Every Seahawks game of the 2018 season, ranked by how well they Established The Run

It started Week 1, after the Seahawks lost to the Broncos by three points despite staying close for the entire game. “Not enough [rushing],” Pete Carroll told reporters by way of explanation for the loss. “The reason was we didn’t covert on third down. It’s just football. That leaves you where you don’t get your next series.”

Wait, no — it started after the draft, where the Seahawks took running back Rashaad Penny with the 27th overall pick. “We wanted to make sure we’re at the core of who we want to be, and the running game is a lot of that,” Carroll said in a post-draft press conference.

Or maybe it started in 1994, when Carroll was the head coach of the New York Jets. “Coach Pete Carroll believes that in order for the Jets to be successful, they have to establish their running game, something they have had trouble doing this season,” wrote Jason Diamos in the New York Times.

Whenever it began, the 2018 Seahawks were certainly on an explicit, season-long mission to Establish The Run — an ironic goal for a team, at least under the Carroll administration, best known for a play when they didn’t run the ball. In an era when NFL offenses are scoring at an unprecedented rate, the Seahawks preferred to grind out points despite the absence of an A-list back (Chris Carson, you are incredible, but it’s true). “You know, I don’t mind being different at all,” Carroll insisted in a press conference that followed the midseason Chiefs/Rams Monday Night Football spectacle. Free to be you and me, the Seahawks way.

But as Seahawks fans would soon learn, in the post-Marshawn Lynch era, the run game was to be treated like a beautiful, delicate flower that required careful and often counterintuitive cultivation.

If the team was having success running the ball, one simply kept running, running like a million Pats fans with Super Bowl XLIX goal-line interception GIFs were chasing them. If the team wasn’t having success running the ball, all that meant was that the run had not yet been established; that it was necessary to keep running it until, like Cris Collinsworth into Sunday Night Football camera frame, a successful running attack appeared, fully realized and ready to take on the world.

Offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer alone holds the secret to this process, one that remains opaque to much of football Twitter. During the Wild Card game versus the Cowboys, for example, a sequence during which Schotty abandoned his preferred run-run-pass sequence for the rarely seen run-run-run-pass inspired vocal chagrin, even beyond the self-referential bounds of Seahawks Twitter. Previously, that rag-tag group had been able to focus their ire on former offensive line coach Tom Cable; now, the whims and wiles of the younger Schottenheimer (who brings up his father more often than is entirely reasonable) — and accordingly, the relative merits of running the ball — are their primary object of discussion.

As is now abundantly clear, the Seahawks failed to Establish The Run in the playoffs — but not for lack of trying. Though they didn’t actually run the most in the NFL (that title belongs to the Ravens, who are also out of the playoffs), they ran ... a lot. Here are all 17 regular and postseason Seahawks games, ranked by how well the run was established from “Wow, we really had 5 yards on offense in a quarter” to “We’re never throwing again!!!*(#*!”

The Seahawks rushed and rushed and rushed some more, for a sum total of 3 yards per carry. The run briefly appeared to be Established when Russell Wilson ran for a touchdown, and then Carson ran for the two-point conversion — but it was a mirage. In total, they ran 73 yards and threw for 226 to wind up losing by ... two points.

So much passing, so little rushing: a paltry 64 yards, almost half of which was the result of one long run by Penny. For shame — a loss was (checks notes) inevitable.

Trying to run the ball against Khalil Mack is a challenge, to put it mildly. But the Seahawks persisted — even after a fourth-quarter touchdown to Tyler Lockett made a win possible, they kept running because if you let up for even a minute the run might unestablish itself and that, my friends, would be a disaster. They lost.

The run was decidedly not Established, as the Seahawks had just 2.7 yards per carry. And yet — and yet — they won. Incomprehensible.

“On a day when we couldn’t run the ball like we had been, we needed the throwing game, and Russ came through and had a great day throwing the football,” Carroll said afterwards. “He just found so many key plays in crucial situations, and did a wonderful job of making plays down the stretch when we had to have them. Guys made the catches, and the pass protection was there for us. We love to run the football, but balance is what’s really the essence of this thing, and I’m thrilled we were able to do that.”

In other words, the run was so well-Established from the previous games that it actually held over into the Panthers game, casting a magical protective aura around the team that allowed them to have a successful offensive performance. The power of the run simply cannot be understated.

The run was only very tenuously Established — 2.9 yards per carry — but the team got its first win of the season. Perverse.

It was a home game, and Carroll and Schottenheimer knew what the fans wanted: The Run. And so it was very, very Established — so Established that when the fourth quarter came around, the team felt that it was safe to throw to the Seahawks’ best receiver, running back Mike Davis, five times. They lost — an important lesson to those who might consider throwing.

Establishing The Run worked, in the sense that the Seahawks threw for three touchdowns which is the ultimate purpose of Establishing The Run: to run so often that you can throw successfully. But a win against the Raiders only sort of counts.

There might be no better illustration of the agony and the ecstasy of The Run than the Seahawks’ games versus the Niners. They ran for the exact same number of yards — 168 — in both games, resulting in one win and one loss. “How is this possible?”, you might ask. Well, in Week 13 Bobby Wagner had a 98-yard interception return, which is something of an Establishing The Run cheat code.

The Seahawks ran a lot — Carson had 116 yards in Week 5, and Penny had 108 in Week 10. But, inexplicably, the Rams threw more. It’s an unorthodox strategy but it paid off, for despite the fact that the Seahawks Established The Run (and weirdly scored exactly 31 points in both games), the Rams still won.

This was when the Seahawks Established The Run for what felt like the first time in a millennium. The Cardinals win marked two games in a row where Seahawks running backs had had 100-yard games. “We really needed to focus and establish that we could run the football and find our offensive line’s nature,” said Carroll. “I think we’ve really tapped into that. That’s really important and it’s a long, long season.”

The Seahawks averaged 4.2 yards per carry, and even punting savant Michael Dickson had a 9-yard carry — needless to say, the Run was Established. This game, a classic run-down-their-throat Seahawks W, was also the inspiration for the first Cable Thanos (the Tom Cable-inspired online moniker of Seahawks Twitter’s most enterprising meme-maker) video, the most important milestone of the season.

So you think you have one of the best quarterbacks of all time — but have you Established The Run? NOPE. Another win for the Runaround Hawks.

The Run was real, and she was spectacular — a Carson touchdown and a Davis touchdown fueled the team’s postseason dreams.

Who needs throwing when you have Carson and Sebastian Janikowski, honestly? Russ even had a 40-yard run, because it was just that Established.

Imagine having one of the best offenses in the league, one of the most innovative playcallers around, and a QB in the middle of a record-setting season — and still losing. Has Andy Reid even heard of Establishing The Run? Perhaps Schotty can give him a few tips before this weekend.