A week removed from their most impressive performance of the season, a 20-point road win over the NFC South-leading Falcons, the Seahawks were on the other side of a lopsided score on Sunday, falling 31-10 to the Buffalo Bills.
The Bills are one of the league's top teams, to be sure, and they played well again on Sunday on their way to a sixth win in eight games, and the Seahawks only compounded the issue with mistakes in all three phases as they lost their fourth game in five weeks following a 3-0 start.
"That's a result of good football team that outplayed us in three phases, and then it gets out of hand when you're doing the things we did today where we didn't help ourselves as well," Seahawks coach Mike Macdonald said. "It's a laundry list of things. We can go line item by line item if you want. The long and short of it is we got outplayed, outcoached, and we got to go make it right. Feel like it's too often we have had this conversation with you guys of going back to work on Tuesday and hitting this thing head on and seeing if we can get this thing turned around against a good Rams team coming in here."
Despite getting off to a slow start, the Seahawks had a chance to be right in the game heading into halftime, but two trips into the red zone, both of which got as far as the 2-yard line, resulted in a total of three points thanks to a botched snap for a huge loss on one drive, and a fourth-and-goal from the 1-yard line that ended when Geno Smith got tripped up by center Conor Williams, resulting in a 6-yard loss.
"Hard to tell if it flips, but you feel like you're right in it," Macdonald said of those two wasted red zone opportunities. "Again, it's a story of red zone, us not getting stops in the red zone that we need, and then not being able to run the ball inside the five-yard line. We need to be better there for sure."
Smith, called the loss, "Extremely frustrating. I thought we prepared really well this week. I thought the guys were dialed in, we had great energy. Obviously, it didn't show up on game day today. We had too many self-inflicted wounds. That's been our story this season. We got down there in the red zone twice, had a shot at points, and came away with nothing. Well, we got three points, but we want to score touchdowns. Those are things that, again, we've got to be better at. I'm going to look at myself first and see what I've got to do better and take it from there."
While Smith will always point the finger at himself first when things aren't going well on offense, there wasn't much he could do about a snap well over his head or a lineman stepping on his foot and tripping him before a play ever got going.
"It definitely starts with me and the snap," Williams said. "My role is to be reliable and consistent, and I wasn't that to me. It starts with me, and I've got to fix it."
Williams added that a wet football was no excuse, saying, "It's got to get to Geno and it's got to get to him in the right place, so that's completely on me."
Maybe some level of inconsistency was to be expected from a team learning entirely new schemes on both sides of the ball under a new coaching staff, so it's hard to pinpoint exactly who the Seahawks are at this point. A week ago they were good enough to win by 20 points on the road over a Falcons team that improved to 5-3 with a win on Sunday, but a week later they were inconsistent and sloppy enough to lose by three touchdowns at home.
"We talk about stacking wins around here, and when you're going on and off, back and forth, it's frustrating," Macdonald said. "You want to be able to build on the good things that we're doing so we can get our program to where we want it to go. When you take steps back like today, it's very sobering, frustrating. But this is the NFL. If you don't bring it and have your best against good teams, you're not going to win those games. Our guys know that. As coaches we've got to prepare our guys the best we can. We've got to call great games. This whole thing has to keep coming together. Time is ticking as we say. We are about halfway through the season now. But you take a step back, I mean, right in the thick of it in the division, and this game coming up is going to be a big one."
As Macdonald notes, if there is one consolation the Seahawks can take out of the week it is that, for all of their ups and downs, they are right in the thick of things in the NFC West with no team running away with the division. The Rams won Thursday to improve to 3-4, the Cardinals won Sunday to get to 4-4, and the 49ers are now 4-4 after beating the Cowboys in Sunday night's game.
And for as bad as Sunday's game looked, the Seahawks know that if they play closer to how they did a week ago in Atlanta, they can hang with anyone in the league.
"I think everybody on this field knows our best can compete with them," Macdonald said. "Look, Buffalo is a great team. Been doing this thing for a long time, the record speaks for themselves. They've got great players. That's a vote of confidence in our guys, our people."
Safety Coby Bryant added that the Seahawks are "not far at all" from being a top team in the league.
"It's us right now," he said. "We're beating ourselves. It's about us. Once we come together and play our style of football, we'll be good."
Added Williams, "I think at the end of the day, we've got the right attitude and the right men in the room. It's just about focusing on the details and being able to build on the details one day at a time, one step at a time."
To get back on track, the Seahawks know the first step is to learn from the mistakes they made in Sunday's loss and figure out how to clean up the issues that have been hurting them
"First of all, got to own it and learn from it," Smith said. "Each one of those games, whether you won or lose, it's a lesson to be learned. That's the major thing, is we learn the lessons. Never want to go from a game and say we just put it behind us. That's the wrong way to look at it. Got to learn from your mistakes and own it. Those are things I'm going to do personally, and I know our team is going to do as well. We're going to take it from there. One day at a time."
