.

Oh.

Passing rates are at an all-time high for a reason: It’s the most efficient way to move the ball. The coaches who understand this remain employed. Those who don’t are dying out across the league. This isn’t a matter of philosophy. It’s Darwinian evolution,

Schottenheimer was asked how he responds to those who point to the analytics that support this pass-first evolution. His answer, like his offensive philosophy, was illogical…

“You look at our success against arguably the two best offenses in the NFL: the Rams and the Chiefs. We beat the Chiefs in a shootout. We played great here against the Rams in the first game. We came up just short, but it was a fun game to watch.”

I guess we should just ignore the fact that Seattle went 1-2 in those games, and that the Seahawks offense actually had success against the Rams’ and Chiefs’ mediocre defenses, not their high-powered offenses.

He continued…

“The way that we play, it doesn’t prevent us from scoring. There are certainly things we need to get better at. But I believe the identity we played with this year was really cool because it was different. And it didn’t really slow us down.”

Unfortunately, the numbers disagree. The Seahawks’ “establish the run at any cost” approach did prevent the team from scoring, as FiveThirtyEight’s data proves, and it ultimately cost them their season.

Fans in Seattle may have been hoping the loss in Dallas would be an eye-opener for the coaching staff, but that obviously isn’t the case. Briand Schottenheimer won’t rest until the run has been established.