What can the Seattle Seahawks do about Kenny McIntosh's struggles in pass protection?

what's going on everybody good afternoon hope your Monday is going along well so far and I think it's about time we talk about Kenny McIntosh a little bit we got to talk about Kenny Macintosh one of the best preseason performers for the Seahawks so far through two games he's clearly been the most productive running back he showed a lot of impressive things to his game and he looks like the player that we were hoping we would get when we drafted him over a year ago so obviously even in an extreme scenario Kenny Macintosh is not going to be a huge part of the 2024 Seahawks but he could be a significant part of the 2024 Seahawks so we got to figure out exactly how that can work so through two preseason games Kenny Macintosh has had multiple good runs I will say the off defensive line has mostly done a really good job in front of him but he showed elusiveness he showed fight he showed some power he showed the ability to catch passes out of the back field which was one of his big draws coming out of Georgia so that's not terribly surprising but overall the Kenny Macintosh experience has been good but there is one problem and it's a problem that could kind of derail our plans here and Corbin Smith lays it out here in this Tweet now this tweet was was actually during the game against the Titans it um I believe happened right after the sack on uh Sam Howell the strip sack where Stone foresight quote unquote gave it up but Kenny Macintosh kind of tripped Stone foresight which caused him to give it up and that in tandem with the previous week where Kenny Macintosh allowed a sack straight up in blocking um he he's struggling with pass protection so Corbin Smith Tweets this out I'm not impressed At All by Kenny Macintosh in pass Pro he looks lost out there most of the time which is crazy because that was a strength for him at Georgia so this is somebody who has watched a lot of the training camp stuff as well this is not just the two games because the two games he's had very few opportunities to pass protect according to PFF I think he has like two he's had two pass protection reps so we're not just talking about two reps we're talking about a pattern established in Camp and we're talking about a stretch of a a extended stretch of opportunities to show that you can pass block and Kenny Macintosh simply not doing it so let's uh let's try to figure this one out here because first I want to address this last sentence from Corbin Smith's tweet which is crazy because that was a strength for him at Georgia I will say this PF does not really agree and they really don't agree uh you go back to 2022 on PFF they had him down for 27 opportunities to pass block in uh his final season at Georgia and while he only allowed one quarterback hurry which is fine they thought that his actual performance relative to what he's doing on the football field was very poor they graded him all the way down at a 29.2 so they thought he was a miserable pass protector you can see that some of these games where he didn't allow any pressures he still was graded out terribly now this is probably a little bit of a hiccup with PFF and the way they do things if a player has 27 opportunities to pass block and only allows one pressure 29.2 doesn't really pass the smell test at a certain point you have to take a step back and think well what am I doing here really like what is this also it's a sample size issue 27 is not that many so you're only working with a limited set of data here and I can go back to 2021 where he was graded out much better and allowed zero pressures but he only had 10 reps 10 opportunities to even allow a pressure so we're still dealing with no real data and then I go back to 2020 he had 10 opportunities allowed two pressures and uh his grade literally scrapes the bottom of the barrel his grade breaks through the bottom of the barrel and goes all the way to the bottom of the ocean 2.5 you don't see that every day and again it's much easier to get these really really awful grades when you're only playing a handful of snaps in that situation which is obviously true here but the point is according to PFF Kenny Macintosh has never been exactly the best pass protector and if he ends up being unable to pick it up in the NFL then they would say that was kind of given away by what they saw at the college level so first of all we have to ask can he get better at this the answer is absolutely we see players get better at this kind of stuff all the time so understand that I'm not throwing in the towel on this particular part of Kenny macintosh's game but what I would say is this for the moment it's evading him he's not doing it in practice very much we've heard multiple people say he's struggling in practice and in the game it's been I mean we we're talking about two plays here but he allowed a sack and he indirectly allowed a sack and those are like the two opportunities he's had so yeah we kind of have a little bit of a problem here so I want to talk a little bit about how the Seahawks might be able to work around this issue because we have to assume for now that it is an issue and it needs to be worked around rather than something that isn't actually there that we can just go through so the most interesting thing about Kenny Macintosh as a player is how the Georgia Bulldogs utilized him in college where yes he was a running back but he was much more than just a running back going back to his final season in college looking at how he was aligned and I know my head's kind of blocking some of these numbers here but you can see the variety of usage here while Kenny McIntosh lined up in the back field about 390 times almost 400 you can see that in pretty much every game he plays he's lining up at least a few times a game in the slot and a few times a game as a white out so 38 reps in the slot and 28 reps in uh in wide so that is 66 total snaps lined up as a wide receiver again he's doing far more stuff in the back field but it's not just the number of snaps it's what he does when he lines up in that situation when he lines up in the slot and lines up wide he's not just a safety valve he's not just a checkdown he's running real wide receiver routes so the Seattle Seahawks used him as I'm sorry the Georgia Bulldogs used him as a wide receiver a pretty decent percentage of his of of his time there and the Seattle Seahawks could mimic that because if you line up as a wide receiver you don't really have to pass protect do you so if you get him on the field in those situations and find a way to get him the ball like that now you're kind of eliminating the problem while still allowing him to use his Dynamic abilities with the ball in his hands so this is just the most uh recent College year with him by the way you can go back to 2021 and you can see he had 145 snaps in the back field and he had 40 as a wide receiver of some kind be it slot or wide and then uh this was uh 2020 again he wasn't playing that much back then but 128 snaps in the back field and 19 snaps as a receiver so those are the creative ways you can use him and again he's not going to be limited at just running a couple different routes he can run wide receiver routes you just have to let him do it so that would be solution number one to get good stuff out of Macintosh in the meantime the other solution and one that I think is a little bit um is obviously losing a little bit of luster right now but I do want to bring this up Kenny Macintosh was a part-time kick returner Georgia over 2020 and 2021 he returned 14 kickoffs for a grand total of 375 yards uh he wasn't necessarily Stellar at it and when he went to a full-time offensive weapon in 2022 he obviously was taking off the kick return team but that's just common sense realistically and it's something that Georgia trusted him to do and remember even if Chanel is one of your kick returners you need another kick returner and it's probably not going to be ES or D Williams Because of roster limitations so you could put Chanel back there and Kenny Macintosh back there potentially if you want to have those two returners back there which I think most teams are going to want now he has no experience as a punt returner which is too bad because that would take care of an issue as well because we don't have a punt returner at the moment that is likely to make the team because I still have my doubts about the D Williams stuff we'll talk more about that later this week maybe but if you get him the ball in his hands this way you know maybe 10 times a year as a kick returner and get him the ball three four times a game as a wide receiver and you just make sure that he's only in the back field for running plays at least you know a large percentage of the time and you allow him to run routes out of the backfield rather than blocking you can find ways to minimize this problem to where he's only going to have to block maybe a couple times a month all right so that's what I wanted to talk about here I wanted to establish that this is a unique player and we don't have to look at him the way we look at most other running backs for a lot of other running backs the inability to block the inability to pass protect would be a little bit of a deal breaker does not have to be with Kenny Macintosh does not all right I'll see you guys later go Hawks let me know what you think down below um yeah it's a it's a problem it is a real problem I mean Corbin Smith if you guys follow him you know he's generally a very positive person when it comes to Seahawk stuff so for him to call something out in the negative like this means that there's something there it's not just made up out of nowhere all right might be another video later today if not I'll see you guys tomorrow go Hawks and let me know what you think down below about Kenny macintosh's future on the Seahawks