Ryan Grubb unleashed all the play action in final Seahawks game

When “better late than never” meets “it’s still too late.”

The Seattle Seahawks are in need of a new offensive coordinator after firing Ryan Grubb. Among the major disappointments of Grubb’s offense in his lone season with Seattle was the startling lack of play action passing, a total departure from the Seahawks passing game throughout the Russell Wilson and Geno Smith eras.

Well, with no playoff implications at stake and a report from Corbin Smith that Grubb’s fate was sealed before last Sunday’s win over the Los Angeles Rams, Grubb decided to go against tendency in the most comical way possible.

According to NextGenStats, a whopping 13 of Geno Smith’s 29 dropbacks were play action passes. Smith went 9/12 for 70 yards and a touchdown and took a sack. It was the first time all season that Smith threw at least 10 play action passes and just the second time he had at least 10 PA dropbacks. Coincidentally, that other instance was against the Rams in the overtime loss at home.

If you go exclusively by play action rate, Smith ranked dead last among all qualifying quarterbacks at just 16.7%. Against the Rams, Smith’s PA rate was a whopping 44.8%, a full 18 percentage points higher than his next highest game. In fact, it was the second highest rate for Geno since becoming Seahawks starter.

We even saw a rare wrinkle in Grubb’s PA use, which included faking to the strongside of the formation while under center, something Seattle spent virtually the entire season not doing.

Smith finished with a career-high four touchdown passes on an efficient 20/27 passing for 223 yards.

The Seahawks had a reasonably effective rushing attack with Zach Charbonnet and Kenny McIntosh combining for over 100 yards on 21 carries, but it was hardly some overwhelmingly dominant display of running the ball. At the very least, Grubb finally committed to running the ball and using play action… too late.

This in itself is why I think moving on from Grubb was the right call. It shouldn’t have taken until a meaningless Week 18 to break tendencies, such that it almost looked like he had a reactive gameplan to combat all of the issues the offense had dealt with all year. This was a positive version of when Mike Macdonald got on Grubb for not running Kenneth Walker III enough in the New York Giants game, so Grubb spammed a series of the least effective Walker runs possible throughout the first half of the San Francisco 49ers game.

Seattle’s season finale should’ve been how the offense should’ve operated all season, as opposed to the insanely shotgun-centric, pure dropback-heavy approach we actually got.