I know that the NFL Scouting Combine is fast approaching, there are free agency decisions to make over the next few weeks, and the NFL Draft is about two months away, but dammit I will squeeze every drop of juice I can out of reviewing what made the 2025 Seattle Seahawks such a special team.
One of the big reasons why the Seahawks were able to return to Super Bowl glory was their ability to win in the trenches. Outside of turnovers, nothing kills drives more than sacks, and the Seahawks have had their fair
share of seasons under Russell Wilson and Geno Smith in which it felt like the season sack total would threaten triple digits.
Thanks to Stathead, I pulled down the totals for every season in which sacks were an official stat (1982 to present), with the playoffs included. Folks, the 2025 Seahawks were so good at sack avoidance and getting sacks that the only comparable team had one of the great offensive lines the game has ever seen.
Sam Darnold had never had a full season with a sack rate below six percent until he joined the Seahawks. His 5.49% regular+postseason sack rate was the best for any Seahawks starting quarterback since Matt Hasselbeck in 2007. For context, Darnold’s sack rate was three percentage points higher with the Minnesota Vikings.
Obviously, it’s not surprising that not once did the Seahawks have a positive sack differential in the Russell Wilson era. The combination of some truly awful offensive lines and Wilson creating a lot of his own havoc in between the magic was not conducive to keeping sack totals low.
While there’s a lot of potential for the Seahawks offensive line to be great in the long-term, the 2005 Seahawks had a pair of Hall of Fame starters in Walter Jones and Steve Hutchinson, along with the very reliable Robbie Tobeck at center. We hope one day that Charles Cross and Grey Zabel are the next Walt and Hutch, but they aren’t there yet. It is wildly impressive how well the Seahawks turned their ship around just by having Zabel replace Laken Tomlinson, Sundell replace Connor Williams, Abe Lucas have a healthy season, and Josh Jones be a way better swing tackle than Stone Forsythe. Add in John Benton’s coaching and the Seahawks had one of their best offensive lines in years.
But it’s not all down to the OL or even Klint Kubiak’s play-calling, which was generally quarterback friendly and did not leave Darnold repeatedly hung out to dry. The reason Darnold escaped the Super Bowl with only one sack taken despite a blitz rate well above 50 percent was his vastly improved pocket maneuverability.
PFF has a metric called the pressure-to-sack ratio. In other words, how often are quarterbacks turning their pressures into sacks? For Sam Darnold, he was a little bit above the 20 percent median at avoiding sacks under pressure with the Minnesota Vikings. With the Seahawks, he was well below the 17.7% P2S median (Geno Smith, by the way, was the worst P2S QB in the NFL after being one of the best two seasons ago).
While Darnold was pressured at a below average rate, he was outstanding at not bleeding negative plays through sacks. When he wasn’t creating with his legs he was, and I cannot stress this enough, getting the damn ball out on time and in rhythm. That’s what made the 2005 Seahawks hum so beautifully under Mike Holmgren and Matt Hasselbeck. For all of the intermittent frustrations with the Seahawks offense, what made this year’s passing game mostly aesthetically pleasing to watch was how frequently they were able to operate on schedule. I love improvisation as much as the next person, but I love clean pockets and quarterbacks who are in sync with their targets more.
We knew the defense was destined to be a danger to opposing quarterbacks, but what put the Seahawks over the top was finally having an offense that could play within structure and not have both the quarterback and the offensive line drive sledgehammers through any semblance of normalcy.
