The Seattle Seahawks had a down year in 2015 and much of that can be blamed on the poor performance of the team’s secondary. Some in the media blame Kam Bam Bam Chancellor, but AJ Wiborg explains why that is not a valid argument.
Disclaimer: I am a born and bred Seattle Seahawks fan, having grown up in the Pacific Northwest rooting for Steve Largent, Curt Warner, and Cortez Kennedy.
Pete Prisco loves to write click bait articles and his 2016 most overrated NFL players list hits that that nail squarely on the head. This year Prisco chose to rate Seahawks strong safety Kam “Bam Bam” Chancellor as his most overrated player going into the 2016 season.
Prisco is wrong and here is why:
Entering the 2015 offseason, the Seahawks secondary was among the most injured in the league, with Earl Thomas rehabbing after surgery to repair a torn labrum, Richard Sherman dealing with a severely sprained elbow, and Jeremy Lane becoming a bionic man while healing from a torn ACL and a broken arm, all in addition to Chancellor having his MCL surgically repaired. All of these injuries, plus the additional failure to integrate free-agent cornerback Cary Williams into the defensive system, led to an overall down year for the secondary. Factor in an ill-advised hold out by Chancellor which created significant communication issues within the unit, and it is easy to see why someone could be down on Chancellor as a player. Injuries and communication issues, however, were not solely to blame on Chancellor, and any player evaluator should know that he was not the singular reason for the lackluster 2015 the Seattle secondary had.
Chancellor had slightly lower than expected production for the 2015 season. But when you factor in that he only played 11 games, he actually had better production than he did in the 2014 season. In those 11 games, Chancellor had 72 total tackles, two interceptions, a forced fumble (Week 4 vs Detroit to save the game) and four passes defended. Those are almost the exact same numbers he had during the 2014 season while playing 14 games.
The other major thing Prisco appears not to factor into his overrated list is the expected usage of a player. In Seattle’s Cover 3, Chancellor is not asked to provide excellent coverage but rather he plays the robber and ensures that underneath routes are not available.
The Seattle system does not expect Chancellor to do more than what he currently does. As such, any attempt to judge a player based on criteria irrelevant to a player’s role and that which is asked of him is simply not accurate or, for that matter, useful; if anything, it is misleading for anyone who seeks to understand the game.