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Week 2
Arizona Hired the Man Who Spent Three Years Drawing Up Offense Against Us
The Cardinals are 1-0 and the person running them spent the last three seasons as the Rams’ offensive coordinator. Mike LaFleur has seen more recent, more repeated live looks at Mike Macdonald’s defense than almost any coach Seattle plays this year, and now he has his own team and a full week to point it at us.
His Rams offense did not embarrass itself in those meetings, either. Last season it beat Seattle 21-19 in Week 11, then hung 37 points in a Week 16 game the Seahawks somehow won 38-37 in overtime, then put up 27 in the NFC Championship Game Seattle survived 31-27. Three tries, three offenses that moved. We won two of them and needed overtime and a title game to do it.
The other half of the problem is that Arizona is not the team anybody penciled in. It walked into SoFi Stadium as an 8½-point underdog and beat the Chargers 26-14 with 23 first downs, a 6-for-14 day on third down, three sacks of Justin Herbert, two takeaways, and roughly a fifteen-minute advantage in time of possession. Jacoby Brissett was close to flawless. That is not a fluke shape. That is a team controlling a football game.
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Minutes of time-of-possession advantage Arizona held over the Chargers in its Week 1 upset.
So Sunday in Glendale is a division road opener against a 1-0 team, with Drew Lock under center, against a coach who has a filing cabinet on our defense. I do not think Arizona is good. I think Arizona is prepared, which on a Week 2 afternoon in the desert is close enough to the same thing.
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Quarterback
The Guy Starting Sunday Preps on a Whiteboard His Kid Keeps Drawing On
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That is the preparation infrastructure behind what happened in the opener. Cold off the bench, zero practice snaps, Lock went 16-of-22 for 187 yards and a touchdown, took one sack, and turned it over exactly never, including a 45-yard catch-and-run to Jaxon Smith-Njigba that tied the game.
Here is the thing worth actually being encouraged about: this week he gets the reps. Real ones, with the real first team, in a real practice, against a defense the coaching staff has had days to study. Whatever Lock is, we are about to see the version of him that got to prepare like everybody else. The whiteboard can go back to being a whiteboard.
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AROUND THE COOP
Around the Coop
Dante Fowler Jr.’s Seahawks debut was quieter than the signing was. By Field Gulls’ charting he got about six pass-rushing snaps, and Macdonald twice parked him out at Wide 9, beyond the tight end. We signed a rusher and used him as set decoration. Field Gulls
Julian Neal, the third-round corner, dressed for the opener and played zero defensive snaps. Five special teams reps, and that was the evening. He missed most of camp with a quad, and the coaching staff is clearly not handing him the good china yet. SI
Put Super Bowl LX and the opener together and Seattle has pressured Drake Maye on 39 of his 95 dropbacks. Under that pressure: 9-of-21, 113 yards, two interceptions, nine sacks. New England has now studied this defense for seven months and still can’t find the door. PFF
NFC WEST SCHADENFREUDE REPORT
RAMS
Matthew Stafford’s passer rating in Melbourne was 61.2, his lowest in a single game since 2018, and it was the first time he’d thrown a pick without a touchdown since a 2024 loss to Miami. He turns 39 in February. Los Angeles spent the offseason assembling a roster designed to win exactly one game in February, and Week 1 mailed back a very detailed receipt.
NINERS
San Francisco flew to Australia and then asked the NFL for one small favor: give us the Monday night game in Week 2 so the roster can find Pacific time again. The league said no, and handed the Monday nighter to the Rams instead. Kyle Shanahan, on the request: “We asked very nicely.” And then: “Didn’t work.” Sixteen thousand miles of air travel, and the prize is a regular Sunday like everybody who stayed home.
SEACHICKENS TRIVIA
Seattle won a lottery for the top pick in the 1987 NFL supplemental draft and used it on Oklahoma linebacker Brian Bosworth. What did that pick cost the Seahawks?
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Their first-round pick in the 1988 NFL Draft. The Boz started 24 games across three seasons before a shoulder injury ended his career, which makes it one of the more expensive haircuts in franchise history.
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Four days until the desert. Let's go be unpleasant about it. — The Rooster