The 2013 Seahawks and the secret sauce of a generational defense (2024)

Pete Carroll, the architect of this generation’s most dominant NFL defense, was presented with a simple question during a news conference earlier this season.

If this is a copycat league, why then, when other teams began to mimic Seattle’s Cover 3 scheme, didn’t they have similar success?

“That’s a good question,” said Carroll, whose Seahawks defenses led the league in scoring four years in a row from 2012 to 2015.

“Not that it is hard to answer.”

Carroll and the Seahawks have always known the answer. They knew it when Gus Bradley, the team’s defensive coordinator from 2009 to 2012, left to be the head coach of the Jaguars in 2013. They knew it when Dan Quinn, the coordinator who replaced Bradley and led the defense that headlined two consecutive Super Bowl runs, became Atlanta’s head coach in 2015. They knew it when quality control coach Robert Saleh and defensive line coach Todd Wash eventually joined Bradley in Jacksonville, and when linebackers coach Ken Norton Jr. became the defensive coordinator of the Raiders in 2015.

The Cover 3 scheme was only part of the question, albeit an important one. Football in many ways is about creating advantages and exploiting them. Seattle’s defense played with eight men in the box — four down linemen, three linebackers and a safety — meaning they had all their gaps covered in the run game, a numerical advantage over the offense. Stopping the run, most defensive coordinators will tell you, is the quickest path to making an offense one-dimensional and, therefore, easier to stop.

In the passing game, Seattle would drop more defenders into coverage than the offense had running routes, but the advantage up front would then belong to the offense with its five blockers matching up with only four rushers. The way to tilt the scale in favor of the defense is to apply pressure on the quarterback with only four rushers, as the Seahawks were able to do.

“Basically they were saying, ‘We know what we’re doing, we don’t care, we going to do what we do better than what you do,’” said Seahawks defensive tackle Quinton Jefferson, who caught the tail end of Seattle’s run when he was drafted by the team in 2016.

That run peaked in 2013 with a defense that was the driving force of the top Super Bowl champion (and nearly a second) over a two-decade span. According to the betting model of The Athletic’s Austin Mock, the 2013 Seahawks and 2004 Patriots share the title of best champion in the realignment era (since 2002). The 2014 Seahawks would have made it a three-team tie at the top if not for Malcolm Butler.

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Of 640 NFL defenses over that 20-season span, the 2013 Seahawks rank fourth in expected points against. The 2014 unit ranks 14th of 640. The consistency of elite play is staggering: From 2012 to 2015, Seattle allowed 15.7 points per game, almost four fewer than any other team. The second-ranked Bengals (19.5) were closer to 18th (the Jets at 23.08) than they were to first.

And the Seahawks did it all with one of the league’s thinnest defensive playbooks.

It’s a simple enough scheme, so long as the players can execute. The simpler the scheme, the faster the defenders can play within it. That made it easier for other teams to study it and implement similar fronts and coverages.

“The whole NFL adopted that defense,” said former cornerback DeShawn Shead, an undrafted defender out of Portland State who played four-plus seasons in Carroll’s defense, two as a starter in 2015 and 2016. “It’s a copycat league. Everybody watches a lot of tape, and they see what’s winning and they like to mimic that.”

The problem for those other teams was they had a key ingredient for the most elite defense of this generation, but they were missing the secret sauce: the players.

“I would totally put it back on the guys that were doing the plan,” Carroll said in response to the question. “We were able to piece together a bunch of guys that really had something special about them. The less we did, the better they played. When we played in (Super Bowl XLVIII against the Broncos), that was one of the simplest game plans we ever played.

“We were simple anyways, but it wasn’t simple because they weren’t smart. It was simple because that’s the way they needed to really express their awareness, their commitment, and their speed and their confidence.”

Richard Sherman entered the 2011 NFL Draft as a 6-foot-2 converted wide receiver with just two years of cornerback experience under his belt and 4.5 speed. By Year 2, the fifth-round pick was among the best cornerbacks in the league, capable of shutting down a third of the field by himself.

Bobby Wagner didn’t have any Pac-10 offers out of high school and ended up being a tackling machine at Utah State before he was taken in the second round by Seattle in 2012. By Year 2, he was among the best defenders at his position, with a unique combination of strength, athleticism and ball skills.

Earl Thomas was a first-round pick in the 2010 draft, Carroll’s first with general manager John Schneider. By Year 2, he was among the best safeties in football, one who could hit like a linebacker in the run game and patrol the middle of the field like an elite center fielder.

Thomas, Sherman and Wagner played together for five full seasons. They’re all likely to be Hall of Famers.

The hardest piece to find may have been Kam Chancellor, a hybrid defender who was arguably the key to making Seattle’s Cover 3 defense work because he could cover like a safety and fit the run like a linebacker. Seattle used a fifth-round pick to get him in 2010. By Year 2, he was among the best safeties in football. Last week, Chancellor was named a finalist for the Pro Football Hall of Fame.

“A lot of teams didn’t have that lockdown corner in Sherm, they didn’t have that physical safety in Kam, and you didn’t have a phenomenal post player in Earl,” said Seahawks safety Josh Jones, who grew up admiring Seattle’s Legion of Boom defense. “That’s hard to mimic and try to find.”

The players, not necessarily the scheme, were what put Seattle’s defense in the conversation with the all-time greats. Their chemistry made the defense virtually unstoppable.

“We just had a strong, tight-knit brotherhood,” longtime Seahawks linebacker K.J. Wright said in a recent interview on “The Richard Sherman Podcast.” Wright, who retired in July, was also a member of Seattle’s 2011 class and played with Sherman for seven years. “We was boys, we all loved each other, we had each other’s back. When you turned on that tape, we was all on our responsibilities.”

“My favorite game is obviously the Super Bowl, but if you watch it, Sherm, we all moved like this,” Wright said, motioning his two index fingers horizontally in unison. “Everybody was tied on a string. We was so connected, so dialed in, so fast, you couldn’t mess with us for about four, five, six years. When you talk about the greatest, you got the Ravens in there, you got the Bears — but of this generation? It’s not even close.”

Although Seattle’s defense earned the “Legion of Boom” nickname, there are players from the group who contend that LOB truly stands for “Love Our Brothers.” Building that bond is something that simply copying Seattle’s scheme couldn’t account for.

“We played at such a high level because we also played for each other,” said Shead, now in his second year as an assistant defensive backs coach with the Seahawks. “We knew each other so well. We knew everybody’s family on the field and off the field, and we really had that bond and that trust, both on and off the field.

“I could look over at K.J. in a certain formation, and we knew exactly how we were going to play that; we didn’t have to say no words to each other. I look over to Sherm, Kam, Earl and we could just have that unity on the field. It was different. Because of that, nobody was able to match that in the way we played that defense.”

Coaches around the league have learned this lesson the hard way. Very few from Carroll’s tree have fielded elite defenses over multiple seasons. Bradley couldn’t recreate the magic as head coach of the Jaguars nor as defensive coordinator of the Chargers or Raiders (he’s now the Colts’ coordinator). Quinn’s Atlanta defenses were never elite, though he’s since found success as the coordinator in Dallas, which has two of the best players at their respective positions in linebacker Micah Parsons and cornerback Trevon Diggs.

Norton’s Raiders defenses weren’t very good, and Seattle’s weren’t any better when he returned to be Carroll’s coordinator from 2018 to 2021. Saleh coordinated excellent defenses in San Francisco in 2019 and 2020, the former carrying the 49ers to the Super Bowl. Sherman was one of two Pro Bowlers on that unit along with edge rusher Nick Bosa, the 2019 Defensive Rookie of the Year. In 2021, Saleh became head coach of the Jets, whose defenses have been among the worst in the league. (Kris Richard, another member of the Carroll tree, is in his first season as New Orleans’ co-defensive coordinator.)

All those coaches weren’t merely running Seattle’s Cover 3 when given the chance to control their own defense. The same is true for all the teams to deploy versions of Seattle’s defense without hiring one of Carroll’s disciples. Many of them had to adapt, either because of offensive evolution around the league, a lack of talent or some combination of the two. Carroll hasn’t even been able to recreate the same magic, and he’s running the show and picking players.

Another factor: Defense in general is volatile from year to year, making it hard to sustain excellence the way Seattle’s defense did in the peak LOB years. Great defenses generate turnovers, but turnovers can be fluky, and high turnover rates are hard to maintain for multiple seasons. The same goes for high sack rates, another calling card of most elite defenses. Sack rates can be a function of quarterback play as much as pass rush talent, and teams play a different crop of quarterbacks each season.

That speaks to another reason the Seahawks’ defense was so unique: It made the unsustainable look sustainable.

An additional, underrated answer to the question Carroll was asked is the challenge associated with being the copier and not the originator. Playing great defense in the NFL is about having answers to various ways offenses will attack the weak points in your fronts and your coverage. Carroll, being the originator, had the answers to those tests. His understudies and other teams around the league did not, at least not to the same degree.

“When you copycat, in my opinion, you’re always one step behind the eight-ball because you’re teaching something you’ve learned off of tape, whereas here, it was firsthand knowledge,” said Sean Desai, Seattle’s associate head coach on defense. Desai was Chicago’s defensive quality control assistant from 2013 to 2018. “They knew all the issues, they had all the answers for the problems, and they knew how to solve them faster.

“Whereas if you’re copying it, you’re going to learn that a step later because you have to go through that experience. When you’re the innovator and you’re doing it first, you’ve got all the answers.”

Carroll experienced this dilemma firsthand when he was coaching at his alma mater, the University of the Pacific. That was at a time when Howard Schnellenberger’s Miami Hurricanes were dominating college football. One day, Carroll said, the Pacific head coach walked into the office with a notebook of Miami’s defensive playbook and dropped it on the table.

“OK, put it in,” Carroll recalls being told. “That’s the defense we’re playing.”

The Tigers, unsurprisingly, did not replicate Miami’s success. Carroll has actually fought against copying other teams or trends in that way, a lesson he learned coaching under Monte Kiffin at Arkansas in 1977.

“If you change your philosophy from year to year, then you don’t have one,” Carroll said of Kiffin’s message. “And that’s never left me, and that’s the truth.”

The days of coaches borrowing from Carroll’s defensive philosophy are in the past. Carroll himself fully abandoned that scheme this offseason. The Vic Fangio-inspired split-safety defense is growing in popularity as teams attempt to modernize their pass defenses without compromising their run fits.

And although NFL trends tend to be cyclical, it’s unlikely the league will see a four-year stretch of Cover 3 dominance that rivals what Carroll and his Seahawks produced to power one of the best championship teams of the past 20 years.

(Top illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; photos: Mike Strobe, Steve Dykes / Getty Images)