RENTON — The Seahawks are having to replace the indispensable key to their defense. Again.
They feel far better equipped to do it this time. And it doesn’t appear they will have to do it for as long as they had to — failed to — last year.
Uchenna Nwosu did not practice again Thursday. He likely won’t for weeks. Seattle’s top pass rusher and edge-setting run defender at outside linebacker is healing and rehabilitating a sprained knee.
He won’t play Sunday when the Seahawks host the Denver Broncos in the season opener at Lumen Field (1:05 p.m., channel 7).
Nwosu sprained the medial collateral ligament in his left knee Aug. 24. Cleveland guard Wyatt Teller dived into it and cut blocked him, then Brown running back Jerome Ford chop blocked him up high. That was on a pass play during the first possession of Seattle’s final preseason game.
Nwosu is likely to miss multiple games, perhaps through the Seahawks’ trip to New England next week for the week-two game Sept. 15. But he’s not likely to miss four games or more. That’s how many, at a minimum, he would have to miss on injured reserve. The Seahawks have chosen not to put Nwosu on that, as they first feared when he limped off Lumen Field 2 1/2 weeks ago.
How long will the $45 million linebacker be out?
“Well, we didn’t put him on IR, so you can probably put two and two together on when we hope to have him back,” coach Mike Macdonald said. “There’s no definite time table right now, though.”
Last October, Nwosu tore his pectoral in the sixth game of the 2023 season. He missed Seattle’s final 11 games.
The Seahawks went from allowing 79.2 yards rushing per game in five games with Nwosu to surrendering a dismal 166.3 yards rushing per game over the final 11 games. That included 200-plus yards by Pittsburgh and Arizona.
Baltimore would have rushed for 300 in a November blowout of Seattle but the Ravens took two kneel downs at the Seahawks’ goal line to end that game.
Macdonald sees stopping the run as his first priority to fixing a Seattle defense that was 31st against rushing and 30th overall last season. Nwosu is the outside linebacker he demands.
But so is Derick Hall.
Derick Hall’s time
This time last year, Hall was a seldom-used rookie on the outside of the plans then-coach Pete Carroll and his now-former staff had for the Seahawks’ defense in 2023. Hall is a second-round draft choice, from Auburn. He’s 6 feet 3, weighs 260 pounds, with the strength of an inside linebacker and speed of a running back.
Yet he played just 26% of Seattle’s snaps on defense last season. Carroll, coordinator Clint Hurtt and the defensive staff in 2023 replaced Nwosu with Darrell Taylor instead. Taylor was often ineffective or uninterested in run defense. He flew straight up the field at quarterbacks, most plays, or just got blocked at the point of attack. That left a running lane the width of the I-5 freeway on the edge of Seattle’s defense. Offenses zoomed through it.
Team chair Jody Allen and vice chair Bert Kolde fired Carroll and his staff in January. That was days after Seattle finished 31st in the NFL in run defense and 30th in total defense in a third non-playoff season in 10 years.
They hired Macdonald. The former defensive coordinator for the Baltimore Ravens led the unit that was the first in NFL history to lead the league in fewest points allowed, sacks and turnovers produced in 2023.
Hall has already thrived in Macdonald’s new varied, multiple schemes. Hall was one of the most dominant players in Seahawks training camp and preseason games. In the team’s second preseason game, Aug. 17 at Tennessee, Hall took out a pulling tight end and pulling guard on one play, knocking them into the ball carrier for no gain at the line of scrimmage.
Macdonald called it “an all-time great play.” In a preseason game.
Asked what he felt he showed in the six weeks of training camp and the preseason, Hall said: “Just consistency. Coming out and trying to be the same guy, every day. …Not taking anything for granted, every, single day. Because this opportunity doesn’t come very often.
“You have very, very limited time to play at this level.”
His time is now.
Last month, Macdonald and returning general manager John Schneider traded Taylor to Chicago to gain a late-round choice in next year’s draft.
Coaches planned to have Hall enter this season as the backup to Nwosu and opposite starting outside linebacker Boye Mafe.
Then Nwosu got hurt.
Enter Derick Hall.
“I think it’s a big opportunity,” he said at his locker before practice began Thursday. “Obviously, I didn’t want it to come that way.
“But can’t take control of injuries. We are all hoping for ‘Chenna to get back as soon as possible. But I feel like this opportunity, it presents a lot to me to be able to go out and show these coaches what I can do — and continue to carry over everything I did this offseason and preseason and training camp into now.”
Trevis Gipson readies
The Seahawks didn’t stop with just promoting Hall after Nwosu’s injury. They traded a sixth-round pick, essentially what they got from Chicago for Taylor, to Jacksonville to add four-year veteran outside linebacker Trevis Gipson.
In his first three NFL seasons with Chicago, he was the outside linebacker Macdonald wants now in Seattle. He set edges. He played the run. He has the size to do that. At 6-4, 263, he’s bigger than Hall and Mafe.
It’s been a whirlwind week since his trade for the 27-year-old Gipson. Besides moving his girlfriend Alexis, eight months pregnant, with him 3,000 miles north and west across the country, he’s crash-coursing Macdonald’s new Seahawks defense.
How’s that going entering the opening game?
“You know, it’s a thick playbook,” Gipson said, with a knowing grin.
This is his fourth team in 12 months. So he’s used to acclimating quickly to new teams, schemes and surroundings.
He’s got a work-around to merging into the Seahawks defensive traffic so soon before the opener.
“I’m just focusing on this week, our game plan (for Denver’s offense). So that sort of takes a little stress off my shoulders, not having to dig into the whole thing.”
Gipson doesn’t want the coaches to put those training wheels on him with piecing together the entire system game plan by game plan. He wants to learn the entire defense as soon as possible.
“I don’t want to just wait until those things come up (against future foes), you know?” he said. “I want to peek around the corner here and there and see how familiar can I get with it — so when those things do come up on weekdays or game weeks, it’s not my first time seeing it.”
Gipson can’t wait to play in Macdonald’s disguised, varied schemes. The 37-year-old coach’s defense move players at all positions around at the snap, through one-word commands, to confuse quarterbacks and offensive play callers.
“It allows us to play fast, man,” said Gipson, who played for Tennessee after Chicago and before his few months this year with Jacksonville. “That’s the best thing I like about it.”
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