Seahawks 2025 Season in Review

Seattle's defense bled minus 124.5 expected points added on the season — second-stingiest unit in football, and the engine of this entire story. Here's how a top-two defense carried this team, how Sam Darnold quietly authored a top-five efficiency season, and the one ground-game number that says this offense had to win a very specific way. Fourteen and three. NFC West champs, number one seed, and they didn't just win the conference — they won the Super Bowl, beating New England twenty-nine to thirteen. The Seahawks smashed.

Let's set the table. Seattle finished plus 32.7 in offensive expected points added, a thirteenth-ranked, slightly-above-average offense. The defense was the headliner at minus 124.5 expected points added allowed — second in football. Twenty-seven takeaways ranked eighth, forty-seven sacks ranked eighth, and a forty-three percent third-down conversion rate ranked seventh. Steady floor, not boom-or-bust: outside of three close losses — the early stumble to San Francisco, the thirty-eight to thirty-five shootout against Tampa, and a two-point game at the Rams in Week Eleven — they were never out of a game. They closed the regular season on an eight-game winning streak, then steamrolled the playoffs by a combined one hundred and one to forty-six.

Now let's talk about the passing offense — the side of the ball that actually drove the points. Sam Darnold produced plus 56.6 expected points added on five hundred and ten dropbacks, plus 0.11 per attempt, top-ten in the league. His adjusted net yards per attempt of 7.4 ranked fourth among qualified starters, and his completion percentage came in four point three percent above expectation — also top-five, meaning he was hitting throws the tracking data flagged as harder than average. Jaxon Smith-Njigba was the engine: one hundred and nineteen catches, one thousand seven hundred and ninety-three yards, ten touchdowns, thirty-seven percent target share. The defining snap came in Week Twelve at Tennessee — third and six, tie game, second quarter — Darnold ripped a deep ball down the right sideline to Smith-Njigba for a sixty-three yard touchdown. Single most valuable offensive play of their season at plus 6.4 expected points added. Pass protection held up too, a five point two percent sack rate in the seventy-fifth percentile leaguewide. The passing game smashed.

Now let's dig into the rushing offense, because this is where the story gets uglier. Seattle ran five hundred and eight times for two thousand and ninety-eight yards — four point one a carry, one hundred and twenty-three a game, both middle-of-the-pack. The problem is efficiency. Rushing expected points added came in at minus 36.8, twenty-ninth in the league, thirteenth percentile. They ran a lot, they got yards, and on a per-play basis the run game was actively hurting them at minus 0.07 per carry. Kenneth Walker carried two hundred and twenty-one times for one thousand twenty-seven yards and five scores, while Zach Charbonnet took the goal-line work with twelve rushing touchdowns — seventh in the entire league. So the run game's value wasn't between the twenties. It was inside the five. Seattle won fourteen games despite the ground game, not because of it.

Next up, the pass defense — and this is where Seattle truly separated. Two hundred and thirteen passing yards a game, just twenty passing touchdowns all year, passing expected points added allowed of minus 64.8, eighty-first percentile leaguewide. The rush got home forty-seven times, delivered one hundred and ten quarterback hits, and held opponents to a thirty-two percent third-down conversion rate — a top-of-the-league stop rate. And they took the ball away in clusters: twenty-seven takeaways, eighteen interceptions. The signature snap came in Week Thirteen against Minnesota — fourth and one at Seattle's own four-yard line, Vikings driving for a go-ahead score, and Ernest Jones jumped a short route and took it eighty-five yards the other way for a pick-six. Worth minus 10.7 expected points to Minnesota on one snap. That was this defense — not just stout, but capable of ending drives by sprinting the other direction. The secondary smashed.

And the run defense was somehow even more dominant. Just ninety-two rushing yards a game, only nine rushing touchdowns all season, rushing expected points added allowed of minus 59.7 — a one hundredth percentile number, the best run defense in the league by this measure. Per carry, opponents averaged a brutal minus 0.15 expected points, meaning every handoff against Seattle was, on average, a losing play. The front seven didn't just plug gaps — they created chaos. When your run defense is generating points instead of just preventing them, you're playing a different game than everyone else.