The Seahawks are at the point of the season where every week feels like a referendum, and after the loss to the Bears, that pressure only got louder. Seattle now has to treat Week 9 as a must-win, and the bigger question hanging over the team is the same one that keeps coming back: who can you actually trust?
There’s at least one thing that feels safe. Jaxon Smith-Njigba isn’t going anywhere on this list.
Even in a game where his production dipped by his standards, he still went over 100 yards and scored, accounting for nearly 70 percent of Seattle’s passing offense. He has become the one constant the Seahawks can lean on, and nothing about last week changed that.
The same kind of confidence applies to the defensive front, where Byron Murphy II and Leonard Williams have been driving the pass rush. Murphy has three sacks and sits near the top of the team in pressures, while Williams also has three sacks and leads Seattle with ten quarterback hits. Williams, though, has already been ruled out for Week 9, which takes one of the team’s most reliable disruptors off the board for now.
That leaves Jarran Reed carrying even more weight inside. The veteran nose tackle has been soaking up double teams and still making life miserable for offenses.
According to John Boyle on seahawks.com, Reed leads the league in pressures when double-teamed since 2018. For a player in his 11th season, that’s a pretty wild level of consistency.
The biggest jump on this week’s trust meter belongs to Drew Lock. Sam Darnold’s cracked rib clearly mattered against Chicago, and now Lock gets a chance to step in against an Arizona defense that has struggled against the pass. Lock already had a strong outing against the Cardinals in Week 2, and with Smith-Njigba available, the setup is there for another big day if he’s healthy.
Grey Zabel moves in the other direction after a rough debut. Pro Football Focus charged him with three pressures, but gave him a 13.2 pass-blocking grade, which says plenty about how the day went.
To be fair, he was playing right guard for the first time since college and had Jeffrey Simmons lined up across from him. He’ll move back to left guard this week.
Darnold drops because the situation around him has gotten shaky and the frustration around his play has grown. Plenty of Seahawks fans would have him near the bottom of the trust list even if he were available, and if Lock plays well, that noise is only going to get louder. When Darnold gets back on the field, he’ll need to answer for it.
Then there’s Jalen Milroe, who sits in the afterthoughts for a reason. By Sunday game time, it will have been 399 days since he last played in a regular-season game, and he has never thrown a regular-season pass. If Seattle needs him this week, the team will learn a lot about whether that third-round pick was worth it.
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Seahawks Face One Big Test To Hold Serve Against Arizona
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Around the matchup, the focus has been on how contributors see the game playing out and what it says about both teams right now, from Seattles performance trends to the health of key players on both sides. BetMGMs odds have added another layer to the discussion, but the real intrigue is simpler than the numbers: if the Seahawks want to keep control of their own path in the NFC West, this is the kind of game they need to handle cleanly. [Read more 🡒]