The Seahawks Have A Need For Rashid Shaheed

First impressions can be deceiving, but the opening seconds of Saturday’s 49ers-Seahawks NFC divisional round game really did presage the lopsided evening to follow. Maybe the game was over before it began: The Niners won the toss and deferred, perhaps to get a better look at an injured Sam Darnold. First mistake. Before Darnold could be looked at, Seattle return man Rashid Shaheed took the opening kickoff 95 yards for a touchdown. Half the country hadn’t yet switched over from the Bills-Broncos overtime on CBS, and the Seahawks were up 7-0. The coin toss was the only thing the Niners won all day. 

So dominated was San Francisco’s offense that Shaheed’s touchdown, which took all of 13 seconds, would end up being the game-winning score in the 41-6 result. The Niners looked slow, weak, and sloppy against a defense that has killed opponents' passing games with heavy nickel and dime usage, stuffed the run with a loaded front seven, and generally befuddled quarterbacks all season with an array of disguised coverages. In the Seahawks' locker room postgame and at the podium, the phrase “complementary football” came up a lot. This team would be a fitting victor of a postseason whose lesson has been something like “quarterbacks don’t matter.” Darnold’s last playoff performance didn’t inspire much confidence, and a late-breaking report from ESPN's Adam Schefter about Darnold tweaking his oblique in practice earlier in the week inspired just as little, but in the end, Darnold felt almost incidental to the whole thing. The defense gave him short fields to work with, and the running attack finished the job in the second half. The job responsibilities of the Seahawks QB, whoever it may be, are simple: Don’t turn the ball over, target Jaxon Smith-Njigba, and everything will be OK. You don’t really have to do anything else.

No team scored more non-offensive touchdowns than Seattle in the regular season. On one occasion, special teams scored all their points: Jason Myers made all six of his field goals in the queasy 18-16 walk-off win against the Colts, in Philip Rivers’s first game back from retirement. Two catches by Shaheed on that game-winning drive got the Seahawks into field goal range.