NASHVILLE, Tenn. — In a late-August joint practice with the Titans, the Super Bowl-champion Seahawks were being outplayed by a defense that finished 2025 in the bottom third of the league.
The connection between Pro Bowl quarterback Sam Darnold and Offensive Player of the Year Jaxon Smith-Njigba still looked sharp, but the Seahawks went nowhere in the run game all day. And a Titans secondary that struggled in preseason action against backups made several big plays against the pass, including a pick-six by cornerback Alontae Taylor off Darnold.
Sure, you could chalk it up as one bad practice against an inferior team motivated to show out against the champs. But here’s another way to look at it: Seattle’s offense was still working through hiccups with first-time playcaller Brian Fleury. The new offensive coordinator’s acclimation is one of the biggest storylines facing the Seahawks, who open the 2026 NFL season by hosting the New England Patriots in a Super Bowl LX rematch on Wednesday night.
“He’s been around some really, really good playcallers. I think for him, it’s just learning the flow of it,” Darnold told me after the joint practice last month when I asked about building a rapport with Fleury. “When to call a certain play. When to get the play in. How much time we’re going to have on the play clock.
“But he’s super, super smart, and we know he can handle it.”
It’s up to new Seahawks OC Brian Fleury to continue the offensive excellence that helped Seattle win the Super Bowl last season. (Photo by Jack Compton/Getty Images)
Hired in February, Fleury has big shoes to fill in replacing Klink Kubiak, who left Seattle after one season to become head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders.
The 47-year-old Fleury is a longtime NFL assistant who was most recently the run game coordinator and tight ends coach for offensive guru Kyle Shanahan and the San Francisco 49ers. Now, Fleury is tasked with sustaining and improving a Seattle offense that was one of the league’s best a year ago.
Under Kubiak, the Seahawks ranked third in scoring (28.4 points per game) and pressure rate allowed (27.8%), according to Next Gen Stats, plus seventh in yards per game (351.4 yards). They were top-10 in both passing (229.1 yards per game) and rushing (123.3 yards per game). Darnold had his second straight 4,000-yard passing season, while Smith-Njigba led the league in receiving.
To build off it, the Seahawks must adapt — and not just at playcaller.
Standout running back and Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker III signed with the Kansas City Chiefs in free agency. Fellow tailback Zach Charbonnet, the team’s combined rushing and receiving touchdowns leader a year ago, will be out at least the first four games as he recovers from a torn ACL suffered in January.
But the desire to establish the run, Darnold told me, will be the same as last season. Coming from the Shanahan tree, similar to Kubiak, Fleury wants to use the rushing attack to set up the play-action game. That comes with a lot of the same terminology, which Darnold was also exposed to in 2023 as a Niners backup.
Typically, it can take a full season for an offense to fully acclimate to a new scheme. Darnold says he’s already seeing his teammates make Fleury’s system their own.
“What really sets him apart, I think, is just his willingness to listen to the players and understand what I like and what the receivers like and some of the things that we did last year,” Darnold told me. “He’s so willing to adapt to what we did, and I know a lot of coordinators and a lot of coaches wouldn’t necessarily do that.
“Even though it’s a different coordinator, it feels like it’s kind of the same offense.”
The connection between Sam Darnold and Jaxon Smith-Njigba (11) will again be key to the Seahawks’ success, but Seattle still wants to establish the run. (Photo by Steph Chambers/Getty Images)
But the QB says there will be new wrinkles, both in the run game and the pass game, including some things that Shanahan has added to his offense since Darnold’s departure in 2023 that Fleury has brought with him to Seattle.
It also sounds like the Seahawks could be playing faster in 2025. Last year, they scored offensive points on 45.9% of their drives, sixth-most in the NFL, with an average possession time of 2:48, ranked 11th in the league.
“When we want to get into tempo, there’s a lot,” Darnold told me. “Building our tempo package was huge going into this year. Like, we haven’t shown a ton of it.”
So it’s safe to say that the Patriots will see a different offense on Wednesday than the Titans saw in late August.
