How exciting is a Seahawks safety tandem of Diggs and Adams?

After a disappointing showing in 2019, the Seahawks’ defense suddenly has some hype surrounding it. The excitement, for the most part, stems from the back end of the group, where suddenly Seattle may once again have one of the best secondaries in the NFL.

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The Seahawks now have Pro Bowler Shaquill Griffin and either Tre Flowers or trade acquisition Quinton Dunbar manning the outside of the defense at cornerback, which has many excited, but the safeties are also drumming up plenty of interest.

Last season, the Seahawks shipped a fifth-round draft pick to the Detroit Lions for Quandre Diggs, who, once healthy, manned the free safety position and helped create some big plays. Now playing alongside Diggs is All-Pro Jamal Adams, who the Seahawks traded for this offseason, giving up two first-round picks, a third-round pick and veteran safety Bradley McDougald to the Jets for Adams and a fourth-round pick in return.

Safe to say Diggs is excited to play with Adams, who has been one of Diggs’ best friends dating back to before either were in the NFL. Adams told Seattle media members that the two met when Adams was being recruited by Texas, where Diggs played his college ball.

“I think it’s going to be a fun tandem. I think we can do some big things and for us, we’ve just got to continue to put the work in, don’t buy into the hype, just be us,” Diggs told 710 ESPN Seattle’s Danny and Gallant Monday morning (podcast available here). “That’s what it’s all about – being us, going out there and competing, letting our plays do the talking and just kind of feeding off each other.”

Discussing what stood out from Diggs’ interview, former NFL linebacker Dave Wyman said on 710 ESPN Seattle’s Bob, Dave and Moore that you can’t help but look forward to seeing the safety tandem of Diggs and Adams on gameday.

“You see a lot of the same things out of Quandre Diggs that you see from Jamal Adams,” Wyman said. “Just really good angles and lines they take on the field. And also remember Quandre Diggs, I thought his best hit was on the tight end in the Monday night game against Minnesota – I think it was Irv Smith –  and he came up and smoked him and it was like one of those Earl Thomas-type of angles where he comes flying up out of nowhere. But those two guys, they have kind of similar builds and they play with similar purpose.”

Wyman’s co-host Jim Moore said he’s glad that there’s reason for optimism with the defense at all, and noted that he’s interested to see what having Diggs and Adams side by side for a full season does for the Seahawks.

“You look at that secondary, I was just thinking about with Diggs back there – and we know about the 16 takeaways they had in the five (regular season) games he played (for Seattle in 2019) – you add Adams to the mix (and he’s an) upgrade over McDougald. And then getting Diggs for 16 games as opposed to five, your cornerbacks are set and you’ve got these moving parts, too, where maybe on passing downs you move Dunbar inside, you’ve got Marquise Blair getting good reviews so far at the nickel spot, so they’ve got a lot more options this year defensively,” he said.

Adams won’t have had much time with the team overall as he was not part of the initial virtual offseason with the rest of the team due to the timing of his trade. But he and Diggs have known each other for quite some time, and the two not only have talked about playing with each other, but have also discussed each other’s games.

“It’s more of like something that we’ve always talked about and I think that’s the difference,” Diggs said on Danny and Gallant. “I think he and I look at each other in the huddle and it’s like, dang, we’re really teammates, we’re really teammates now. I think that’s the most different aspect. I think it’s cool because we’ve always talked and stayed in contact. It was almost like a weekly thing where me and him talked during the season just because of the fact that we threw ideas off of each other. If they played somebody or I played somebody we’d ask questions, so it’s something like that.”

Wyman said that the way the two safeties discuss approaching the game, it’s hard not to think of arguably the best safety tandem in Seahawks history.

“Listening to those guys talk about how they prepare, watch film and all that, it can’t help but remind you of Kam (Chancellor) and Earl (Thomas),” Wyman said, “and that’s the kind of chemistry that they had and they sort of knew what the other person was thinking. … It’s cool to hear that the two safeties – which I believe are the two most important parts of the defense – are having that kind of connection already.”

Listen to the conversion in the full first hour of Bob, Dave and Moore at this link or in the player below.

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