The Seahawks' Next (and Harder) Task: Avoid Being a One-Off
For Seattle, winning the Super Bowl may have been the easy part, compared with the complications that lie ahead.
No sooner does the confetti settle on the Super Bowl field to conclude one season than we begin looking ahead to the next one. It’s the nature of sports — and especially the NFL, where coach hirings have already been happening for a month, and the scouting combine and free-agency are already only a few weeks away.
So we’ll grant the 2025-26 champion Seattle Seahawks a few days to celebrate what was an impressively dominant Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots on Sunday night. (The parade down 4th Avenue in downtown Seattle is set for Wednesday.) But soon enough, they’ll have to pivot toward their title defense — and it might be one of the most complex and unusual of those that we’ve seen in a while.
For one immediate thing, the team is reportedly facing a sale, with ESPN reporting last month that the estate of late owner Paul Allen (managed by his sister, Jody) will put the team up for new ownership in the wake of Super Bowl LX.1 As Seth Wickersham and Brady Henderson noted in their story, it would mark the first time in the Super Bowl era that the majority share of a team who played in the Big Game went on the market right afterward. (A 50 percent stake in the New York Giants was sold after they won Super Bowl XXV in 1991.)
Ownership changes tend to lack the immediate impact of other staff shakeups, such as at head coach or general manager. And in both of those spots, the Seahawks have names — in Mike Macdonald and John Schneider — who rank among the league’s best.
However, my previous research into what I called CHAOS (Cumulative High-Activity Organizational Strife) Score did find a real detrimental effect to a team’s performance amidst ownership changes, even after controlling for the fact that bad teams tend to shake things up more frequently than good ones. Uncertainty around leadership is never good for business, and we haven’t seen a champ face this kind of transition at the top in the modern era.
Then there are the inevitable personnel moves that will reshape what this roster and coaching staff look like next season.
After QB-whispering Sam Darnold into a Super Bowl-winning performance — forget what the passer ratings say, Darnold (while far from perfect) hugely outplayed Drake Maye, his New England counterpart who’d been the NFL’s top quarterback during the regular season, on Super Sunday2 — offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak is off to Las Vegas to become head coach of the Raiders next season. And beyond replacing him, the team has a number of question marks to find answers for over the offseason.
Darnold is set to become a lot more expensive, unless the Seahawks take steps to save cap room by converting his salary to signing-bonus money in the next few days. As they look ahead to a new league year, they also need to exercise options (or sign extensions) for stud WR Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Super Bowl hero CB Devon Witherspoon, to go with the potential departures of brand-name veteran WR Cooper Kupp, CB Riq Woolen, explosive WR/returner Rashid Shaheed, and another heroic Super Bowl defender, Uchenna Nwosu — plus RB Kenneth Walker III, who’ll hit free agency after becoming the first player at his position to win Super Bowl MVP since 1998.
As if all of that wasn’t enough — and to be clear, a lot of the cap business is par for the course when it comes to a current-day NFL team following a championship run — the very DNA of these Seahawks sets them up to regress more next year than the typical champion.
That’s because, just like in its previous championship iteration, Seattle relied on one of the best defenses of any Super Bowl winner to help power its run to the title. In terms of regular-season Simple Rating System (SRS) scores, the Seahawks had the league’s No. 2-ranked defense (at +6.7), trailing only the fearsome Houston Texans among 2025 teams and ranking 10th-best among all Super Bowl winners since 1970:
That was amplified even further on Sunday, when they humiliated the Patriots en route to one of the best 15 or 20 defensive showings in Super Bowl history, relative to what the opponent was expected to produce based on their regular-season stats. (And it would have been even worse for New England without some garbage-time points.)
Unfortunately for Seattle, though, great defensive teams tend to struggle to maintain that level of play more than their offensive counterparts going forward. If we just plot out year-over-year changes in SRS on both sides of the ball, the correlation for offense is stronger than it is for defense — to the point that we’d expect a team with a +6.7 offense to hang onto about six-tenths more points per game the following season than a team with a +6.7 defense (like Seattle had).
Defense is generally more compressed anyway, as we can see in that chart, making outliers less predictable — and regression a better bet. That’s why the best defensive Super Bowl teams tended to almost universally see big declines in their SRS on that side of the ball the next year, from the 2002 Bucs to the ‘85 Bears, the 1973 Dolphins, 2008 Steelers and 2000 Ravens. (Even the 2013 Seahawks themselves fell a bit, from +8.9 to +7.1, despite returning to the Super Bowl in 2014.)
The good news for Seattle is that they were plenty good on offense this season as well, also ranking second leaguewide with a +6.2 offensive SRS. In that regard, they were actually one of the best two-way champs since the merger, becoming only the fourth team in that club to rate as +6.0 or better on both sides of the ball:
That could help the Seahawks weather any defensive backsliding more than other strong defensive champs, who seldom had as good an offense to fall back on when regression hit.
Still, continued offensive success is going to rely on Darnold producing at or near career-highs for a third consecutive season — no ironclad assumption for a guy with one of the most confusing career paths of any QB in recent memory. In the pantheon of Super Bowl-winning QBs, Darnold may not be a Trent Dilfer, but he’s not too different from a younger Brad Johnson, for whatever that’s worth.
And perhaps the most fascinating part of Seattle’s path forward following their title is just what an in-flux moment this is for the NFL overall.
Yes, the Seahawks are favorites to win again in the opening 2027 NFL title odds at Polymarket. But yesterday’s dynasty, the Kansas City Chiefs, are still in the mix below Seattle, as are the Seahawks’ best rival (the Rams), the team they just vanquished (the Patriots), the champs from two years ago (the Eagles) and a bunch of AFC contenders — Buffalo, Baltimore, Denver, etc. — who all might argue that, with a few extra breaks, they could have just as easily gone to the Super Bowl as New England did (and probably given the Seahawks a better game, if we’re being honest).
That’s the challenge facing the Seahawks now. They didn’t stumble into this year’s title, and they weren’t merely lucky — they were legitimately great, and deserved every bit of their championship. But the real test begins when you have to start navigating everything that comes next. And for Seattle, that follow-up phase may be even harder than what most champs typically face.
Filed under: NFL
After that report, a spokesperson for Allen’s estate said that “the team is not for sale” and that they wouldn’t comment on rumors to the contrary.
Darnold had 3.7 EPA above replacement (-2.1 versus average) in the game, against a dreadful -12.5 EPA above replacement (-20.1 versus average) for Maye.