Seahawks are in Beast Mode on the road, with Bengals in their crosshairs

Eric Williams

NFC West Writer

For Pete Carroll and the Seattle Seahawks, road contests have been a home away from home over the past five years.

The Seahawks are 22-13 on the road since the 2019 season and 2-0 this year, as they face another tough road test against quarterback Joe Burrow and the Cincinnati Bengals coming off a bye week on Sunday.

Seattle’s trip to Cincinnati is part of a league-high 31,600 miles that will be traveled this season as the Seahawks play nine games away from Lumen Field. Seattle plays the team that travels the least (11,942) this weekend: the Bengals.

The Seahawk have five of their next nine games on the road coming off the bye week, including games at the Baltimore Ravens, the Los Angeles Rams, the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers.

After a poor performance in a season-opening loss to the Los Angeles Rams, the Seahawks have won three in a row, including road wins over the Detroit Lions and the New York Giants, so Carroll feels good about how his team is handling their approach going into a game week.

“The last three games we stayed kind of in a mode,’ Carroll told reporters this week. “We’re playing with the same kind of focus, same kind of intensity. We feel like we’re gaining on some things, we’re getting better at some stuff.

“We finish in similar fashion, which is something that’s really important to me, telling me how the mentality of our team is. We’ve had three really good, solid settings that we’ve been through, a couple of aways and a home, big trips that we’ve been through, the whole thing. We’ve gained a lot, hopefully, we can keep going.”

However, Carroll’s Seahawks will face perhaps their toughest test on Sunday against the Bengals. Cincinnati quarterback Joe Burrow appears to have recovered somewhat from a calf injury he suffered in training camp. Burrow struggled early but had his best game of the year in a 34-20 win over the Arizona Cardinals in Week 5.

Burrow finished 36-of-46 for 317 yards, with three touchdowns and one interception. His favorite target was explosive receiver Ja’Marr Chase, who totaled 15 receptions for 192 yards and three scores on 19 targets.

Seattle finished with 11 sacks and held quarterback Daniel Jones to 136 passing yards two weeks ago in a 24-3 victory over the Giants. The Seahawks are 33-8 when scoring at least 24 points since the start of the 2019 season, and 9-20 when scoring less than 24 points.

However, Seattle faces a much better passing offense in Burrow and the Bengals, who will look to improve to 3-0 against NFC West foes this weekend.

“They’re finding out ways to get their playmakers the ball, and we just have to make sure that we try to make them one-dimensional,” Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner said. “A lot of times people sleep on their run game. They don’t run as much, but they have a really talented back that can get going if you don’t stop them. Our job is to stop him and make them do what they want to do, which is throw the ball, and then make our plays in the pass game.”

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Receiver DK Metcalf quipped that he believed rookie Devon Witherspoon would get the best of Chase this week in a matchup between the two. Chase said Metcalf is just spicing up the game.

Witherspoon finished with seven combined tackles, two sacks, four quarterback pressures and a 97-yard pick-six while playing mostly nickel cornerback against New York.

Chase has aligned in the slot just 23 percent of the time according to Pro Football Focus, so there likely won’t be many one-on-one matchups between the two players.

Further, the Seahawks run zone coverage at the NFL’s fifth-highest rate (81.7 percent), according to Next Gen Stats. So, Chase will likely receive some kind of bracket coverage from Seattle’s secondary.

However, Burrow is averaging just 5.6 yards per attempt against zone this season, the third-lowest in the NFL. Using zone concepts against the Bengals could be an effective way of limiting Cincinnati’s explosive plays.

Also helping Seattle defensively is the likely return of safety Jamal Adams, who left the game against New York after only nine plays due to a concussion. Carroll said that Adams cleared concussion protocol and he was a limited participant in practice this week.

“He’s OK now for this week to go, he hasn’t missed anything,” Carroll said. “I’m really excited for him to get back going again. He really had fun in the preparation, and I know he was jacked about being out there.”

Eric D. Williams has reported on the NFL for more than a decade, covering the Los Angeles Rams for Sports Illustrated, the Los Angeles Chargers for ESPN and the Seattle Seahawks for the Tacoma News Tribune. Follow him on Twitter at @eric_d_williams.