By Cedric Williams
Tuesdays are normally off days in the NFL. It’s the one day of the week that players can have completely off to rest and get away from the daily physical and mental rigors of being a professional football player.
In fact, having Tuesday as a league-wide off day every week was negotiated into the collective bargaining agreement by the Players’ Association. So every week players look forward to having their Tuesdays away from the facility.
But after playing on ESPN’s Monday Night Football, and suffering a stinging 31-17 loss to the rival San Francisco 49ers, and with one less day to get ready for Sunday’s visit by the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks, nearly every member of the St. Louis Rams roster made his way in to the Rams Park training facility for either some type of injury treatment, film study, or perhaps even to get an early look at the gameplan for the coming week.
“Everybody gets all excited about Monday night games and so on and so forth, except for the coaches because it’s a short week,” Rams head coach Jeff Fisher said during his weekly meeting with the media on Tuesday. “It’s hard. The coaches looked at the game real quickly. I looked at it quickly this morning. We’ve moved on to Seattle. I’ll say this, the same thing I said last night, there were a lot of good things in this game – great effort. We played very physical. There were some really, really outstanding individual efforts on some individual plays, so we have to take those positives and move forward.”
And moving forward means preparing for the defending champs, who will come to town with a 3-2 record after falling last week, 30-23, to the Dallas Cowboys.
Seattle on Offense
The Seahawks will come into Sunday’s Week 6 matchup with the Rams ranked 20th overall in total offense (335.8 yards/game).
Despite having one of the league’s best dual-threat quarterbacks under center in third-year man Russell Wilson, Seattle has struggled to pass the ball this season. The Seahawks are averaging just 186.0 yards/game through the air, which ranks 31st, or second-worst in the league, ahead of only the New York Jets.
The Seahawks have a couple of reliable pass-catchers in wideouts Doug Baldwin and Jermaine Kearse, and one of the league’s best home-run hitters in Percy Harvin. But none of them has been able to break out for many big plays this season. And that’s really surprising, especially considering Harvin’s big-play capabilities.
What Seattle has done well on offense is run the ball.
The Seahawks are averaging 149.8 yards/game on the ground, which ranks second-best in the league, while also averaging a league-best 5.3 yards/rushing attempt.
Most of that damage has been done by tailback Marshawn Lynch, whose carried the ball 79 times this season for 367 yards and three rushing touchdowns.
Seattle’s second-leading rusher is Wilson, who had a 100-yard game two weeks ago in the Seahawks’ win over the Washington Redskins.
Seattle on Defense
The Seahawks’ defense, known as the “Legion of Boom”, has been good this season — Seattle is ninth overall in total defense — but they haven’t quite lived up to that best unit in the league reputation they built for themselves last season.
Top players like LB Bobby Wagner, S Kam Chancellor, and CB Richard Sherman are still some of the best players in the league at their respective positions, but Seahawk fans are still waiting for their club to put it all together at the same time like they did last season.
One noticeable difference is Seattle has forced only five turnovers this season. That’s only one a game, and a significant drop off for a club that forced a league-best 39 turnovers last season.
Series History
Seattle leads the all-time series with the Rams, 20-12, with most of the victories coming during a dominant last decade, which has seen the Seahawks win 16 of the last 18 meetings.
St. Louis’ last win over the Seahawks came in a 19-13 triumph at the Edward Jones Dome in 2012.
For more Rams news and updates, visit Rams Central.
Cedric Williams, a lifelong St. Louisan and proud UMSL alum, has been a freelance reporter/photographer covering St. Louis area sports for nearly two decades. Most recently, he has been working as a credentialed beat writer covering the Rams and small-school college sports for Examiner.com and other outlets from around the area. Please share any comments, questions, or feedback with Cedric at cedricwilliams510@gmail.com. His work can be found on Examiner.com.
