Pete Carroll likes to establish the run. In fact, one could argue that the 2017 season broke his football brain so much that he made an over-correction for the ages in 2018. How on earth can you justify a near 60-40 run-pass ratio on early downs? One can only hope that Carroll and Brian Schottenheimer make some minor tweaks so that this level of insane predictability can no longer be a thing.
But that’s been discussed to death, so let’s look at the other side of the ball. If Carroll believes in establishing the run on offense, he has to think that the defense’s job should be to prevent the other team from establishing their running game.