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How on earth does a team with a roster not even cracking the top nine in 2025 manage to put on a Super Bowl performance rivalling the best of the last 35 years? It’s a head-scratcher, right? Take the Seattle Seahawks as they storm into Super Bowl 60 — a line-up that may not scream “all-time great,” but somehow, they’ve played like legends. Sure, there’s talent sprinkled in — Jaxon Smith-Njigba’s sensational receiving yards, Kenneth Walker III’s thousand-yard ground game, and a tough defensive front anchored by DeMarcus Lawrence and Leonard Williams. Yet, by traditional metrics and star power—or the lack thereof—this team doesn’t fit the mold of a football dynasty. So what’s their secret? It seems the Seahawks have cracked the code on being greater than the sum of their parts, defying expectations and the usual analytics. Let’s dive into how this quietly brilliant team has turned heads and stats on their head, blending grit, strategy, and a sprinkle of magic to rewrite what it means to be elite.
How is it possible that an NFL team with a roster that’s not among the nine best in 2025 has played like one of the five best teams of the past 35 years? We take a look.
Go ahead and take a look at the roster for the Seattle Seahawks heading into Super Bowl 60.
We’ll wait for you to be impressed.
Sure, the NFC champions are bringing some talent into Santa Clara. Offensively, Jaxon Smith-Njigba had the eighth-most receiving yards in a single season with 1,793 and Kenneth Walker III surpassed the 1,000-yard mark on the ground. DeMarcus Lawrence, Leonard Williams and the rest of the defensive front are as good as they come, as are Devon Witherspoon and the team’s defensive backs.
But overall, does this have the look of an all-time great Super Bowl team? According to our team ratings, that answer is no. And we’re not alone. CBS Sports called this Super Bowl matchup “devoid of star power.”
Yet somehow, Seattle has performed like one of the best teams of the past three-plus decades. And we have the data to prove that as well.
How is it possible that a team with a roster that’s not among the nine best in the 2025 season has played like one of the five best teams of the past 35 years?
Good question.
As we hinted at, the Seahawks are 10th in our team ratings as they get ready to face the New England Patriots on Super Sunday. Team ratings rely on our player-level ratings to determine quality at the team level for six categories: pass catching, pass defending, pass rushing, pass protecting, run blocking and run stopping.
From there, we combine the six weighted by importance to winning and add in quarterbacks with their own rating to create team ratings for each squad.
Seattle’s ranking doesn’t sound too bad on the surface. But considering the team is in the Super Bowl with nine others rating higher, it’s not overly impressive, either.
It’s also up a ways from where the Seahawks have been throughout much of the season. Entering Week 14, they had bounced back with consecutive victories after falling to the Los Angeles Rams in an NFC West showdown but still ranked ninth in the NFC – not NFL – in the team ratings and were projected to be the sixth seed by the Opta supercomputer.
The Seahawks still only had the fifth-highest probability of winning the conference a week later. And entering the playoffs, they were named our biggest overachieving team of the 2025 season because they had a 14-3 record despite a team rating that ranked 20th overall.
What’s been holding the team back in the ratings? Well, the quarterback for one. Sam Darnold ranks 20th among starters in our QB ratings after he had a league-high 11 interceptions and a 90.5 passer rating (14th in the NFL) over the final 11 games of the regular season.
Darnold, however, played lights out in the NFC championship game, going 25 of 36 for 346 yards with three touchdowns and no picks. It was Darnold’s third career game with 340-plus passing yards, three or more TDs and no INTs.
But there’s still a feeling of impending doom with the 28-year-old journeyman, and the Patriots hope to force him back into his mistake-prone ways. The AFC champions have seven interceptions over their last five games, including four in the playoff win over Houston.
The Seahawks don’t rate highly on the offensive line either after allowing the eighth-highest run disruption rate and finishing in the middle of the pack in pressure rate allowed. They don’t have a single lineman who ranks in the top 10 in either pass-rush rating or run-block rating.
Having said all that, Seattle came away from its conference title game win over the Rams not only No. 1 in the league with a 14.70 TRACR this season but also No. 5 among all teams dating back to the 1991 season.
That’s even better than the 2013 Seahawks team that trounced Peyton Manning and the Broncos 43-8 in Super Bowl 48. That Seattle team, which lost to the Patriots on the infamous Malcolm Butler interception at the goal line a year later, ranks 12th overall with a 13.29 TRACR.
TRACR normalizes a team’s performance from league factors that can either inflate or deflate its numbers with a model that uses advanced metrics and other factors to calculate how teams compare or compared to the league-average club during a given season.
It’s basically how many points per 10 drives better or worse the team was to that average-club baseline. We can go one step further and rank teams by offensive TRACR (O-TRACR) and defensive TRACR (D-TRACR). Note that lower is better for defensive ratings in each sport.
Seattle’s vaunted 2025 defense rates comparably to the 2013 “Legion of Boom” defense. The 2013 unit ranks fourth with a minus-7.96 D-TRACR among all teams dating back to 1991, while the 2025 “Dark Side” defense sits seventh at -7.67.
So they may not rate out as elite at the player level, but the Seahawks have performed at an elite level as a whole with a plus-230 point differential (including the playoffs) and their three losses all season have been by a total of nine points.
That point differential ranks second in franchise history to date (+235 in 2013) and is the league’s best since the 2019 Baltimore Ravens finished at +233.
In comparison, the Patriots seem to check out. Nothing equally suspicious, as they rank sixth in both our team ratings and TRACR for the 2025 season.
But while New England enjoyed the second-easiest path to the Super Bowl in terms of its opponents’ average TRACR (regular season and playoffs combined) among the past 70 Super Bowl participants dating back to 1991, the Seahawks have faced the 11th-most difficult road.
Seattle’s exceptional TRACR points to the team having been dominant throughout much of a challenging schedule.
But how are they doing it? It’s probably where special teams, creating turnovers (the Seahawks forced the sixth most in the NFL) and coaching come into play. So it’s no wonder that Seattle’s Mike Macdonald is a 2025 NFL Coach of the Year finalist.
The coaching staff doesn’t put players in a position where they have to make plays beyond their ability. Macdonald and Co. puts them in the perfect spot to succeed, given their skill sets.
And so, the Seahawks have become a perfect sum of their parts heading into the Super Bowl.
Opta Analyst’s Kyle Cunningham-Rhoads and Matt Scott contributed. For more coverage, follow on social media at Instagram, Bluesky, Facebook and X.
The post A Perfect Sum: How the Seahawks Have Been Historically Good Without an Elite Roster appeared first on Opta Analyst.
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