re: It has to be the defensive scheme right?

Definitely scheme as you can see the SAME EXACT issues from when Allen arrived in 2015 to right now, despite having different players every year.

And people want to blame lack of pass rush, but when you are letting guys run free in big open zones and giving up all the underneath stuff your rush isn't going to have time to get home.

And then the zone blitzes are even worse because they are too telegraphed and again leave even bigger holes in those zones.

And you can try to call Ryan bad but the fact is he turned the "worst defense of all time" around in one year to be the 4th best defense of that year with largely the same players.

Then Payton decides he wants the Seahawks defense the next year and brings in Byrd to be Earl Thomas and tells Ryan what scheme to run.

Then when that failed Payton brought back his buddy Allen to run the secondary, and they somehow got worse from 2014, yet Ryan gets the boot and Allen gets promoted.

Then last year you saw the same issues from 2016 and that you are seeing now.

Allen is the issue, and Payton is too. He should have left Ryan alone and not cut all of our defensive leaders (Smith, Vilma, Harper, and Jenkins) all in one off season. At the least you keep one of those guys for continuity. It's been downhill since that point.