NFL Pro Week 8 Preview

Bears and Seahawks, that's the first game that we're talking about.

Not only is it a matchup of two of the best teams in the NFL, man, we're getting to the point of the season where there's a lot of playoff probability swings that can happen with wins and losses here.

So this is a pretty high leverage game.

If the Seahawks win this game, They have a 78% chance to make the playoffs.

If they lose it, it goes down to 54%, so a 24% swing.

And the Bears, if they win this game, it's all the way up to 82% chance to make the playoffs.

And if they lose it, it goes down to 53%, a 23% swing.

So, a lot of things to dig into here on this one.

Brett, where do you want to start? When you think Seahawks and Bears for Week 8 of this season, where does your mind go to first?

I think about a team that wants to run the ball versus a team that is really good at stopping the run.

And the thing that's most amazing to me about the Seahawks run defense is that they do it from two high safety structures, right? The Seahawks, if anything that they're known for on defense, it's how much quarters and in particular how much quarter, quarter, half or half, quarter, quarter that they play, you know, cover six plus cover eight.

And the fact that they're still able to stop the run to me speaks to how good their DBs are at tackling in space.

You know, whether you want to call Nicky M and worry a DB or a linebacker at this point, you know, dealer's choice, but their actual true safeties that are lining up, you know, 10 yards plus off the line of scrimmage, they're top 10 in terms of average depth of tackle, meaning accuracy.

how far past the line of scrimmage their average depth of tackle is at just 7.7 yards, which sounds like a lot, but remember that's the average.

So there's a lot of tackles that these safeties are making at 3, 4, 5 yard depth while coming from 10 to 12 yards off the deck.

And when you're making that many tackles and you're that good of a tackling team, that adds up over the course of a game to cut down on the number of second and shorts and make them second and medium, second and long, and to give yourself more advantageous third down positions as well.

And so if you're looking at how this defense operates as a whole, it really starts with how they stop the run on early downs to make their late downs better.

And you can't do that without good tackling safeties.

Yeah, 100%.

I mean, I was going to talk about Nicky Manwari at some point.

I might as well talk about him now because I went back and I watched that game that the Seahawks played against the Chiefs.

And I said on game day preview, I think this is going to be a struggle for Kenneth Walker.

I think that the Seahawks know him very well.

And I just think that it was a game that lent itself towards him having one of his slower, if not the slowest day at the office that we've had so far this season.

Nothing again for Walker.