The Seattle Seahawks are just about destined to miss out on the postseason, and for the second year in a row it’ll likely come down to the rarely applied strength of victory tiebreaker.

With the Los Angeles Rams scraping past the Arizona Cardinals on Saturday, Seattle is on the verge of elimination and it could come as soon as Sunday. They would’ve been on the better side of the SOV tiebreaker situation had they beaten the Minnesota Vikings on Sunday. They didn’t, which is all that matters, and that might cost them their season.

I cannot think of a more appropriate encapsulation of recent Seahawks football, if not the Geno Smith Era in totality, than these past three games.

Week 15: Blowout loss to the Green Bay Packers

Week 16: Competitive but close loss to the Minnesota Vikings

Week 17: Unbelievably ugly but narrow win over the Chicago Bears

Two different types of losses to Super Bowl contenders and the barest of margins to get past a checked out Chicago Bears team that’s currently on a 10-game losing streak. Te Seahawks typically beat bad teams and don’t beat any serious playoff contenders, whether within their own division or outside of it.

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.

If we isolate to just the Geno Smith seasons, the numbers are grim. As things stand—they’ll be fluid given the possibility of beating the Rams in Week 18—Seattle’s strength of victory has been under .400 in all three of his years as the starter. Their four wins against teams with at least 10 victories are the P.J. Walker-led 11-6 Cleveland Browns in 2023, a genuinely excellent overtime win over the 12-5 Detroit Lions in 2023, Drew Lock’s career highlight against the collapsing 11-6 Philadelphia Eagles in 2023, and the 37-23 beatdown of the 10-7 Los Angeles Chargers in 2022. That’s it. The Browns, Chargers, and Eagles were very clearly not contenders and none of them won a playoff game. Detroit is Geno’s gold standard win surrounded by a stream of Ls that have ranged from blowout to “close but no cigar.”

You can rightly argue that the Seahawks were ahead of schedule given the expectations following the Russell Wilson trade. But I can just as easily counter that we’ve effectively seen the same sort of results with the Seahawks on either side of the trade. Exempting the disastrous 2021 campaign, they’ve been firmly entrenched in the NFL’s middle class of fringe playoff team/faux contender. My designation of the “Geno Smith Era” does not necessarily mean he’s been the main reason Seattle has struggled to beat top-tier teams; he’s had good games in defeat (see: Dallas Cowboys, 2023), horrid games in blowouts (see: multiple 49ers games), and unremarkable games where he neither elevated nor held the team back. We’ve seen the Seahawks defense capitulate repeatedly against elite opposition and the offensive line get destroyed, so it’s usually all-encompassing failure. However, if the organization decides to move on from Smith in 2025, whether justified or not, It’s hard not to think that the lack of signature wins will be one of the main factors.

I believe Mike Macdonald has generally done a good job in his rookie season as head coach and I am optimistic about his future. The end of Carroll’s tenure suggested stagnation and that nothing was going to improve unless he left. I’d also say, however, that citing Vegas over/under win totals as proof of exceeded expectations needs to come with the acknowledgement that the likes of the San Francisco 49ers, Miami Dolphins, New York Jets, Minnesota Vikings, and even the Denver Broncos were all expected to do either much worse or much better than anticipated. If I were to tell you at the start of the season that the 49ers, Dolphins, and Jets would be bad/injured teams and that the Vikings would be pushing for the No. 1 seed, you’d probably readjust your expectations. With the way the schedule has turned out, I do not think it was unreasonable to believe the playoffs were possible. This is as weak as the NFC West has been in years and Seattle unfortunately fumbled fate right out of its hands.

Beating a 13-2 team like the Vikings is obviously much easier said than done, but the main point is that this recent stretch of Seahawks football has been largely defined by middling results. The quarterback has changed, as has the bulk of the roster and coaching staff, and the results have not changed a whole lot in terms of who they beat, who they lose to, and how they win and lose.

The hope is that Macdonald is coaching the next great Seahawks team, but we’re also basing that on the assumption of linear growth akin to 2010-2013, which is neither guaranteed nor always the norm. If anything, John Schneider’s 2025 offseason decisions (especially at quarterback) will tell us how he feels about the state of his own roster and whether the Seahawks are going to keep looking at competing in one-year increments, or if they may have to risk taking a major step back in order to be better in 2026, 2027, and beyond.

We’ll know when the Seahawks are on the cusp of breaking through to the upper floors again when they show they can win tough games against the best, including within the NFC West. Note that I didn’t say “consistently beat good teams” in the headline, because only the absolute elite like the Kansas City Chiefs, Baltimore Ravens, and Buffalo Bills can do that on an annual basis. The Seahawks of the past five seasons have scarcely shown that, and the lack of playoff success and appearances accurately reflects who they’ve been and what they are right now.

(All stats via Stathead)