For the folks who say they changed the scheme...
If you want to get mired in technical minutia, it is mostly true. But really more like window dressing, or fake marketing.
Philosophically, it remains the same. That is why Pete signed off on it in the first place.
Rush 4, play soft zone behind it.
Whether it be cover 2, cover 3, quarters, or quarter-quarter-half.
Soft zone is what is repeatedly run.
They are built to play a different way.
Stacked fronts, and bring pressure from everywhere with their unique talents they have in the secondary, who also are at their best in man defense. 5 of 6 Woolen INTs last year came in man coverage. He is not a soft zone corner. Neither is Witherspoon.
Stop defending this horrible defensive head coach, and his crony coaching staff for the love of God.
They are dysfunctional, underachieving, taking plays off, and disinterested with the playoffs on the line. Tells you all you need to know.
The folks who say they changed the scheme, it's not 'mostly true' on a 'minutia' level, it's just 'mostly true'.
And part of what is hard to take seriously about some of this 'analysis' about what's wrong now is the number of people here who were insistent, INSISTENT!, that Ken Norton was the worst defensive coordinator of all-time, that our defense the last season with Russ was the WORST, MOST TERRIBLE, NO GOOD defense of all-time.
What was the reality? We were an average to good defense who basically operated with a bend-but-don't-break philosophy. If we were just holding them to the bend-but-don't-break philosophy, they weren't kind of good, they were just good.
Number 5 in the red zone, number 3 on 4th down, top 10 in points given up, opp. scoring percentage, and points per opp. drive. Number 2 on yard per rush attempt!
So why in the world were so many people convinced they were bad? Because we had to have an anti-Pete narrative to explain why our team didn't make the playoffs that year and focusing on the obvious problem (Russ was a 3 and out machine) put the blame somewhere that didn't fit the narrative.
This was the quintessential Pete Carroll defense. It had a weakness (soft against intermediate depth passing), but designed to not give up easy rush yards or big passing plays and once a team no longer has that intermediate space, they became one of the stingiest in the league. The thing that was missing is we simply didn't have the impact players to get us takeaways that Pete loves. But our gameplan worked with what we had.
That is not what we have now. This is NOT the same problems we had then. We actually have impact guys like Love and Witherspoon who are capable of creating turnovers, but we are soft against the run and generating TO's is now what we do to stop big passing plays instead of just not letting that work. It's got some of the same ideas of Pete's other defenses but that's only because every defensive system has some overlap and if you are comparing zone to zone schemes, the overlap naturally becomes greater.
All those numbers where we used to be top 10 or better, we are bottom 10 on basically all of them and have been since last season. This was an IMMEDIATE reversion. It's fun to say 'players have given up on Pete' or 'these guys don't respect Pete' (especially when we ourselves don't like Pete), but these are the same guys who just went out and ended both the previous two games on big defensive plays.
The problem is we have a bad system and due to injuries and other personnel issues, we are fundamentally undersized when faced with a bullying running game.