The Seahawks' Best Season Against the Spread Came Right After One of Their Worst

In 2024 the Seahawks beat the spread 38.2% of the time: 6-10-1, one of the three worst seasons in their modern history. In 2025 they beat it 75.0% of the time: 15-5-0, the best single season in the twenty-four complete seasons we store, and it ended with a championship.

Same franchise, consecutive years. If a team's record against the spread told you something durable about that team, those two numbers could not sit next to each other.

And then 2026 started. Through five weeks the defending champions are 3-2 straight up and 1-2-2 against the spread (40.0%).

The long-run number

Since 2002, the window SpreadTrends stores as completed games, Seattle is 212-195-13 against the spread through 2025. That is 52.0% across 420 games.

Over the same 420 games they are 245-174-1 straight up, or 58.5%.

That gap is the whole story of a good franchise measured against a market number. The Seahawks win considerably more often than they lose. They beat the spread barely more often than they don't. The winning is real; it is also already in the price.

The seasons do not resemble the average

Here is the part that gets lost when you quote a career figure. Of those twenty-four complete seasons:

• 10 finished at or above 55% against the spread
• 8 finished at or below 45%
• only 6 landed in between

The average is 52.0%, and the average season looks nothing like it. A typical Seattle season is not "a bit over half". It is well clear of half in one direction or the other, and which direction is not something the previous season tells you.

The four worst and the four best, pulled out of the same twenty-four-year run.

Why: the record does not carry

This is not a Seattle quirk. Take every team-season from 2002 to 2025 and compare a team's rate against the spread with that same team's rate the following year: 736 pairs in all.

The correlation is −0.05.

That is zero, to the precision the sample supports. Knowing a team finished at 62% last year tells you nothing usable about where it finishes this year. The average across all those team-seasons is 49.7%, which is what a market doing its job looks like.

So the Seahawks going 38.2% and then 75.0% is not a puzzle needing a Seattle-specific explanation. It is what a coin-flip process looks like when you cut it into seventeen-game pieces and read each piece as if it meant something.

The champions' start, read the same way

2026 is the first season where the market got to price Seattle as the defending champion, and it did. The Seahawks have been favored in all five games, by an average of five points, including 8.5 at Washington and 7 at home against the Chargers.

The two pushes are the story of how hard those numbers were to clear: a three-point win over the Patriots, in a rematch of the title game, as a three-point favorite, and a seven-point win over the Chargers as a seven-point favorite. The two misses were outright losses: by two points in Washington, and at home to San Francisco.

It would be easy to read this as the market overcorrecting for the title, or as a champion's hangover. Five games is not enough to support either. By the evidence above, it is not enough to say anything about how the rest of 2026 goes against the spread, and the 75.0% that came before it says no more than the 38.2% that came before that.

The one window that stands out, and why we are not making much of it

From 2012 through 2015 the Seahawks went 45-27-2 against the spread, a 62.2% clip. Outside those four seasons, across 346 games, they are 167-168-11: 49.9%, a coin flip to one decimal place.

It is tempting to hand that window to a roster and call it an explanation. Two things argue against leaning on it:

1. The window was picked after looking. Choosing 2012-2015 because it is the peak and then reporting how unlikely the peak is gets the logic backwards. At 74 games the standard error is around 5.8 points, so 62.2% sits about two of them above half. That figure only means something when the window was chosen in advance, and this one was not.
2. It is really two seasons. 2012 finished at 72.2% and 2013 at 71.1%. 2014 was 57.9%. 2015 was 47.2%, below half, inside the supposed era.

The division split says less than it looks like it does

Seattle plays in the NFC West, and the division record is the split that gets quoted most. Here it is, 2002 through 2025:

One and a half points apart, over 420 games. Whatever the NFC West being a hard division does to Seattle's season, it does not show up here.

Split by rival, it looks far more dramatic, and this is exactly where the reading goes wrong:

Nearly fourteen points between the best and worst. It reads like a real tendency: Seattle handles San Francisco, Seattle struggles with the Rams.

At about fifty games per rival, the standard error is roughly seven points. The 49ers figure is about 1.3 of those above half; the Rams figure about 0.7 below. Both are ordinary. Twenty-four years of a divisional rivalry, two games a season and the longest sample this sport offers for a single matchup, is still not enough to separate a tendency from noise, and the gap between them is the kind of thing random assignment produces routinely.

That is worth sitting with, because the per-rival split is precisely the number a fan is most confident about.

One thing in the division data that is at least interesting

Splitting by venue and division produces the one pattern in this dataset we would want to look at again with more data:

Outside the division, Seattle's home/away gap is nearly seven points. Inside it, the gap is gone, slightly reversed in fact.

There is an appealing story here: divisional opponents visit often enough that whatever Seattle's home environment is worth against a stranger, it is not worth against a neighbour. We are flagging it, not claiming it. The difference is about 1.1 standard errors, which is to say it is the sort of pattern that appears and disappears as seasons are added.

What the data actually supports

• Seattle is a 58.5% straight-up team and a 52.0% against-the-spread team from 2002 through 2025. The distance between those is the market working.
• A single season tells you almost nothing about the next one: leaguewide, the year-over-year correlation is −0.05 across 736 team-seasons. That includes the champions' 1-2-2 start in 2026.
• The NFC West split carries no information (53.0% against 51.5%), and the per-rival spread that looks so decisive is within noise at fifty games a side.
• Seattle is 51.8% against the spread as a favorite and 52.4% as an underdog. No role tendency.

Every long-run figure above uses literal calendar seasons, 2002 through 2025, postseason games included. The 2026 figures are through Week 5 and are shown separately. Percentages count a push or tie as half, the same rule the site uses everywhere.