The Seahawks will most likely be facing Jimmy Garoppolo as the Rams’ starting quarterback in Week 18.
The Seattle Seahawks’ Week 18 finale against the Los Angeles Rams quickly went from potentially being for the NFC West title to effectively meaningless. Seattle is eliminated from postseason contention with a week to spare, while the Rams have won the division but haven’t locked in their seed yet.
At the moment, the Rams are the No. 3 seed and would play the Washington Commanders, but if the Rams were to lose to the Seahawks and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers defeat the New Orleans Saints to clinch the NFC South, Los Angeles would drop to the No. 4 seed and automatically host whoever loses the Minnesota Vikings vs. Detroit Lions game.
Would Sean McVay want to push to keep the No. 3 seed by playing his starters, or would he do what he normally does and rest players when there’s no real important seeding (e.g. first-round bye) at stake? It looks like we have our answer.
“Those are always the great questions you ask yourself,” McVay said on The Coach McVay Show. “And I think you have a responsibility as a head coach and really with your coaching staff to collaborate and say, ‘Hey, we’re going to compete every opportunity that we get.’ You don’t minimize the importance of every single game.
“But relative to what’s at risk, what’s at reward in terms of either/or, and being able to maybe get some guys that are – you know, the toll that a season takes – get them back, refreshed, rejuvenated. Typically, we’ve erred on the side of leaning a little bit more towards that and I would imagine as we continue to finalize our plans, that’s probably the direction we’ll go.”
McVay also discussed seeing the likes of running backs Blake Corum, Cody Schrader, and some reserve offensive linemen get more playing time than they’ve been getting this season. He also all but indicated that former San Francisco 49ers starter Jimmy Garoppolo will be at least getting the bulk of the playing time if not the start over Matthew Stafford.
This isn’t surprising to hear from McVay given who he’s approached previous seasons where they knew their playoff/division fate in advance. One play here, another play there, and the Seattle Seahawks and Los Angeles Rams could’ve been for the NFC West title. Even if the “strength of victory” tiebreaker situation staved off elimination for Seattle into Week 18, this game would’ve definitely had starters playing the whole game.
On the flip side, Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald didn’t directly say that the starters will get the full workload, but it seems as if the starters will play.
“The first thing is it’s an opportunity for us to go get to 10 wins and that’s important right now,” Macdonald said on Monday. “There’s a standard here of what we’re trying to establish and show off our football character of what type of team we are, what type of people we are, and how we’re going to play. The situation has changed, but the situation really hasn’t changed to a certain extent as well. We’re going to play a good football team that won our division, and we want to get to 10 wins.”
“Yeah, we are going to go play to win the game,” he added.