The Seahawks Won the Super Bowl. They Also Nearly Lost It Four Times.

Seattle's championship banner is real. The confetti fell, the trophy was hoisted, and Sam Darnold finally has the defining moment his career always seemed to be chasing. None of that is up for debate. What is worth examining, as training camp churns through August and a new ownership group settles in, is the number hiding underneath the celebration: 4-3.

That's the Seahawks' record in games decided by seven points or fewer last season. Four wins, three losses, in a season where they otherwise won at an 82% clip. The gap between those two figures is the story that the Super Bowl parade temporarily buried. A team that dominant in aggregate — outscoring opponents by more than 11 points per game across a 14-3 regular season — should be running roughshod over close games too. Instead, when margins tightened and the game came down to a possession or two, Seattle converted barely more than half the time. That's not a championship team's clutch profile. That's a good team getting away with something.

The counterargument writes itself: they won the Super Bowl, so how bad could it really be? Fair enough. And the late-season 10-game winning streak, which carried them from late November straight through February, suggests the team found something in the second half of the year that it lacked early on. Ernest Jones IV was a force all season — 151 tackles and 6 interceptions — and the defense gave Darnold's offense room to operate. When Seattle was rolling, it was genuinely hard to watch. But rolling is different from grinding, and the NFL in 2026 will ask this team to grind.

That's where the offseason picture gets uncomfortable. Zach Charbonnet, who scored 12 touchdowns in 17 games last season and gives the offense a different dimension than Kenneth Walker III, is currently out. Deven Eastern, the rookie defensive tackle they're counting on for interior depth, hasn't practiced. The EDGE group just added a former UFL player to fill a gap after Jadeveon Clowney chose to return to Houston rather than reunite with Seattle. These aren't catastrophic losses individually, but they cluster around exactly the positions — depth, interior defense, pass rush — that matter most when a game is hanging by a thread in the fourth quarter.

My read is that the close-game vulnerability wasn't random variance. It was the team's identity in tight spots: an offense that could torch you when the field opened up but hadn't fully solved the problem of manufacturing points when the defense had time to adjust, and a defense that was excellent in aggregate but not consistently dominant enough to win low-scoring games by itself. Darnold threw 14 interceptions last season — a number that doesn't sink you when you're winning by double digits but becomes fatal when you need a clean drive at the end. The roster construction heading into 2026 doesn't obviously address that. What it does is preserve the ceiling. Whether the floor rises is the real question this team needs to answer before anyone starts talking dynasty.