Winners and Losers from Seahawks 6, Bears 3

The Seahawks got their ninth win of the season and did so with minimal entertainment value.

I guess if you’re looking for anything positive out of Seattle Seahawks’ very ugly 6-3 win over the Chicago Bears (aside from the actual win), it’s the fact that it finished in well under three hours and was very light on penalties for both teams. The game was free-flowing boredom from start to finish. If you’re going to be dull, at least make it quick.

It’s time for the penultimate Winners and Losers of the 2024 regular season.

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Winners

Leonard Williams

Big Cat added another three tackles for loss and two sacks to his ledger, giving him nine sacks on the year. Do I hear a 10-sack season for Leonard Williams? He’s been the best defensive player all year and this back-end of the year has just been a clinic from the veteran defensive lineman. Seattle’s defense as a whole has been good. Williams has been great.

Devon Witherspoon

That wasn’t like his Monday Night Football masterclass against the New York Giants, but Spoon dominated. Three tackles for loss and a “sack” of Caleb Williams that was really just Williams running out of bounds for no gain while Spoon chased from an angle. Spoon is extremely fun to watch and I’m glad that he at least got a sack on his stat sheet, because he’s earned something major in his season.

Uchenna Nwosu

That was his best game since returning from his latest injury. Nwosu had a pass defensed and his first sack of the season, and generated a few other pressures on the evening. It’s encouraging to see Nwosu salvage something from a frustrating season largely spent on the shelf.

Coby Bryant

Another instance of Bryant delivering a late pressure on a quarterback blitz to force an errant throw. He did it versus Aaron Rodgers in the New York Jets game and he did it on the game-deciding play against the Bears. Bryant has been a revelation as a full-time starting safety and he might be someone who is looking at a contract extension pending what happens next season.

Riq Woolen

After all of the criticisms levied against him for the performance against the Green Bay Packers and the subsequent “team violation” benching to start the Minnesota Vikings game, Riq needed that game-ending pick in the worst way. He needed it a little more after getting beat on that D.J. Moore drag route on 4th and 6 before the two-minute warning. Woolen snapped Caleb Williams’ NFL record streak of consecutive passes without an interception and was otherwise very good in coverage in this matchup.

Kenny McIntosh

It was tough sledding for Zach Charbonnet after a fast start, finishing with just 57 yards on 15 carries, but Kenny McIntosh is making the most of his increased playing time. He had a career-long 25-yard rush to help set up the Seahawks’ first field goal and finished with 46 yards on 7 carries. I’ve not really put McIntosh on here this season but it’s good to see him get involved more and be effective.

Charbonnet was outstanding in pass protection and deserves a shoutout, but the statline after halftime wasn’t anything major.

Jake Curhan

Once a Seahawk, always a Seahawk. Thanks for the hold on Uchenna Nwosu to take away a touchdown.

Mike Macdonald

First-year head coach clinching a winning record? That’s a good personal moment for him, even if it doesn’t lead to the playoffs. His defense also kicked ass and had Caleb Williams in a tizzy.

Noah Fant

The Seahawks only had two scoring drives and three of Fant’s four catches for 42 yards came on those series. Perhaps his most important contribution was getting Seattle out of a 2nd and 16 jam (thanks to DK Metcalf’s personal foul penalty) following the two-minute warning. Fant’s playing his best football late in the season, although his wait for his first touchdown since 2022 continues.

Olu Oluwatimi

Oluwatimi recovered Smith’s fumble on the Darrell Taylor strip sack, otherwise the Bears would’ve been in field goal range right away. Incredibly, Smith hasn’t lost a fumble yet this year, and he can thank Olu Olu for keeping it so.

Jason Myers

Myers was responsible for 100% of the Seahawks’ points and he drilled a 50-yard field goal with ease in difficult conditions. His eighth make of 50+ yards on the season extends his franchise record and is a new career high.

Losers

Everyone who watched that game

Were you not entertained? Oh, you weren’t? Well, I know some of you like to see great defense so I can’t knock you if you loved Seattle’s defensive performance, but there was a whole lot of bad offense going on in this one. That was this generation’s Seahawks vs. Browns game from 2011, which was also 6-3 but went against Seattle.

For neutrals, that was not fun. At least bad football can be fun with terrible interceptions, wacky turnovers, missed field goals, and other lowlights. This game was a string of incomplete passes, throws short of the sticks, and punts aplenty.

Ryan Grubb

Well, Grubb gave us a good quarter and change of running the ball effectively and with diversity in attack. That’s about it. The Bears had allowed 102 points over the past three weeks and the Seahawks turned up and Chicago gave up the fewest points its allowed all season.

Grubb ran the ball more and still had a low play action rate. When he threw the ball it was all at the line of scrimmage, which I sort of get given the weather and the compromised state of Geno Smith’s health, but a screen to Pharaoh Brown?! Last week it was fake tossing to DK Metcalf behind the line of scrimmage and this week he pulls out something worse for a guy who’s had multiple drops on the season and is a known non-threat on offense.

Whatever you think about Geno Smith, his results with Shane Waldron were vastly superior to what we’re seeing with Grubb. He’s neither the first nor the last offensive coordinator to be restricted by his offensive line. Grubb’s results are the worst we’ve seen out of any first-year Seahawks OC since Jeremy Bates, who got the boot in 2010.

Pharaoh Brown

I don’t really have the energy to write about it right now, but John Schneider’s free agent additions this offseason have been nothing short of a disaster, and Brown is one of those players. Pharaoh Brown was here to be a blocking tight end and he doesn’t consistently block well. For some reason he’s getting the ball on a screen pass and he fumbles the ball, which thankfully was not a touchdown after Kyler Gordon was ruled down by contact. In his defense, he should never be in position to get those targets in the first place.

Brown will not be a part of the Seahawks in 2025.

Jaelon Darden

Do not return a punt at your own 5 unless you have acres of space. Some of that is down to the lackluster blocking the Seahawks continue to have on special teams, but the punt return and kick return decisions regardless of who’s on the field have been a major part of the Seahawks’ terrible field position woes all season.

Final Notes

• Geno Smith wasn’t very good and he’s not healthy. He should’ve been picked in the red zone (again) and the thought process that led him to pre-determine a tight window throw to Tyler Lockett was baffling. Smith’s hesitancy to scramble was also evident and you can’t blame him given the knee injury, but the near-interception seemed to impact his decision making to be as cautious as possible for the rest of the night. He’s also been liable to underthrow quite a few of his misfires in recent weeks. Officially he had a turnover-free game but he was fortunate to not have two. I’m still of the opinion that the issues regarding his season are much more to do with the circumstances around him than him specifically, but that was a worrying performance even without turnovers.

• DK Metcalf hadn’t had a penalty since Week 4 against the Detroit Lions so I’m not super mad about that silly skirmish with Tyrique Stevenson, but you can’t hurt the team like that. Show some restraint just once. The only reason Metcalf avoided the losers list is because he made an incredible hands catch on an underthrown Geno Smith play action pass, one that he’s seldom ever made in his career. That’s a positive to me!
• Jaxon Smith-Njigba only had three catches for 32 yards, ending his lengthy streak of games with at least 70 receiving yards. He needs five more catches to surpass Tyler Lockett’s 100-catch single-season franchise record.
• I was skeptical about re-signing Jarran Reed at the start of the season but he got the game ball for his efforts and has been playing very well the past several weeks. He was one of six Seahawks to sack Caleb Williams.
• The Bears have an unserious coaching staff and apparently no one on that team knows how or when to call timeout. It’s not just a Matt Eberflus problem.
• I said in the game thread comments that I find the Seahawks to not be exciting and I stand by that. There are exciting individual players but the team itself is not great to watch and hasn’t been for years. I’m not sure how much that can be pinned on the coaching staff compared to the roster quality at this point. An offense that lacks explosive plays whether in the run or passing game + a defense that doesn’t consistently generate a lot of turnovers or negative plays + an overall team prone to a ton of penalties is not must-see TV. It’s also how the Seahawks make games against poor opposition close while they have more often than not been blown out against Super Bowl contenders. Until that changes, the ceiling on the Seahawks is not going to elevate.
• And yet, the division is still within reach. I’m rooting for Week 18 winner-take-all. Go Cardinals! Let’s see L.J. Collier sack Matthew Stafford. Let’s have Evan Brown turn into Steve Hutchinson and block Kobie Turner out of SoFi Stadium. DeeJay Dallas? It’s time to house one of those kickoff returns.