This thread has already been taken over by misinformation and cynicism, so it'll have to be put back on track here...
That "disgruntled, angry" defense, for all their supposed bitterness, was still top 5 in the league right up until Earl Thomas' injury in 2016. We all knew it. The stats say it. Nobody, in this board or elsewhere, was saying otherwise until mid-2017. To claim anything else is revisionist history. If you think those big stars weren't earning their contracts, how do you account for that fact?
"Injury played a role, but...?" No, no buts. Injury either played a role or it didn't. There's only so many upper-tier, offense-powering starting RB's a team can reasonably be expected to enlist in one season. We found one in 2015, he got hurt, and it got in his head; he was never the same since (seriously, Rawls' play style changed after the injury. He was a better RB in 2015). That hurt the team all the way through 2016. We started over in 2017, found another starting RB, and...he got hurt. I was never a fan of the Lacy signing, and the Christine Michael failure deserves more talk concerning its role in our offensive struggles, but again, you don't condemn a team for failing to come up with a Carson/Penny combo every year. Stuff just happens.
Blair Walsh happened. That was the most damaging free-agent signing of the post-2013 era. It lost us three(?) games in 2017. Far more destructive to our playoff hopes than Graham, who got us ten touchdowns, or Harvin, who hurt the cap but was otherwise jettisoned without too much pain.
We could talk about Tom Cable being a problem. We could even talk about Darell Bevell.
But in the end, the Seahawks lost games. It's as simple as that. They missed enough games to miss good seeding in the playoffs, then failed to execute in playoffs. It happens. To 31 NFL teams. Annually. Unless you're going to contend that there's always 31 mediocre teams and one good one, and that the Patriots were mediocre from 2005-2013 purely because they didn't win a Super Bowl, then Seattle never hit mediocrity. They just lost the war of attrition. It ----ing happens.
Maybe these defensive clowns did do some of the acting up claimed in this article. We'll never know.
But it will never be the scapegoat people want it to be.