Why the Seahawks Will Win Superbowl XLIX
They would be back-to-back world champions. Winning one Super Bowl is hard enough. Even when you have a franchise QB, top-notch offense and aggressive defense, you can never guarantee success in the NFL, because as any good fan knows: anyone can win on any given Sunday. To dominate one of the most volatile leagues two years in a row is a feat so daunting that it’s only happened eight times in the history of the league. And yet, the Seattle Seahawks are on the brink of victory; the only thing between the rainy city and its second straight Lombardi is the New England Patriots.
That’s not to say that nobody saw this coming. Seattle sat at number one in the power rankings for most of the season, and they’ve been dominating their opponents with 9 of their 14 wins decided by 10+ points. The Legion of Boom, the most shutdown secondary in the NFL, does have one “weakness”: one out of the four starting DBs and CBs hasn’t made the Pro Bowl yet. Unfortunately for the Pats, that man is Byron Maxwell, the player who picked off Aaron Rodgers for only the fifth time this season in the NFC Conference game to help finish off Seattle’s comeback against Green Bay. The other three members of the LOB, Earl Thomas, Kam Chancellor and Richard Sherman, have helped create the best defense in the NFL; and lock down the pass game for their opponents. Fun factoid: the #1 defense in the league is 8-1 in the Super Bowl since 1990, and the one loss was Pittsburgh’s #1 defense’s loss to the #2 defense: Green Bay. The total yards per game is more than 30 fewer than the second place team—Detroit—and the gap between first and second is the same as the gap between second and ninth. Given the fact that New England is a modest 13th in total defensive yards, history isn’t exactly in New England’s favor on the defensive side of the ball.
That’s not to say that this is another Trent Dilfer-esque story of a mighty defense carrying a hapless QB to a ring. The offense is powered by the dual-threat read-option ground game duo of the Skittles-fueled, media-hating RB Marshawn Lynch and the scramble-happy, tuck-and-run QB Russell Wilson. To say that Lynch is a tank would be an understatement. The highlight of his career is probably the legendary “beast quake” of 2011 where he burst through every single man of the New Orleans Saints on his way to a 67-yard touchdown run. This run caused the Seahawks to get so fired up that they caused an earthquake with a magnitude of 2. However, just this season, Lynch topped that run with a 79-yard single-cut run where he tore down the sidelines, threw one of the best CBs out of bounds with one hand while still running, and finished in the end zone with his classic “Hold Mah ****!” gesture and backwards leap.
On paper, Seattle is stacked. No other way to put it. Critics will point to their 17 point deficit against Green Bay as a weakness, but think about it this way: Seattle played their worst game of the season against a team that already beat New England in Week 13 and still won. This may be the last year that Seattle can afford to keep their team together, but they’re certainly the favorites as they march on to make history.