In his first press conference since suffering the season ending loss to Atlanta last weekend, head coach Pete Carroll emphasized that with this group of players, despite being in their prime superstars, he was pondering bringing in players to push them and give them some competition. His reasoning behind this philosophy is that he wants to avoid complacency among his players.

He should look for his coaching staff to avoid complacency. In particular, Tom Cable and Darrell Bevell. For Cable, his critique is short: stop using the offensive line as a science experiment - at least with left tackle. Offensive line is extremely hard to coach up, acquire talent for, or even build through the draft. A tandem like Walter Jones and Steve Huchinson aren't coming back to Seattle anytime soon, and really not even a handful of teams have an offensive line that they can confidently look at and say, "yeah we're ok" or that they would even prefer to keep everyone they have.

However the problem is that he trotting out guys that have played football for a couple years. It gets spun that they're amazing athletes, intending to give fans the picture that there is some sort of plan around the experimentation. George Fant may be a superhuman athlete, but he is not qualified to be Russell's bodyguard.

Bevell on the other hand needs to go. Simply put. There's been a pattern of failing to find ways to integrate elite weapons into this offense year in and year out. Yes, Jimmy Graham did make strides this year and was one of the best tight ends in football, but Bevell's scheme failed to find ways for Graham to have an impact game in and game out. If we're going to give up a Pro Bowl center in Max Unger plus a pick for this guy, we can't settle for him to be just another one of the guys.

The talent on the offensive side of the ball almost matches that on the other side, therefore why are we not lighting up teams from start to finish? Yes Pete does like smash mouth football with an emphasis on the running game, but the running game ranked outside the top four for the first time since 2012, falling to 25th not even averaging 100 yards per game. 

We need an actual offensive guru directing things, but for some reason Pete is willing to forgive Bevell time and time again. At this point we got to start thinking about what kind of dirt Bevell has on Pete that gives him this much job security.

Photo:Flickr/Mike Morris