If there was any question about how much Julian Love means to Seattle’s defense, Sunday answered it the hard way. The Seahawks dropped their first game of the season to the Commanders, and the back end looked noticeably different without one of the league’s best safeties in the lineup.
The box score doesn’t jump off the page at first. Washington ran the ball 32 times for just 82 yards, and Marcus Mariota completed 19 of 31 passes for 183 yards.
On paper, that’s the kind of defensive output that usually puts Seattle in position to win. But the game never really played out that simply.
The bigger picture was about sequence, not totals. Sam Darnold piled up 379 passing yards and four touchdowns, which would normally suggest Seattle had the game in hand.
Instead, the Commanders were the ones stacking plays when they needed them, while the Seahawks couldn’t do the same. As Mike Macdonald put it after the game, the Commanders stacked plays, and we didn’t.
Love’s absence was felt most in the defensive backfield, where communication broke down and the big plays started to show up. Seattle had not given up a play longer than 20 yards in its first two games, but that changed with Love sidelined. Mariota didn’t need to throw for a huge number to hurt the Seahawks; he just needed to deliver when it mattered.
Josh Jobe had a rough afternoon, and the 30-yard touchdown to Terry McLaurin was a glaring example. He got turned around on the play, and the coverage issues didn’t stop there. Macdonald also pointed to communication problems, and that was obvious throughout the day.
Rodney Thomas II did at least turn in a better outing. He avoided the kind of costly penalty that hurt him last week.
But “decent” wasn’t enough against Washington, and Finley did not play well either. With Love out, nobody was really steering the secondary.
This wasn’t on one player alone. The Seahawks had too many problems to pin the loss on a single absence. But there was no hiding how important Love is to the way this defense functions, and Sunday made that plain.
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