If you read national media outlets (ESPN, Bleacher Report, CBS Sports, among others), you’ll notice there’s not a lot of widespread love or belief that the Seattle Seahawks will be as much as a playoff team this year, forget about competing for the NFC West. Even the betting lines have the Seahawks with a 7.5 win O/U.
I have no issue whatsoever with the reserved opinions about the Seahawks and the predictions of no playoffs or even a last place finish in the NFC West. While I personally believe Seattle
will at least make the postseason and have a very good shot to win the division, I’m not such a homer that I can’t see the obvious paths to a non-winning season that don’t involve a slew of injuries.
The Geno Smith era has come and gone with the Seahawks posting winning records every season, making the playoffs once and losing out on tiebreakers the other two times.
I am begging you to not view this as “Geno’s fault” or anything like that, but there’s a reason why his tenure as Seahawks quarterback felt… a little lacking.
Or, to put it another way: The Seahawks were a +5 in the win column, had the point differential of a sub-.500 team, and the win strength of a paper tiger.
Back in December, following the loss to the Minnesota Vikings, I wrote this blurb that extended to the final seasons of the Russell Wilson era:
Since 2020, the Seahawks are just 3-17 against eventual division champions (usually Super Bowl contenders, with few exceptions). The .150 win percentage is an abysmal 28th in the NFL. This includes getting swept by the Rams in 2021, as well as the 49ers in 2022 and 2023. One of those “division champion” wins was the 7-9 Washington Football Team in 2020. This stat could actually get worse if they lose to the Rams again and the Atlanta Falcons don’t win the NFC South.
In that same time frame, they are tied for the most wins in the NFL against teams below .400. That stat could fluctuate depending on whether or not the San Francisco 49ers lose out this season. And even then, more than half of those wins were by one possession.
Yes, I included the 2020 division champion Seahawks to not isolate almost everything exclusively to the Geno Smith era. Beyond any other asterisks we could put on that unprecedented coronavirus pandemic season, those Seahawks were pretty damn inflated. They were a 12-4 team with a point differential more akin to a 10-6 squad despite playing the third easiest schedule in the entire NFL by opponent win percentage. Their only game against a serious Super Bowl contender that season was a complete humiliation against the Buffalo Bills. Against the only other playoff team they faced with a winning record, they went 1-2 versus the Rams and were blown out in the playoffs.
As an update, the Seahawks have the second-most wins against sub-.400 teams and are still 28th.
On the subject of point differential, the Seahawks usually either play close games or got blown out. Since 2022, Seattle is bottom ten in offensive possessions when leading by 10+ points. Want to know the records of the other nine teams during that span? It’s ugly.
The Seahawks have not led by more than 21 points in each of the last three years, something every other NFL team has accomplished at least once. I don’t anticipate the Seahawks being a championship-caliber team this season, but I think this line in Aaron Schatz’s 2025 FTN Football Almanac is accurate.
Championship teams are generally defined by their ability to dominate inferior opponents, not their ability to win close games.
Football games are often decided by just one or two plays: a missed field goal, a bouncing fumble, the subjective spot of an official on fourth-and-1. One missed assignment by a cornerback or one slightly askew pass that bounces off a receiver’s hands and into those of a defensive back five yards away and the game could be over. In a blowout, however, one lucky bounce isn’t going to change things. Championship teams—in both professional and college football—typically beat their good opponents convincingly and destroy the cupcakes on the schedule.
Yes, while even the 2013 Seattle Seahawks needed to rally from 21-0 down to beat a horrid Tampa Bay Buccaneers team at home, they also hammered the Jacksonville Jaguars and Atlanta Falcons by combined scores of 78-27, blasted the San Francisco 49ers and New Orleans Saints by a combined 63-10 over two home games, and edged past the Carolina Panthers in a 12-7 gutty road win. The greatest Seahawks team won more often than not against contenders and mostly hammered inferior opposition. In recent years, Seattle has seldom shown itself to be demonstrably superior to bottom-dwellers and has been routinely hammered by the NFL’s elite. If you want to add in context of the low expectations of the 2022 team and the coaching change in 2024, I don’t think my point changes much regarding the quality of the team, especially when they’ve not done a full-scale “blow it all up” rebuild.
Several weeks back, Rob Staton made this point on the HawksZone Rundown podcast that I mostly (but don’t completely) agree with:
“The other thing I’d love to see for them next year is just win the games you’re supposed to win. Don’t allow a team as bad as the Giants to come into your backyard and outplay you and win that game deservedly. Don’t allow that kind of thing to happen. Don’t allow the Rams to come to Seattle and escape with a victory in a game you should have won. Win those games you’re supposed to win. We’ll forgive the Seahawks losing road games against top teams. You’ve just got to win the games you’re expected to win next year.”
Yes, Seattle shouldn’t let a dreadful New York Giants team win at Lumen Field. But that’s been a general blip in the radar and even happens to the best teams. As noted earlier, the Seahawks have not had issues defeating bad teams, which for this exercise I’m defining as sub-.400 (aka 10+ losses), but they’ve not beaten enough upper echelon opposition to be taken seriously or merit consideration as a contender.
We’re now two years removed from Pete Carroll’s departure, and this offseason saw two of the more polarizing ‘#PetesGuys’ players (Geno Smith and DK Metcalf) traded to AFC teams. Forget what the odds say; many of you believe the Seahawks will win the NFC West and usually that means winning at least 10 games. If you believe that the Seahawks upgraded their coaching staff and roster in totality in the short- and long-term, then presumably you back the Seahawks to make the playoffs this year. If you don’t and accept that an 8-9 “step back” season is possible and not a failure, then the rest of this article is probably not meant for you!
With a full, proper offseason for Mike Macdonald, new coaches on offense, a defense that is vastly improved from Pete’s final years, a splashier free agency than normal, and a widely praised draft, it’s easy to be optimistic that the Seahawks are close to being contenders as soon as this year. This isn’t a “rebuild to be good eventually,” it’s a remaking of the roster to push for the playoffs after narrowly missing out twice in a row.
If the Seahawks are on the cusp of greatness again, then they need to prove it by doing things great or soon-to-be great teams do. It rarely happened in the Geno era and steadily stopped happening during the end of Wilson’s tenure. This is Seattle’s chance to prove the critics wrong and show that this is not a middling, mostly harmless squad akin to the past few seasons. If it doesn’t happen and it’s not because of a slew of injuries to key players, I would consider it a disappointment. But if these Seahawks are different, live up to their potential, and look like a playoff threat that is supposedly stacked with young, mostly battle-tested talent? Then that’s worthy of respect and praise, and we’re in for exciting times ahead.
And if the ’Hawks still don’t get their props from these national outlets, columnists, podcasters, and talking heads… then who gives a shit?
