NASHVILLE — The Seattle Seahawks haven’t lost consecutive games this year, and they’re in no mood to start now with the NFL’s 2025 regular season about to hit the stretch run to the playoffs.
They are focused on improving quickly after a 21-19 loss to the Los Angeles Rams pushed Seattle (7-3) to second in the NFC West Division standings.
“There needs to be a sense of urgency now,” Seahawks second-year head coach Mike Macdonald said, “because we’ve got to start playing our best football. We’re in the second half of the year going into the last quarter of the season.”
The Seahawks have traveled well in Macdonald’s tenure, going 11-2 on the road, and on Sunday they will visit the struggling Tennessee Titans (1-9), who keep finding ways to hurt themselves whether they’re playing at Nashville’s Nissan Stadium or anywhere else.
The Titans have lost five straight games, four of those since Brian Callahan was fired less than halfway through his second season as the head coach in Music City and replaced by interim coach Mike McCoy. They also have lost nine consecutive games at home, two shy of the longest such skid for the franchise formerly known as the Houston Oilers since it relocated to Tennessee ahead of the 1997 season.
Last weekend, the Titans blew a 6-0 lead in the third quarter at Nissan Stadium before losing 16-13 to the Houston Texans, who kicked a 35-yard field goal as time expired to win the AFC South Division matchup.
“We’ve just got to make more plays more consistently,” McCoy said.
The Titans are last in the NFL in total offense at 242.5 yards per game, last with a meager 14.3 points scored per game, and 30th among the league’s 32 teams in passing yards at 163.6 per game. They’ve scored just 10 touchdowns, and penalties are a continuing problem for an offense that struggles to extend possessions.
Tight end Chig Okonkwo, a fourth-year pro selected by Tennessee in the fourth round of the 2022 draft, couldn’t answer what the team’s offensive identity is in a season when Callahan handed off the play-calling duties to quarterbacks coach Bo Hardegree three games before he wound up being fired.
“Honestly, I can’t tell you exactly what it is,” Okonkwo said, “because each week the things we put on tape is not what we are preaching.”
Tennessee at least got back a couple starters on the other side of the ball last week in three-time Pro Bowl defensive tackle Jeffery Simmons and linebacker Arden Key, and they helped the Titans allow fewer points than they have all season.
The team also had four sacks and has 22 since Oct. 5. That’s the third-highest total in the NFL in that span, trailing the Denver Broncos (34) and the Atlanta Falcons (24), but it won’t be easy getting to Seattle’s Sam Darnold, who has been sacked just 10 times this season.
Simmons leads the Titans with 5 1/2 sacks despite missing most of three games.
“He’s one of the best,” Macdonald said. “He plays hard, plays physical, and they do a good job of moving him around and matching him up. So he’s a guy that we’re going to have to account for.”
Tennessee rookie quarterback Cam Ward has taken a league-worst 41 sacks, including three by the Texans last weekend, and the overall No. 1 pick of this year’s draft has been sacked at least twice in each game so far.
The Seahawks, who have the fourth-most sacks in the NFL with 32, failed to notch even one against the Rams last weekend. Seattle’s defense held Los Angeles quarterback Matthew Stafford to 130 passing yards but couldn’t take him down.
“Overall, we just didn’t put ourselves in enough situations where they had to truly drop back and pass,” defensive tackle Leonard Williams said. “In those times where they did, I think we got pressure to Stafford and he had to throw the ball away a few times.”
Seattle’s offense has the capacity for balance, with its passing attack among the league’s best and its rushing attack coming along.
Jaxon Smith-Njigba leads the NFL with 1,146 receiving yards — 208 yards ahead of the next-closest player on the list — already eclipsing his total from last season. Smith-Njigba is the first player in NFL history with at least 75 receiving yards in each of his first 10 games in a season. With at least 75 yards against the Titans, he would become the third to string together 11 such games in one season, joining Pro Football Hall of Famer Marvin Harrison (14) and teammate Cooper Kupp (13).
Meanwhile, Darnold and Smith-Njigba quietly are getting help from running back Kenneth Walker III. He leads the Seahawks in rushing yards with 606 on 136 carries, and his 4.5 yards per attempt represent his highest average since his 4.6 clip as a rookie in 2022.
He’s a big reason why the Seahawks have topped 100 yards on the ground in three of their four games. Walker ran for 67 yards in each of the past two, and he also had three catches for 44 yards against the Rams.