Seattle’s win streak is largely a result of stellar defense

RENTON, Wash. — It may not have looked that way earlier in the season, but the Seattle Seahawks are back to being an elite defense.

Seattle is tied for the league lead in scoring defense after Sunday’s 24-7 romp over the New York Giants. The Seahawks are allowing just 15.7 points per game, tied with Jacksonville for the league lead. They’ve given up a combined 244 yards rushing in the past three games, including just 46 yards on the ground in rolling past New York.

It’s no surprise the Seahawks have won three straight because their defense is back playing at the level that has become their standard.

The Giants finished with just 177 total yards, the 18th time in Seattle coach Pete Carroll’s tenure that the Seahawks have held an opponent under 200 total yards in a regular-season game. It was the 21st time they held an opponent under 50 yards on the ground. Carroll was extremely pleased with the play of secondyear defensive tackle Jarran Reed and veteran Sheldon Richardson against the Giants.

“They were really consistent, really disciplined from inside out. … It takes great discipline to do that play after play after play. We’ve been doing this for years and this is how you play base defense and if you don’t play with great discipline, which shows up in those couple of plays that get away from you once in a while, you can’t play at this level and you can’t play a base scheme like we do,” Carroll said. “We don’t do a lot of fancy stuff. We do stuff really well and we count on our guys to execute the heck out of it.”

The performance in New York capped a threegame turnaround for the Seahawks after an ugly performance in Tennessee where Seattle allowed 195 yards rushing and 33 points to the Titans. Seattle gave up touchdowns of 55 and 75 yards in the loss.

But Seattle is about to get possibly its toughest defensive test yet this season with the Texans visiting Sunday. They are coming off their off week but before the break had scored at least 33 points in four straight games, sparked by the play of rookie quarterback Deshaun Watson. The Texans scored 33 against New England and Cleveland, 34 against Kansas City and 57 points in their rout of Tennessee.

Not surprisingly, Carroll was already breaking down Texans film on Monday.

“I’ve already jumped all over that. He’s really good,” Carroll said of Watson. “He’s got terrific numbers. … I’ve already checked him out. He looks good and they do a lot of stuff with him.”