Why can Seahawks WR Jazz Ferguson have a shortcut to the list of 53 men?

With the Seattle Seahawks and the other 31 NFL clubs, it is planned to reduce the number of players to 53 on Saturday, but the debate over who will qualify and who will be eliminated will reach a fever pitch in the 24 next hours. In particular, the Seahawks face serious decisions in the back of their receiver group, the top four being Tyler Lockett, David Moore, Jaron Brown, and DK Metcalf, but half a dozen different players could end up in the top spot. places behind. these players.

Add a capillary fracture of the humerus to Moore and Metcalf, just ten days after a knee operation, and the answer to this question could become even more complicated. Keenan Reynolds, Terry Wright and John Ursua compete for the right to support Lockett in the slot, while competition from outsiders seems to be against Gary Jennings, Malik Turner and Jazz Ferguson.

Ferguson and Ursua led the team with pre-season production, but pre-season statistics do not mean much because they are produced against players who are unlikely to be employed once the regular season arrives . Thus, beyond production, the other keys to focus on are those skills outside production. What is the quality of a road racer is a receiver? How much of a player attack can he execute well? Can a player play at different positions?

Regarding receivers more specifically, I explained a little why some receivers may have difficulty adjusting to the NFL game from college. On Wednesday, Pete Carroll articulated this theory as the basis of an excuse for Jennings and Ursua regarding their knowledge of the game book.

However, what emerges from Carroll's quote is that even though he mentions that Metcalf took the offense and that Ursua and Jennings have problems because of the time they missed, it is not done no mention of Ferguson. Ferguson led the team in the pre-season, so it's time for the team to make a decision.

Jennings, Ferguson and Ursua have combined only three targets in the pre-season final against the Oakland Raiders. Ferguson got two of those three targets and the other did not get close to Jennings on what appeared to be poor communication between Jennings and Paxton Lynch. This begs the question, however, why Ferguson played in the first half of the pre-season games, when Jennings and Ursua did not see the time until the second half. Was it the Seahawks hiding Jennings and Ursua to add nothing to the movie? Are Jennings and Ursua less attractive to the 31 other teams being waived because if a receiver can not learn the game book after six weeks of training camp How long will it take to learn the booklet after migrating to a new system with a new team?

Or was it simply the result of the fact that Jazz Ferguson may have had a head start on the other rookie receivers when he learned the offense?

Fans know very well that Ferguson played for the FCS Northwestern State in 2018, in a downward offensive against a lower level of competition. This means that just like Jennings, who played in an air raid system in West Virginia, and Ursua, who played in the Run and Shoot game in Hawaii, he would need to learn a professional style attack as soon as his arrival in the NFL. . Or would it be?

Before destroying the competition at Northwestern State in 2018 and before spending the 2017 season in the Northwestern State scouting team, Ferguson spent the 2015 and 2016 seasons at LSU. The reason is important because of the offensive system that the Tigers used during his stay there. It is true that the Miles were fired four times in the 2016 season, but if we look at the first four games of the 2016 and 2015 season, we find something very interesting. Specifically, when Miles was fired, LSU also sacked his offensive coordinator, Cam Cameron.

Cam Cameron is a name that should be familiar to Seahawk fans. Of course, he is best known for being the offensive coordinator of the Super Bowl champion Ravent Baltimore Ravens, but nearly two decades ago he was the coach of the Washington Redskins quarterbacks under Norv Turner. Turner, of course, is an offensive coach who is probably best known for leading the Dallas Cowboys to win two consecutive Super Bowl titles in the early 1990s, but I am more concerned about the offensive system he used to do it. Specifically, Turner has been using the Air Coryell system for decades. It's a system he used with the Cowboys, it's a system he used with the Los Angeles Rams in the mid-80s, and it's a system he used with Washington, where he taught this system to Cam Cameron.

Cameron, in turn, used this system with San Diego at the time, but now between 2002 and 2006, Los Angeles Chargers, as offensive coordinator under the direction of a head coach named Marty Schottenheimer. There was a second Schottenheimer among Chargers staff during the first four years of this period, with Brian Schottenheimer having been the coach of the San Diego quarterbacks during this period, and it was during this period that Schottenheimer took over the offensive system used by Cameron.

Thus, while it is undeniable that the versions of the offense used by Schottenheimer and Cameron have evolved over the last thirteen years since the two were trained together, the basis of the offense remains the same. Regardless of how the offenses are currently deployed, the basic road concepts of Cameron's version of the offense remain the same basic road concepts of the Schottenheimer offense. So, there is no doubt that Ferguson has probably forgotten some of what he has learned in the two years between his departure from LSU and his signing with the Seahawks as a non-traded free agent. Moreover, even if the system he learned for the Hawks would be slightly different from the one he had played at LSU, there are likely to be enough similarities for Ferguson to start outpacing other recruits by half.

And that could largely explain why Ferguson was constantly on the ground during the first period, while Jennings and Ursua were not. Now the question is, of course, whether this half-lead in advance will be enough to prevent Ferguson from being lifted on Saturday, and although we do not know the answer until Saturday at the end of the day, Ferguson certainly did everything he could to make the decision as difficult as possible for the front office and the management staff.