In two years at Seattle, Durde and head coach Mike Macdonald have transformed the Seahawks’ defence.<\/p>\n
It is the first time Durde has worked with Macdonald – also a defensive coach – so his first season was “a year of real growth, understanding and adapting” in which the new coaching regime “built a foundation, we got on the right path”.<\/p>\n
Seattle finished the 2024 season with a 10-7 record and missed out on the play-offs on a tie-breaker. In hindsight, it may have been a blessing in disguise, giving them an extra year to build.<\/p>\n
“I’m not going to lie, we wanted to get in,” said Durde. “But once the season’s over, you self-scout, work out how you improve, and we went through that process.”<\/p>\n
In 2023, Seattle’s defence was ranked second-worst against the run game and third-worst overall. In Macdonald and Durde’s first season they climbed to mid-table in both.<\/p>\n
This season the Seahawks’ defence is ranked third-best against the run and has conceded the fewest points (17.2 per game).<\/p>\n
“There’s a lot of defences that are middle of the table in the run game and still play excellent defence, they still stop points,” said Durde.<\/p>\n
“But if you’re really trying to create an identity, a style of play, and you want to make it hard for everything [your opponents] do, it all starts with stopping the run.<\/p>\n
“That’s been a focus point since we got here, and it’s been a stacking process as we go through.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In two years at Seattle, Durde and head coach Mike Macdonald have transformed the Seahawks’ defence. It is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":414569,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,593,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-414568","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-nfl","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=414568"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/414568\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/414569"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=414568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=414568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=414568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}