Seattle Seahawks 2026 Season Preview — The Champion Nobody Made the Favorite | Muffed

This is the Seattle Seahawks 2026 season preview, and it starts with a strange sentence: the defending Super Bowl champions are not the Super Bowl favorite. Seattle went 14-and-3, took the number one seed, and beat New England 29-13 in Super Bowl 60 — their second Lombardi, their first in over a decade. And when the books posted 2026 futures, the favorite was the Los Angeles Rams — the division rival Seattle beat 31-27 in the NFC Championship game. The champs are getting the skeptic's price, and the skeptics have specific reasons. Some of them are even good ones.

Start with what was real, because most of the 14 wins were. The defense finished second in the league in expected points allowed per play, and it did it the sustainable way: a 34 percent pressure rate, fourth-highest in football, while blitzing at a bottom-seven rate. Pressure without paying for it — that's the profile our charting data says actually wins, because a pressured dropback swings about seven-tenths of a point of expected value, and nothing else in football comes close. The unit took the ball away 27 times, fourth-most in the league, off 18 interceptions. The offense was more good than great — thirteenth in expected points per play, eighth in pass efficiency — but it finished third in scoring, and it had the league's leading receiver inside it: Jaxon Smith-Njigba, 119 catches, 1,793 yards, ten touchdowns. Nobody in the NFL gained more receiving yards. Sam Darnold's supporting numbers were real too: fourth in adjusted net yards per attempt, fourth in completion percentage over expected, and sacked on just five percent of dropbacks — a bottom-nine rate, on a line that mostly held.

Now the luck ledger, and it's shorter than the doubters want it to be. Seattle beat its point-differential expectation by about one win — under the threshold where history starts levying a tax. Turnover margin was exactly zero, dead neutral. The one real flag: 6-and-3 in one-score games. Across the last decade, teams that won 65 percent or more of their close games — with at least six of them — lost about three wins the following season, and only about one in nine improved. That's not a prophecy; it's a base rate. But it's the honest reason a 14-win roster prices like an 11-win one.

The identity — charting data via nflverse. On offense, this was the third-most run-committed team in football by pass rate over expected, six percent under expectation, living in heavy personnel. And here's the thing our ten-year data says matters most: play-calling identity is the single stickiest trait a team carries year to year — when the caller stays. Seattle's didn't. Klint Kubiak took the Raiders head coaching job, and the new coordinator, Brian Fleury, arrives from San Francisco saying his goal is to maintain the system. Third offensive coordinator in three years. On defense, the opposite story: Mike Macdonald built this scheme and Aden Durde called it — the two-high-shell, fourth-most-pressure unit that carried the title run — and both are still in the building after Durde fielded head-coach interviews in January and stayed. The reliable half of the champion kept its architects.

What changed is mostly the supporting cast. Kenneth Walker, the Super Bowl MVP, left in free agency — Kansas City made him the highest-paid running back signing in league history. Zach Charbonnet, who led the team with 12 rushing touchdowns, tore his ACL in the divisional round; his recovery timeline points to midseason at the earliest. So Seattle spent the last pick of round one on Notre Dame running back Jadarian Price, and he walks into the clearest lane any rookie back has. The secondary paid the champion's tax: Riq Woolen to Philadelphia, Coby Bryant to Chicago, Boye Mafe to Cincinnati — and the draft answered with defensive backs on four of its eight picks. The receiver room held: Smith-Njigba signed the richest receiver extension in NFL history in March, Rashid Shaheed re-signed for three years, and Cooper Kupp is back for another year. One roster note for honesty's sake: Kupp's 2025 was 47 catches for 593 yards — a supporting player now, not a star. And there's a wrinkle worth watching in the quarterback room behind Darnold: the new coordinator is expected to build situational packages for Jalen Milroe, the 2025 third-rounder whose legs are the one thing this offense doesn't otherwise have. That's a designed-runs subplot with real red-zone implications, and it costs Darnold and the backs a few touches if it materializes.

One more thing the schedule handed this team: the season opens with New England at Lumen Field — a Super Bowl rematch, played on a Wednesday night, the kind of scheduling novelty only champions get — and both Rams games land in the final three weeks of the season. If the NFC West comes down to the wire, and every model we have says it should, the division will be settled face to face in late December and week eighteen. Circle those.

So the 2026 question: can Darnold do it twice? The repeatable core says yes — his clean-pocket efficiency ranked seventh, and his production in stable, repeatable situations ranked fifth among all starters. That's the part of a quarterback season that carries. The counterweight is equally specific: 14 interceptions — only two quarterbacks threw more — and the escape valve of last year's offense, the Walker-Charbonnet run game, is now a rookie and a rehab. And for all the rushing volume — eleventh in rush yards per game — the ground game was never actually efficient: 29th in rush EPA per attempt. The identity was commitment, not dominance. If the new coordinator really does maintain the run-first identity, a first-year back has to carry it behind a line that was good, not dominant — and carry it well enough that Darnold never has to become the version of himself that threw those 14 picks. And the defense, for all its continuity, fights the strongest gravity in football: defense is the least sticky unit year over year, roughly half as predictable as offense. Champions with this exact profile — great defense, close-game glow — have historically given back wins even when nothing visibly broke.

Fantasy names to know — scored half-P-P-R. Smith-Njigba is priced as a top-five pick and earned it: most receiving yards in football, 163 targets, and the league's highest-paid receiver contract as a statement of intent. Jadarian Price is the rookie-back lottery ticket with the cleanest path: Walker gone, Charbonnet out till roughly midseason, and the depth chart behind him thin. Charbonnet himself is a stash with a return date. Kupp and Shaheed are the value tier — 47-593 and a deadline-year 59-687 respectively — role players in a run-leaning offense with one alpha. And Darnold, fourth in adjusted net yards per attempt, is going as the 22nd quarterback off boards — the market is pricing the regression, not the resume.

The verdict. The win total is ten and a half, and the Super Bowl price says second-best in their own division. The one-score tax is real — history says close-game champions give back about three wins — and losing the play-caller is the kind of change our data respects. But the two-high pressure machine kept its architects, the reigning offensive player of the year is entering year four, and the quarterback's repeatable core graded top-five. The honest range is a couple of wins below 14 and comfortably above the market's shrug. Seattle doesn't need to defend the title to beat this number. They need to be what the underlying numbers already say they were.

Follow the Seattle Seahawks feed for the weekly show — every game, every number, all season. This was the Muffed 2026 Seahawks preview. Every number verified.