Has a problem emerged for the Seahawks’ offense?

Teams in the NFL will take wins any way they can get them, and that certainly was the case for the Seattle Seahawks on Sunday.

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In a matchup they were heavily favored in against a 44-year-old Philip Rivers who had come out of retirement to play his first game in nearly five years, the Seahawks eked out an 18-16 home victory over the Indianapolis Colts thanks to a heroic six-field-goal effort from kicker Jason Myers.

It was a win, but it was far from the best game Seattle has played this season. That rings especially true for the offense, which sputtered for most of the first half before finally gaining some traction and putting together four scoring drives in the second half (all field goals), including setting up Myers’ game-winning 56-yarder with 18 seconds to go.

But the offense’s recent performance in the first halves of games is becoming a trend in the wrong direction from where the unit was earlier this year. It was the third straight game the unit failed to reach the end zone in the first half, and the fourth time in the past five games.

During Seattle Sports’ Brock and Salk on Monday, host Mike Salk and ESPN Seahawks reporter Brady Henderson discussed the offense’s recent first-half struggles.

For Henderson, the fact that the Seahawks had shown the capability of putting up points in a hurry early during the first half of the season makes what has transpired of late a troublesome trend.

“That wouldn’t be all that remarkable if this was a lesser offense, even an average offense, but you’re talking about an offense that ranked sixth in the NFL in scoring,” Henderson said, “and yet for whatever reason at the start of games, they really can’t get out of their own way.”

The Seahawks have been able to weather some of those slow starts, winning their past three games while their offense provided just six first-half points in each. But that wasn’t the case when they faced Rams on Nov. 16 and didn’t find the end zone until the fourth quarter.

“You can get away with that when you’re facing an undrafted rookie in (Minnesota’s) Max Brosmer who’s making his first start. You can get away with that against (Atlanta’s) Kirk Cousins, who’s probably a backup at this stage of his career. … You can get away with it against 44-year-old Philip Rivers coming off the couch for the first time in five years,” Henderson said.

“But you didn’t get away with it last month against (the Rams’) Matthew Stafford, who comes to town on Thursday night, and it stands to reason that unless you get some favorable quarterback matchup in the first round of the playoffs, you’re gonna have a hard time doing that when the games get tougher in the postseason. And so that’s something they have to figure out.”

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Salk agreed the offense has showed some worrying signs of late, but he wondered if Sunday’s performance against the Colts was more situational than it was an indictment of the offense’s recent play.

“Maybe this was just the type of game that was going to be low scoring, and so everything sort of went that way,” Salk said. “The play calling went that way. Everything was, hey, let’s not make a mistake, because if we make a mistake, then we’re gonna give this other team a chance to beat us on a day where otherwise they can’t. So I don’t know. I never fully know how much to put into, alright, the offense didn’t look in the first half. It didn’t. I’m right here with you. I mean, they looked awful.

“Quite frankly, the defense didn’t look great in the first half. Special teams didn’t look good in the first half. There were all kinds of problems with the way they played the first half of the game. I just don’t know how much to take from it, and how much to make it feel as if that is who they are as opposed to that’s what this game was.”

Salk asked Henderson if blitz-happy Minnesota, which held Seattle without an offensive touchdown until the fourth quarter in Week 13, laid out a blueprint for other teams to attack the Seahawks’ offense.

“I mean, maybe they provided some blueprint for how to slow down (wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba),” Henderson said. “I think if any team exposed something, it would have been the Rams and the way that they disguised coverages and sort of put (Sam) Darnold in a bind in that four-interception game a few weeks before that.”

Listen to Brock and Salk weekdays from 6-10 a.m. or find the podcast on the Seattle Sports app. 

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