ESPN ranked the top 25 teams of the past 25 years, and the Seattle Seahawks had two representatives.
Everyone should be able to guess the years, and now that you’ve hopefully said 2013 and 2014, congratulations you’re right!
Before we get into the list, Seattle had three honorable mentions, including a shoutout to the team that lost to the 2005 Pittsburgh Steelers, a game that Bill Barnwell admits was ruined by “dismal officiating”.
For a quick NFC West roundup, the Arizona Cardinals had 0 appearances,
wonder why; the San Francisco 49ers had one team (2011), and the Rams also had two teams (2001 and 2018).
No. 23, 2014
For the Seahawks themselves, the ill-fated 2014 team came in at 23rd, the second Super Bowl loser on the list after the 2018 Rams kicked off the countdown. Even though Earl Thomas, Kam Chancellor, and Richard Sherman played through devastating and documented injuries, only Cliff Avril’s concussion made the article.
No. 2, 2013
The top five was exclusively made up of the Seahawks, New England Patriots, and Philadelphia Eagles. Seattle managed to settle in between two Tom Bradys, with Barnwell going out of his way to point out these Seahawks were only the millennium’s fourth-best defense by DVOA, or eighth-best by EPA. He then followed it up by claiming we’ll have three Hall of Fame players from the era: Bobby Wagner, Richard Sherman and Russell Wilson.
Intriguing.
Here was the final rationale for the 35-point Super Bowl champs not to make the top of the list:
The only reason this Seattle team isn’t No. 1? It was sloppy at times during the regular season. The Seahawks went to overtime to beat the 2-14 Texans and the 4-12 Buccaneers, needed a goal-line stop on the final snap to beat the 7-9 Rams and gave up 34 points to the Colts in an early-season defeat at home. The offense went missing in a late-season loss to the Cardinals. This is nit-picking, but the margins at the very top are thin. This was a special team, and I went back and forth with the idea of picking them to top the list.
Topping them were the 2007 Patriots, who won 18 games before losing the Super Bowl to the helmet catch et. al. Seattle was the top-ranked Super Bowl champion but not the top-ranked overall team this century.
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