RENTON — The Seattle Seahawks are searching for answers to their run defense after allowing at least 200 yards rushing in each of the past two weeks.
The St. Louis Rams and Tampa Bay Buccaneers certainly aren’t rushing juggernauts.
Both teams rank in the bottom half of the league in rushing through nine weeks of the season.
However, both found ways to hurt the Seahawks on the ground. The Rams rushed for 200 yards against Seattle while the Buccaneers ran for 205.
Neither team has rushed for more than 160 yards in any other game this season.
It’s left Seattle trying to figure out the issues behind their struggles.
“We think we have some things that we can take care of and improve that’s really obvious to us. We’ll take a shot at that and see how it goes this weekend,” head coach Pete Carroll said.
The Seahawks had been allowing just 92 yards a game on the ground through the first seven weeks of the season.
Arian Foster of the Houston Texans had been the only 100-yard rusher Seattle allowed over that stretch before Zac Stacy and Mike James ran for 134 and 158 yards, respectively.
Defensive coordinator Dan Quinn said there wasn’t one thing they could point to that caused the problems Sunday against the Buccaneers.
Instead, he believed it was a wide array of minor mistakes that came back to haunt them.
“If it had been one thing or one scheme or one player, then OK let’s take that out,” Quinn said.
“We went back through all of them. Here’s the times when we’re playing our really best ball and really attacking the line of scrimmage and going and hitting our fits. When we didn’t do that or got out of a gap, it ended up being a big play. … It just bothered you to no end.”
Linebacker K.J. Wright said they were just a bit out of position at times and their opponents take advantage.
“You get out of your gap for like one second, that guy is going to hit it,” Wright said. “Some guys are peeking in other gaps they’re not supposed to and the other guy is hitting it for big yards so we’ve got to correct that.”
In order to address the issue this week, Quinn said they went back to the basics.
“I think really we went all the way back through and put on our mind-set of how we play,” Quinn said. “The way we attack the line of scrimmage. The way we get off blocks. The way we finish. Those are the things that we want to come back to to reconnect to our core stuff about.”
The Seahawks have made getting those issues corrected one of their major areas of focus this week.
“The coaches addressed it,” Wright said. “We get on film and watch it and be like ‘hey, this has got to stop. We can’t do this.’ Guys have got to be more accountable and just get the job done. We’re professionals. We should be able to handle that.”
Seattle has a chance to get back on the right track Sunday against the Atlanta Falcons. Atlanta ranks last in the league in rushing, averaging just 64.4 yards per game on the ground.
