ClutchPoints
The Seattle Seahawks picked up a huge win on Sunday, riding their defense and a raucous home crowd to a 16-6 win over the Arizona Cardinals. With the win, the Seahawks are now in first place in the NFC West via the head-to-head tiebreaker over the Cardinals.
After they appeared to be slumping just a few weeks ago, the Seahawks have now won two division games in a row to get into position to make a playoff push. This week, they had to push through some adversity to produce some of their best football. The team didn’t have power in its facility for much of the week leading up to the game as a power outage ran through the city.
After the game, quarterback Geno Smith claimed that the fans brought all of the energy they had been missing to the game on Sunday, according to the team’s official website.
“It was huge,” Smith said after the game. “I know our city was hurting for a couple days without power. That’s funny, because they were electric today. I felt like they really brought the juice for us. We wanted to repay our fans. We always want them to be excited and happy for our team. The more we win, the more that builds, so we’ve got to keep this thing going.”
It was a true playoff atmosphere at Lumen Field on Sunday and the 12s were out in full force. As a result, the Cardinals had a very hard time moving the ball on offense.
The main selling point of bringing in Mike Macdonald as the new Seahawks head coach this offseason was his ability to transform this defense, which has been a poor unit over the last few years, into one of the top units in the league. Nobody knew if that would happen in year one, but there were some troubling signs in the middle of the season.
Since the bye week, however, this unit is playing some very good football. After a heartbreaking loss to the Rams before the bye week, the Seahawks came back well-rested and shut down the San Francisco 49ers on that side of the ball in a huge Week 11 win. In Week 12, they put forth their best game yet.
Facing an Arizona Cardinals offense that had been on fire heading into Sunday in a game that decided first place in the NFC West, the Seahawks shut them down. They dominated up front, getting consistent pressure on Kyler Murray in the passing game and stifling the Cardinals’ bruising run game. James Conner finished this game with eight yards on seven carries with zero successful runs on the day.
In the back end, the Seahawks were flying around, making tackles and closing throwing windows quickly. In the third, quarter, they made the biggest play of the game. On a fourth-and-1, Devon Witherspoon chased Murray down and forced an ill-advised throw. Coby Bryant picked...
