“I’ve got to give a shout out to the rookie, Grey Zabel, actually,” Williams said. “He’s a smart kid. Since camp, since OTAs, we’ve been going back and forth communicating, giving each other tips on what works, what doesn’t work. Sometimes it’s good to get insight from a guy on the other side of the ball, and he said to me at one point that he can tell I was getting a slide—the center sliding to me a lot—and he was like, ‘Hey, why are you taking the inside move, when the slide is coming to you? You should just try to burn the B-gap.’ So that whole drive, I was taking off, trying to burn the B-gap, and it worked.
“I went up to him and thanked him, for sure.”
That sack highlighted not just Zabel’s football intelligence as a rookie, not to mention his confidence to approach a veteran of Williams’ stature with some in-game advice, but it also showed Williams’ willingness to learn and adapt, even when that advice is coming from a rookie, 11 years into a standout career.
“It was funny, because even D-Law tried to give me crap about it on the sideline, he’s like, ‘What, a vet learning a from a rookie?'” Williams said. “But that goes back to another thing Coach Mike (Macdonald) talks about, old-school principles, new-school methods. I’m not above myself enough to not take advice from someone, and that’s how this team is. If somebody has good insight, we’re all willing to learn from each other, willing to grow. It doesn’t matter what year I am, I’m learning from a young guy. The game is changing, always adapting. I learned a slogan a long time ago when I was young—adapt or die. That’s how this game is, you’ve got to always adapt.”
The Seahawks have gotten to this point where they are one of the final four teams standing for a number of reasons, from the talent on the roster to the coaching and scheme in all three phases to, as Macdonald likes to call it, the “shocking effort” players show on the field. But there are other, harder to quantify reasons behind their success, not the least of which is the closeness of the team that players have cited throughout this season as a key to their success. And to Macdonald, Williams’ sack was a perfect example of that closeness paying real dividends in a game.
“That’s an awesome story,” Macdonald said. “What a great microcosm of how our team has gotten to this point. It’s really symbolic of those relationships that we’ve built. Then for Leo to have the humility to seek out that type of advice and take it from a rookie—to the layman’s perspective, it’s like, ‘Why would he do that?’ But then you start to dig in and realize that those guys have been working together for a long time, and they’ve developed a cool relationship. I think it’s really, really, really cool.”