When Placing the Blame, Seattle Seahawks Are Tied in Knox

Comes the time, in the center of the biggest crisis Coach Chuck Knox has faced with the Seattle Seahawks, to identify problems, point fingers and place blame.

Turns out, in this case, not to be a tremendously complex, unsolvable mystery.

It’s the coach’s fault.

The team has grown old on him overnight. It leads the league in fumbles, of all things, which is a little like the gunfighter who keeps shooting himself in the foot. The other day at his ritualistic midweek press conference, Knox said this team is throwing more passes than any team he has ever coached.

The bad part is, they can’t run, either.

At the rate they are falling over themselves this season, the 1989 Seahawks will be the worst rushing team ever coached by Chuck Knox, and not by just a little bit. After nine games, the Seahawks have gained a total of 856 yards rushing as a team, falling almost 100 yards behind Christian Okoye, the Kansas City running back. They are averaging 95.1 yards a game rushing, but even those totals have been declining lately.

Knox’s previous low rushing teams were the 1984 and ’85 Seahawks, who averaged 102.8 yards a game. But those teams were opportunistic sleight-of-hand artists that won with takeaways and special teams. This team plays the game as though it were an effort in group masochism. These players are the victims, not the ones who victimize, and on top of all that, they are failing to properly execute the one outstanding trademark of a Chuck Knox team.

A Chuck Knox team that can’t run?

Oh, right.

What’s next? Do we find out Michael Jordan can no longer jump high enough to dunk, or that Jose Canseco turns into a singles hitter?

The Seahawks are too far gone for anyone to assume them capable of putting together a winning streak and storming into the playoffs with a full-of-spit fire. Knox disclosed the real problem Wednesday when he allowed as how his three-pronged review told him the plays are sound, the play calling has been good, but the personnel will require, as they say in the NFL, further review.

Players represent the iceberg’s tip of the problem with the Seahawks.

If this were somebody else’s team and Chuck Knox had been called in to perform a rehabilitation, he would immediately see that major changes are needed in the defensive line, the linebackers, the running backs, the wide receivers and the tight ends. To a lesser extent, he might decide adjustments need to be made in the secondary and at quarterback.

To be blunt, this team is a mess, and to place the blame appropriately is to be aware of the obvious. Namely, Knox has been the sole architect of the Seahawks. He wanted these guys. If you want to second-guess, look back to two years ago when it was possible to trade Jacob Green for two No. 1 draft choices. Had Knox not hung onto Green then, and had he used those picks wisely, there would be a lot less work to do on defense today.

Chuck Knox is the Mr. Fixit of professional football, the Mr. Goodwrench of the gridiron. When he’s all through as a coach one day, he will be remembered as the guy who stripped down and rebuilt three languishing franchises into playoff teams. He taught the Los Angeles Rams, the Buffalo Bills and the Seahawks what it means, what it takes and how it feels to win.

He’s been doing it for 17 years and the inclination is to presume there’s nothing happening with these Seahawks that Knox hasn’t seen and fixed 10 times over in his career.

That inclination is wrong.

Knox is strapped with a football team that has both missed some opportunities in drafts (Brian Bosworth, Kelly Stouffer) and has grown old and tired, all at once. In 17 autumns, Knox has never dealt with this particular problem.

He has mastered the art of the rebuilding the team in transition, but he has not shown himself to be a maintenance coach, a guy for the long haul. For differences of personalities, money issues or philosophy, Knox has never coached a team longer than five years until he got to Seattle.

He never truly faced the problem of rebuilding a team more than once. The first two years were the changeover years, when he implemented his system and sold it to his players. By the third year, depending on the specific talent on hand with each franchise, Knox’s teams were on track and rolling and dropping off the veterans from whom he had previously squeezed another year or two of service.

Each new stop allowed Knox to gather new energy, re-focus his attention and tune his proven strategies to the particular personalities and abilities offered at the new job.

Here, it has all gotten old. The Seahawks play like a tired team that has heard the same coach too long. The coach is out there in uncharted territory, having never had to thoroughly rebuild his own team.

On the field, the Seahawks look inept, like a team forced to play with one hand behind its back. A decay has set in. The locker room is ugly. Everyone has jumped off the bandwagon. The once vital Seahawks are old, tired and confused.

If it were any other team, you would say they ought to ring up a guy like Chuck Knox to get out here and fix it.