Evaluating Sam Howell's performance against the Seahawks

Breaking down the play of QB Sam Howell in the Commanders loss to the Seahawks

The Washington Commanders fell to 4-6 on the season after another disappointingly close defeat, this time to the Seattle Seahawks. The reason these losses continue to be so disappointing is that young quarterback Sam Howell continues to give the team a chance to win the game late on and the team still finds a way to lose. If there is a positive to take away for Washington, it’s that Howell continued to show positive steps forward towards becoming the franchise quarterback the team has lacked for so long. 

Howell wasn’t perfect, of course, but he largely played well. He completed 29 of 44 passes for 312 yards and three touchdowns. While there were some ups and downs, the key takeaways from this game for Howell is the continued development in the right direction for areas he struggled with earlier in the season. The Seahawks began the game sending a lot of slot blitzes and simulated pressures to try and generate pressure and Howell for the most part was able to handle them. 

These two plays are good examples of Howell seeing a blitz post-snap and throwing hot. Now obviously in an ideal situation, Howell is able to identify the blitzes pre-snap and adjust the protection to get them picked up so he doesn’t have to throw hot, but we don’t live in an ideal world and the defense can disguise things well sometimes. 

The first play of the clip is a simulated pressure with the linebacker joining the rush on the left side of the line while the defensive end on the other side drops off into coverage. Howell identifies the linebacker rushing and quickly realizes that the protection isn’t sliding the right way so they will be overloaded. Instead of panicking or trying to scramble, Howell simply throws hot, hitting running back Antonio Gibson in the flat. On the second play of the clip, we see the same sim pressure from the Seahawks and again Howell reacts positively, understanding the line is overloaded and throwing hot to Gibson in the flat. On both plays, the Commanders end up with a positive gain, whereas earlier in the season, Howell may well have been sacked. 

Another area where we saw Howell improve was his pocket management. Now, we’ve seen plenty of plays this year where Howell has moved around within the pocket nicely to avoid rushers and stay on track with the play. However, there have also been times where Howell has faded away from the pocket when he could have just stepped up within the pocket or made a subtle move to slide one way or the other and let pressure run by him. In this game, we saw him more consistently manage the pocket.

The two clips in this play show very different levels of pocket management. The first play is much more subtle, but still very important and effective. The Seahawks use a very similar pressure to the plays we saw above, with a linebacker joining the rush and the defensive end dropping off from the other side. Gibson steps up from his spot in the backfield to pick up that linebacker, but loses track of the linebacker after the initial contact. Howell makes a very subtle move to just casually slide slightly to his left away from that linebacker, giving Gibson a chance to recover the block and run the linebacker by him while also creating space for Howell to deliver his throw on the shallow cross. 

The second play of the clip is a drastically different type of pocket management and the play doesn’t ultimately result in a positive, but the pocket movement from Howell is what’s important to focus on here. The two defensive tackles end up running a stunt, though I’m not sure if it was a designed one or just ended up working out that way. Either way, one defensive tackle rushes inside to the A gap while the other defensive tackle loops around him. The offensive line doesn’t handle this stunt very well, with left guard Chris Paul struggling to cut off the first defender and Larsen not helping as he was reading the other defender. Howell does a fantastic job to side step the first defender and then climb up in the pocket to avoid the second defender. He then gets his eyes back downfield and nearly finds a throw over the middle but just misses it. 

Again, the result of the play is obviously not what Howell or the Commanders would have wanted, but the movement within the pocket was extremely encouraging. Being able to avoid a rusher like that and move positively within the pocket to extend plays is a huge part of playing quarterback in the NFL. Howell can still be more consistent with it, but when he gets it right, it’s very good. 

Something else Howell did well in this game was going off-script when the play broke down. Howell has always had the ability to go off-script and make plays, but young quarterbacks tend to battle the instinct to go off-script with actually just taking what’s available on any given play. Howell hasn’t gone off-script as often as many young quarterback with his ability typically do, instead trying his best to pick his moments when a play has truly broken down to do so. In this game, he got that mix just about spot on, taking what was available to him when he could and only going off-script when he had nothing else on. That meant when plays worked, he was generally finding the right pass, but when plays didn’t work, he was able to go off-script and make them work. 

These couple of plays show Howell dropping back to pass and trying to work through his progression, but then going off-script when nothing is available to him. The first clip is a basic concept we’ve seen a lot from Washington this year. To the left, they run an out from the slot with a clear out from the outside receiver and to the right, they use their Tampa Bay concept. Howell looks left off the snap, but with nothing there he comes back to the middle of the field. The Seahawks do a good job matching all the routes, so Howell goes off-script, escaping the pocket and finding Terry McLaurin down the field for a first down. 

On the second play of the clip. The Commanders are looking to hit a deep over route from right to left, with the two receivers to the left both running vertical routes designed to vacate space underneath them for the deep over. Unfortunately, Curtis Samuel gets bumped heavily on his deep over route, throwing off the timing of the play. Pressure then arrives and Howell doesn’t have time to wait for Samuel to make up ground, so he takes off running to his left. There he finds Brian Robinson down the sideline and flicks it to him for a big gain.

So in this game, we’ve seen Howell identify blitzes post-snap and throw hot; we’ve seen him move within the pocket to avoid rushers and now we’ve seen him go off-script when plays break down. The best example of all those traits combined came on the Commanders opening touchdown to Brian Robinson.