Seahawks post mortem - defense

Giants defense completely shut down the Seahawks offense, and this was a team that was getting its two starting WRs back and has a very capable QB good enough to take his team to the SuperBowl just a few years ago.

But of course that is the type of superficial analysis you can get from the newspapers. I would like to analyze it a bit more by comparing this game to our previous game against the Bengals. Carson Palmer moved the ball very well against us that game. If he hadn't run out of time, he might have scored a TD to beat us at the end of regulation instead of just a tying FG. They used several startegies against our defense that game:
(1) to blunt our pass rush, they went to a lot of 3-step-drops and let Carson Palmer get rid of the ball quickly in almost a west-coast style offense.
(2) they ran 3 WR almost all game and their slot receiver, Chatman, was very quick and gave Dcokery fits
(3) they guessed right on all our blitz packages and had max protection with 2 RBs in the backfield to help out.

The impressive thing to me about our defense against Seattle and our coaching is that Seattle runs a west coast offense as its base system and they too were running 3 WR formations often to copy what Bengals did against us. We must have been tipping off our blitzes with our formations which is why the Bengals were ready for us. This is not entirely surprising because the league now has more than a year of film on our defense to anlyze it and pick up reads. But in the bye week, when our own offense and defense scout each other, the offense noted that we were tipping the blitzes and DC Spagnuolo changed things up subtly to disguise our formations better. Also - we blitzed less against Seattle, got after them with a standard DL pass rush - but - our DBs played more tight, man to man press coverage to take away the quick hitters that are part of the west coast style.

I was impressed both with the talent of our DBs to pull this off and the quality of our coaching to subtly change things. Dockery had a much steadier game and they lined him up outside more often and let Ross take the inside slot man more often, which might be a better fit for their skills.