The Seahawks have regularly been one of the league’s best teams on special teams since Pete Carroll took over in 2010, and the man overseeing that group over that entire time has been special teams coordinator Brian Schneider.
But as good as the Seahawks usually are in that area—against Dallas big special teams plays are the only reason Seattle was in the game—they were uncharacteristically awful in St. Louis, giving up three game-changing plays that allowed the Rams to win despite being outplayed by Seattle on offense and defense.
First the Rams used a 75-yard kick return to set up a touchdown, then later they scored on a 90-yard punt return thanks to a crazy misdirection play in which the entire Seahawks’ coverage unit was fooled. Then with the game winding down and the Rams clinging to a two-point lead, they faked a punt, got a first down an a pass thrown by punter Johnny Hekker, which allowed them to run out the clock rather than give the ball back to a red-hot Russell Wilson.
“A lot of things did happen, it was a perfect storm for it, but it happened,” Schneider said. “You just learn from those. Something’s going to happen this week too, it happens through the whole league, and that’s why we try to keep educating and keep coach and taking a look at myself and just trying to help out the players in each situation, and them learning too. It’s always a process, always has been, and most of the time you don’t see it like you saw last week, but we’re always correcting things. Sometimes they’re huge that nobody sees but us. So it’s just one of those things that’s out there a little more than we’d like, and we just keep learning.”
On the punt return, Schneider said, “It’s just the consistency of Jon (Ryan)’s punt. We called it there, we just didn’t execute the way we should. As always we’ll learn from it and move on.
“We have calls that we do in those situations where we know where the ball’s going, we just didn’t execute.”
As rare and well-executed as the play was, which saw returner Tayvon Austin go to his left and pretend to be fielding the ball, leading Seattle’s coverage team away from where it was actually going, Schneider said it’s something they’ve studied: “There’s been three or four instances that we’ve actually shown over the years.”
On the fake punt, he said, “It was gutsy, but also we’ve got to put them in a position to be able to stop that; that’s in their history. So I’ve got to do a better job getting guys into position for that.”
St. Louis’ big kick return came against a coverage team that was missing some of its regulars because of injuries, but Schneider said that can’t be an excuse: “That’s no factor. Injuries happen, everyone deals with them, so we’ve just got to make sure we’re moving the right guys in there.”
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