Field Gulls
The full-strength Seattle Seahawks would defeat the Tennessee Titans on average by two scores. So, missing their starting inside linebacker, their center, strong safety, nosetackle, and even their top TD-maker on offense, it follows that they should win by three scores.
They kinda did, and I don’t mean by three safeties. Until variance — a punt return, a pivotal and peculiar no-call-timeout-penalty sequence, and a garbage time score fueled by fourth-down funny business — set in and calmed the score down to a 30-24 victory. But Seattle was never going to lose after establishing a 23-3 lead at the game’s approximate midpoint.
When the Titans had their window — more of a cat door really — of victory open the largest, it was still incumbent on them to punch it in, recover the onside kick, and get in the end zone again. All within a minute with no timeouts, too. Predictably, they cleared only one of those three hurdles, and the Seahawks walked away winners for the eighth time already in a potentially special season.
Today’s win probability chart and Nick tell the story much better than the scoreboard.
It was time after Week 3 to give the Seahawks defense their props, when they ran N’awlins out of the building.
It was time after Week 6, when they dismantled a good offense and a great offensive line in Jacksonville.
It is even more time after Week 12, when they followed the script from wins over the Saints, Texans, Commanders and Cardinals, took an inferior team and pulverized them in the first half — again — and seized control by the midpoint — again — on the way to a road win far more comfortable than the final score indicates. Uh-ginn.
Seattle’s nigh impenetrable defense gave the offense every advantage needed to put the game away before half. This time Sam Darnold and his merry band of knaves didn’t cough up the ball four or five times. And Jaxon Smith-Njigba did JSN things. So did Kenneth Walker and Zach Charbonnet, bless them. So it wasn’t close when it mattered, and the game was not remotely in doubt for the final 28 minutes of gameplay. (Yes, again.)
Y’all. This is a good Seahawks team. They might be great. Their three losses don’t even have a dispiriting aspect to them:
Given the very serious flaws present in every NFC team and every traditional AFC superpower, plus the memory of how winnable the Rams game would have been with decent ball security, the Seahawks are contenders...
