The Seattle Seahawks will go on the road to face off against the top-seeded Carolina Panthers in the second round of the playoffs. This matchup has all the makings of a battle. The top ranked scoring defense faces off against the top ranked scoring offense with the opportunity to go to the NFC championship game on the line. With a game that looks to be close throughout, both teams will have to avoid all the small mistakes that could come back to haunt them.
At multiple points throughout the Seahawks’ first-round playoff win over the Minnesota Vikings, the offense seemed to have a multitude of communication issues. These resulted in a decent amount of instances in which they were unable to get to the line of scrimmage and the snap off prior to getting hit with a delay of game penalty or having to waste a timeout. One such instance possibly took them out of field goal range and resulted in them going for a 4th-and-13. Another instance resulted in a snap that whizzed past Russell Wilson’s head, which did turn into a tremendous play by Wilson and Tyler Lockett, and resulted in the biggest play of the game for the Seahawks.
Seattle did mention having trouble getting play calls in to the huddle, but odds are it will not be much easier in Carolina battling a crowd that will likely be pretty rowdy when the Seattle offense is on the field.
When Carolina and Seattle faced off in Week 6, it was a communication problem in the Seattle secondary that led to a game-winning touchdown pass late in the fourth quarter from Cam Newton to Greg Olsen. This is something that rarely happens with the Seattle defense, and ever since that point communication issues have seemed to be cleared up on the defensive side of the ball.
Seattle cannot afford to continue wasting timeouts or taking delay of game penalties in a game like this, and it will be essential for Seattle to clean up all the communication problems that it had last week in order to stay in front of the chains. This game sets up to be a battle down to the wire, where any small mistakes could be magnified.
