Huard: Seahawks rookie safety could be ‘disruptive force’ vs NFC West rivals

For the better part of the past decade, the Seattle Seahawks have been squaring off in the NFC West against two of football’s brightest offensive minds – Los Angeles Rams head coach Sean McVay and San Francisco 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan.

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But when it came time for the Seahawks to find a successor to Pete Carroll as head coach, they didn’t try to copy their division rivals by finding the next hotshot offensive guru.

Instead, they went the opposite direction and hired rising star Mike Macdonald, who has quickly developed a reputation as one of the league’s best defensive play-callers.

“Mike Macdonald was hired to be a disruptor,” former NFL quarterback Brock Huard said on Seattle Sports’ Blue 88. “You did not stay status quo. McVay and Shanahan would have loved to have seen another branch off their (coaching) tree in this division. (The Seahawks) didn’t do that.”

And when it comes to the Seahawks’ defensive personnel, Huard argues that rookie safety Nick Emmanwori is the embodiment of that “disruptor mindset.”

The 6-foot-4, 220-pound Emmanwori sports a rare level of size, talent and athleticism, which he put on display with an eye-catching performance at the NFL combine. And he has a unique level of positional versatility, which he showcased while roaming all over the field in college as a big-time playmaker at South Carolina.

Those attributes give Macdonald a potential chess piece to counter the McVay and Shanahan offenses.

With the 49ers coming to town for Sunday’s season opener, Huard thinks Emmanwori could be an X-factor in his NFL debut.

“Nick Emmanwori is a part of that disruption with how he covers George Kittle, how he handles Christian McCaffrey out of the backfield, how he plays and sets that edge against that jet sweep and that outside zone that San Francisco loves to do,” Huard said.

“I’m not saying Nick Emmanwori was drafted specifically for the matchup twice a year with the Rams and the 49ers. But I’m also not saying he (wasn’t) drafted very specifically to be a disruptive force in this scheme for Mike Macdonald and to take those (opposing) schemes away.”

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