Data / entry 01 / December 28, 2025 / 5 min read

I told Marcus the Seahawks were for real

Every Sam Darnold game through Seattle's Week 17 win over Carolina, plus a simple model that says the Seahawks are heating up at exactly the right time.

That's basically how this started. I didn't have a clean answer for Marcus that night, because "he just feels different this year" isn't an argument, it's a vibe. So I went and pulled every game Darnold has played this season, from the Week 1 loss to San Francisco through the Week 17 win over Carolina, and looked at what actually happened instead of what his name has usually meant. Sixteen games. Real box scores. No cherry-picking.

Start with the part that could kill the argument

Week 11, at the Rams, Seattle's biggest division rival. Darnold completed 29 of 44, threw zero touchdowns, and turned it over four times. A 45.5 rating. It was, by a wide margin, his worst game of the year, and it happened on the road against the team he most needed to beat. If you wanted a highlight reel of "here's the old Darnold," that's the game you'd use.

But here's the kicker:

He didn't need one big bounce-back game to answer it. He needed five ordinary ones. Over his next five starts he didn't throw a single losing performance, closed with a road shutout win over the 49ers, and along the way put up a 118 rating against Tennessee and torched Atlanta for three touchdowns on 20 throws. Twenty-five touchdowns, fourteen interceptions, and the gap between those two lines only widens as the season goes on.

The reason they can survive a bad Darnold week

Everybody wants to make this a quarterback story, because quarterback stories are easy to argue about at a wing spot. The real reason that Rams meltdown didn't cost Seattle its season is the defense. They held an opponent to single digits twice. They shut Minnesota out completely, 26 to nothing. Across these sixteen games they allowed more than 24 points exactly twice, and one of those was an overtime shootout against the Rams that they still won.

The model

It's simpler than it sounds. For every game starting with week 4, I took the point differential from that game and the three before it, and averaged them. A rolling 4-game point margin. It smooths out any single blowout or bad week and shows the direction the team is actually trending, which matters a lot more in December than any one box score. The dip around week 7 is the Rams game working its way through the average. Everything after it is Seattle pulling the number back into double digits and holding it there.

So, Marcus

One bad half of one bad game against a division rival is not the same thing as a quarterback you can't trust in January, especially when the defense around him has been shutting people down all year and the point margin is trending up, not down, heading into the stretch run. Seattle's sitting at 13-3 with the top of the conference in reach. I'm not saying it's a lock. I'm saying the data agrees with me more than it agrees with him.