Cooper Kupp Impressed By Seahawks Offense With Regular Season Approaching

And it’s not just players on that side of the ball who are seeing that growth, it has also been noticed by defensive players going against them in practice.

“I’ve seen them from the first day they got in here and started going over that playbook,” linebacker Ernest Jones IV said. “It was rocky those first couple weeks of OTAs when we’d go offense-defense. But from that first day to the first day of training camp was a big difference. I knew they had it in them to get up there, attack the ball and just run off the ball, run off the rock and create explosives off of that. I knew they had it in them. It wasn’t a surprise at all.

Jones added what has stood out has been, “The movement. Specifically here, how they get up to the line, they’re super decisive. From the moment the huddle is broken, receivers, O-line, running backs, they’re breaking out, Sam’s walking up, getting his reads, and after a motion or two, the ball is snapped. They do a good job getting set, and when it’s time to roll, they roll.”

Next up for the Seahawks and their still-growing offense is a joint practice against the Packers, which should provide the starters a more thorough test against an opposing defense that they would get in any preseason cameo, then after Saturday’s game, the Seahawks will continue the shift from training camp mode to Week 1 preparation.

“It’s a challenge because you see the light at the end of the tunnel in terms of getting ready to go and start preparing for an opponent,” Kupp said. “But we still have, at least two weeks still of good work, good growth that can be done before you’re into a standard time frame where you start game planning and things like that. Right now it’s really being focused on what is important right now, and that’s about diving into our details, diving into our stuff and making sure we’re doing the best that we can to master our systems and be able to go out there and execute at a high level. That’s where our focus needs to be and knowing that that is going to present itself at the end of the day to be able to go out there and start scheming up against someone.”

One of the reasons players seem to be taking so well to Seattle’s new offense is the way that Kubiak and the rest of the staff are teaching, focusing not just on what players are supposed to be doing by on why they’re doing it.

“They definitely go into the why, the intent of what we’re trying to attack,” Kupp said. “I don’t know if there’s any other way to do it. The guys that we have here and the questions they’re asking me, you’ve got to be able to answer the question of ‘Why’? We’ve got guys that ask those questions. If you don’t give us a why, eventually you’re going to ask why we’re doing something a certain way. The intent behind everything that we do is a pivotal piece of how we operate. It’s the core of what makes plays good. If you’re out there just running lines on a piece of paper, you’re not going to be very good. You’ve got to be able to solve problems and part of solving problems is understanding why you’re doing what you’re doing.”

And of course, it’s always important to remember that it is still August and that this new-look Seahawks offense has yet to play a regular season game. Kubiak and head coach Mike Macdonald will have to evaluate and make adjustments based not just how the offense progresses heading into Week 1, but on how things go in those early games, and in turn, how opponents adjust. But based on what the offense has shown thus far, there are signs that there might not be as big of a learning curve with a new coordinator, quarterback and several other key players as one might expect.

“I think it’s one of my favorite things about watching offenses across the league as the season goes on,” Kupp said. “You have the first four weeks of the season, this is what we did in training camp, this is who we are. We put those four weeks together and now we have to kind of start building off it. You just keep stacking layers upon layers, and by the end it’s morphed into the things that are working for us, these are the things that we’re doing well, and there’s these counters back that makes it a lot of fun to see that growth. It’s about the sequencing and what are the things that you’re putting out there? What runs are working well? What play-actions are you going to build off that? And what screens are you going to build off those? It continues to stack and build. I think we’ve seen a little bit in the way that we do things here. Being able to compete against each other in some ways, it’s like Klint just wants to beat the crap out of Mike, and Mike wants to beat the crap out of Klint, and it makes it makes it really fun.”