RENTON — Coby Bryant won player of the week.
Leonard Williams was steamed. Playfully steamed.
“Sensitive subject,” Williams said with a laugh Wednesday.
That was hours after the league announced his teammate Bryant as the NFC defensive player of the week.
Seattle’s new starting safety intercepted Kyler Murray’s pass on fourth down and returned it 69 yards for the decisive touchdown late in the Seahawks’ 16-6 win over Arizona last weekend. Bryant’s play and the win put Seattle (6-5) in first place atop the NFC West entering its game Sunday at the New York Jets (3-8) in the New Jersey Meadowlands (10 a.m., channel 13).
Williams, the sixth-overall pick of the 2015 NFL draft by the Jets, had even more of an impact across the entire game against Arizona. Seattle’s $64.5 million defensive lineman had 2-1/2 sacks. He hit Murray four times. He had three tackles for losses. He batted Murray’s arm into an incomplete pass. He dominated left guard Evan Brown, Seattle’s starting center last season, tackle Paris Johnson and Arizona’s entire offensive line.
“He’s a young guy. I love to see a young guy flourish,” Williams, in his 10th NFL season, said of Bryant, the third-year safety.
“I’ve got much appreciation and love for the guy. But at the same time is that we talked about how, as a defense, last Sunday we were competing with each other, you know what I mean? So, as a friendly competition, I feel like I should have won (player of the week).
“As a teammate and a vet, I’m obviously happy for him.”
In the Seahawks’ second consecutive division win, Williams had one of the most dominant games by a Seattle defensive lineman since Michael Bennett, Cliff Avril, Ahtyba Rubin and friends were on the team’s top-ranked defense a decade ago.
Williams played exactly as rookie head coach Mike Macdonald designs him to be: a destructive force at multiple positions along the defensive line, inside and outside.
“I thought he was dominant,” Macdonald said minutes after the Arizona game. “I knew he played great.
“And then I looked at the stat line, and he played out of his mind.”
Williams did it doing what Seahawks defensive linemen rarely did in the previous 15 seasons under coach Pete Carroll.
It is an example of how Macdonald’s new Seahawks defensive schemes can confuse offenses and maximize a player’s effectiveness.
Beginning early in the first quarter and throughout the win over Arizona, Macdonald had Williams “stemming.” That is, changing his positioning immediately before the snap.
“Stemming” is designed to confuse offensive linemen. A defensive lineman, usually inside as a tackle, lines up in one place in a three-point stance. Then, as the quarterback calls his pre-snap signals, the defender moves laterally across his defensive line. It can be like a head-start, a guess to where the D-lineman thinks a play might be going.
Against the Cardinals, Williams often lined up over the guard or center. Then “stemmed” to his right or his left into a gap between offensive linemen.
“There’s a few times I stem just because I kind of anticipated a certain play or something like that,” Williams said. “But there’s also a lot of times we stem or move around just to throw off the offense. There are times where we’ll be in a load front and the center has to look through his legs to snap the ball, and then by the time he looks up, I’m on the other side of him. So, sometimes it messes up the protection calls and stuff like that.
“It’s hard for an offense to ID protection or who’s coming and things like that.”
Pete Carroll rarely if ever had his defensive linemen stem while he was Seattle’s Super Bowl-winning coach from 2010 until this past January. Carroll just lined his Seahawks up and counted on them to be just plain better than the offensive linemen over them.
Macdonald stemming his defensive linemen at times is part of the package team chair Jody Allen, vice chair Bert Kolde and general manager John Schneider chose when they hired the former architect and coordinator of the Baltimore Ravens’ top-ranked defense to replace Carroll last winter. Macdonald seeks to confuse offenses. He wants change and movement just before or at the snap, at all three levels of the defense, linemen, linebackers and defensive backs. He seeks to give offenses one look to react to before the snap, then get to a second look to counter what the offense just changed to.
Williams stemmed on what he said was his favorite of his many big plays against Arizona. Two plays after Bryant’s interception return for the game-changing score, Williams moved from head up over left guard Brown to inside him, into the guard-center gap. Williams used the head start to easily beat left tackle Paris Johnson trying to block him. He ran free into the backfield as running back James Conner carried the ball to the left behind two other, pulling Cardinals blockers.
Williams slammed Conner down for a 4-yard loss. The play kept Seattle’s momentum from Bryant’s interception TD and the Lumen Field crowd roaring.
Williams said he’s rarely stemmed in his NFL career with the Jets, Giants and — since his trade 13 months ago — the Seahawks. He calls it a signature of Macdonald’s.
“That’s part of, you know, Mike’s schemes, and the way he likes to blitz and disguise,” Williams said.
“And, you know, we have this mentality of: ‘We hold the pen last.’”
Explain, please.
“Offenses like to shift and motion and do all those type of things to throw off the defense. And we have, like, plays within a play to always check to something based off what the offense has given us,” Williams said.
“And that gives us, like a hold-the-pen-last mentality.”
Two plays after he dumped Conner for the 4-yard loss, Williams showed his versatility. He lined up as the right end. He used his speed rush to zip past left tackle Johnson. Seahawks pass rusher Dre’Mont Jones’ pressure forced Murray to back pedal— directly into Williams for a sack on third down.
In the first quarter, Williams crashed into Murray and caused an incomplete pass officials originally ruled a fumble and a Seahawks touchdown on Derick Hall’s recovery and return. On that play, Williams didn’t use speed as much as strength. He bull-rushed through Cardinals right guard Trystan Colon.
“It was a dominating game,” Seahawks defensive coordinator Aden Durde said Wednesday. “What was so impressive about it: There wasn’t one phase that was more than the other. Normally, when someone goes off they come out with three sacks and have a dominating pass-rush game. Leo, he was rolling in every phase of the game: run, pass, play-action pass. It was so cool to see.”
This weekend on his old home field in New Jersey against the team that drafted him, Williams gets to go after the Jets’ much older, more statuesque Aaron Rodgers. Unlike the speedy, constantly running Murray, Rodgers (who turns 41 next week) has scrambled just one time since week four.
The way Williams is playing, a standing target could be another opportunity for another huge game for the Seahawks’ featured D-lineman. Williams is tied with Pittsburgh’s T.J. Watt and Cleveland’s Myles Garrett among other for the fifth-most quarterback hits in the NFL with 18 through 11 games.
“I said to Mike (Macdonald) the other day: Some of things he’s been doing he just hasn’t had the output or production.” Durde said of Williams. “Some of those rushes have showed up, because he has a pile of QB hits. You see it on tape.
“I’m just so happy for him he got the production to go with it.”
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