Report: Seahawks to hire Rams’ passing game coordinator Shane Waldron as offensive coordinator
SEATTLE – Two weeks after the Seahawks announced the firing of offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer, Seattle appears to have found his replacement – Shane Waldron, who for the past three seasons has been the passing game coordinator for the Los Angeles Rams.
Adam Schefter of ESPN reported Tuesday night that the Seahawks “are planning to hire” Waldron. The report could not be immediately independently confirmed and it’s unclear if or when an official announcement might come.
But indications Tuesday night were that the search was nearing its end. Seattle had also requested in the last day to talk to Buffalo quarterbacks coach Ken Dorsey and had earlier interviewed Oakland running backs coach Kirby Wilson before apparently settling on Waldron.
Waldron, 41, has been with the Rams for all four years that Sean McVay has been head coach having worked with McVay on the staff of the Washington Football Team in 2016.
Waldron has seven years’ experience coaching in the NFL but has not been a coordinator at the NFL level.
Waldron, a native of Portland, was with the Patriots in 2008 and 2009 as offensive quality control coach and tight ends coach and then spent six years in minor league football, high school and college football before returning to the NFL with Washington in 2016 as offensive quality control coach on the staff of head coach Jay Gruden.
He then followed McVay to Los Angeles and has served as tight ends coach and quarterbacks coach and the past three years has been the passing game coordinator.
The Rams have had one of the more prolific offenses under McVay but also one of the more balanced, an aspect that surely appeals to head coach Pete Carroll, who said at the end of the 2020 season that the Seahawks needed to run it both more and better in 2021.
The Rams last year had the seventh-highest run-to-pass ratio in the NFL at 55.75% (Seattle was 18th at 59.59%) while in an offense that features lots of play-action and short passes, as well as runs using receivers.
Seattle fired Schottenheimer after a season in which the Seahawks scored a team-record 459 points to rank eighth in the NFL but flailed badly in the second half of the season, bottoming out with a 30-20 loss to the Rams at home in a wild-card playoff game.
But if it was the Rams’ defense that knocked Seattle out of the playoffs this year, Carroll has seen more than enough of the Rams’ offense the past four years as it has scored 28 or more points against Seattle in six of nine meetings since McVay took over in 2017.