Did Seahawks’ Super Bowl loss to Patriots derail dynasty? Maybe not

Another Seahawks-Patriots Super Bowl will inevitably reignite one of the greatest debates in Seattle sports history.

No, we don’t mean whether the Seahawks should have just handed the ball to Marshawn Lynch from the 1-yard line.

That argument is well-worn at this point, with the, “Yes, of course they should have just given the ball to Marshawn and it’s not even worth talking about side and the, “No, maybe it’s more nuanced than that, because it was second down and the Seahawks only had one time out remaining and the Patriots were in a goal-line defense and the Seahawks had struggled at times in short-yardage situations that year” side unlikely to change each other’s minds.

What we’re talking about is the discussion of that game invariably leads to more conventional wisdom: That if the Seahawks had won that Super Bowl on Feb. 1, 2015, they would have just kept winning Super Bowls.

As a few years passed and there were no more Super Bowls, let alone titles – the Seahawks lost in the divisional round in the 2015 and 2016 seasons and didn’t make the playoffs at all in 2017 – that became a storyline shadowing the team.

“The Dynasty That Never Was: Inside the Unraveling of the Seattle Seahawks,” read the headline on a story in Sports Illustrated in September 2018.

While the accompanying story cited a number of issues that plagued the Seahawks during the three years that followed the loss to the Patriots, the starting point was that fateful moment in Glendale, and how everyone responded.

A point of reported friction was Pete Carroll’s defense of the play call that led to Malcolm Butler’s goal-line interception with 20 seconds remaining to seal New England’s 28-24 win and Russell Wilson’s role in it.

Did Carroll really call a pass so that Wilson could be named the MVP? Never mind that the ballots had already been collected, voters tasked with picking a player for each team and the award going to the player on the winning side. The assumption was that if the Seahawks had won, the award would have gone to receiver Chris Matthews.

As the years went on, that sequence of events became viewed as an increasing demarcation point – a before and after for the Legion of Boom era.

“That one play changed the whole locker room,” defensive lineman Tony McDaniel was quoted as saying in the 2018 SI story. “When Pete would give a speech or try for a heart-to-heart, people just stopped responding. They didn’t know who to trust anymore.”

Or as defensive end Cliff Avril said in a podcast on the NFL Network in 2018: “Sometimes it’s tough, because two (championships) is better than one, obviously. You think about what could have happened. If we win that Super Bowl, I think we probably would have won another one within the two years that went by.”

What if it’s not that simple?

What if much of what happened the next few years might have happened anyway?

No team has ever won three straight Super Bowls, so the odds would have been against them regardless.

Getting to three straight Super Bowls is even statistically more difficult than winning two straight – it’s only been done four times.

True, the recent run by the Kansas City Chiefs – three Super Bowl titles and five appearances from 2020-25 – proves dynasties can happen, even in the salary-cap era when they’ve been rarer than the days of the ‘60s Packers, ‘70s Steelers and ‘80s 49ers, when it was far easier keeping teams together.

Dynasties remain exceedingly elusive.

How much the Super Bowl loss lingered and impacted the team can never be quantified with any specificity – everybody handles such disappointments differently.

At the time, some players portrayed it as a motivating factor.

“I told a lot of people, it feels like this offseason, everybody worked their hardest,” safety Kam Chancellor said May 26, 2015. “I’ve seen guys out here busting their tails, the whole offseason going fast-tempo. Guys are lifting like crazy. It’s just like the mindset is just sharpened. It just sharpened even more. We’re more focused, more driven. We’re just hungry for the first game of the year.”

And in September that year, cornerback Richard Sherman said he didn’t think the loss was hovering over the team.

“Just like when you win a Super Bowl, you get rid of the feeling,” he said. “You celebrate it for a couple days, you enjoy the feeling, then you get ready for next year, because it’s not going to win you any games. And when you lose a Super Bowl, you deal with it for a few days and you get over it, because it’s not going to win you or lose you any games the next year. So you have to start off every year fresh. I think that’s what our guys are doing.”

Maybe the passage of time provided a different perspective.

Or maybe because the dynasty didn’t happen, it was easier to blame that play call and result, instead of having to admit that Carolina (which went 15-1 in 2015 and beat the Seahawks at home in the divisional round and went on to the Super Bowl), or Atlanta (which had one of the top 10 scoring offenses in NFL history in 2016 and beat the Seahawks in the divisional round at home and went on to the Super Bowl) were better in those given seasons.

One could point to other factors as well, such as:

• The personnel began to change. The lineup the Seahawks started in the divisional playoff loss to Carolina in 2015 featured seven different starters from the team that won the Super Bowl, including three on an offensive line that was beginning to become a persistent issue (among those gone included center Max Unger, traded for tight end Jimmy Graham). By 2016, only two starters on the entire offense remained from the Super Bowl winners.

• The depth thinned out. One of the great strengths of the 2013 team was an overall 53-man roster regarded as among the best in NFL history. In 2013, they had an eight-man defensive-line rotation good enough that Michael Bennett was technically a backup, officially starting three games that season. Those eight players played from 46-57% of snaps in 2013, keeping everyone fresh. By 2015, much of that depth was gone and Bennett played 81% of snaps, Avril 79% with the likes of Jordan Hill and Demarcus Dobbs taking over for players such as 2013 defensive team captain Red Bryant and Chris Clemons.

• Money began to change things. The 2013-14 teams were built on rosters featuring several players on rookie contracts (the four-year rookie wage scale took effect in 2011), which allowed for the team to make some aggressive moves, such as signing Bennett and Avril as free agents in 2013.

Following the 2015 season, the Seahawks signed Wilson to a contract making him the second-highest paid player in the NFL and made Bobby Wagner the highest-paid middle linebacker in the NFL.

They also re-signed Marshawn Lynch to an extension that March, ending a long negotiation that began the previous summer when Lynch held out of camp for a week.

In July, Chancellor began a holdout that few around the league understood given that he had three years remaining on his contract, a holdout that came in the wake of signing Sherman and Earl Thomas to rich extensions the year before, making each the highest-paid players at their positions. Those moves meant the Seahawks had to scrimp elsewhere to fit those deals under the cap.

Chancellor held out through the first two games before returning without a new contract. The Seahawks lost each game, putting them in a hole they never got out of as Arizona went 13-3 that season to win the NFC West and Seattle finished 10-6.

“We could have made some decisions in there that would have been really, really hard, but we kept those guys together as long as we possibly could and then suffered in different areas,” general manager John Schneider recalled in an interview on the podcast Finding Mastery with Michael Gervais in 2025. That impacted the offensive line greatly.

• They began to get banged up. Thomas had shoulder surgery and missed all of camp and the preseason in 2015. Sherman had offseason elbow surgery.

Lynch was hurt in the third game of the season and played just eight games in 2015, missing the playoff opening win at Minnesota (when kicker Blair Walsh missed a chip shot at the end) and retiring after the season.

Thomas Rawls took over spectacularly for a while in 2015 but was also hurt, forcing the Seahawks to hastily re-sign Christine Michael, who was the leading rusher in the playoffs with 70 yards on 20 carries in two games. And Graham, the team’s star offseason addition, suffered a season-ending injury in the 11th game just when he appeared to be hitting his stride.

Despite all their apparent issues, the Seahawks still led the NFL in fewest points allowed in 2015, the fourth straight year they allowed the fewest points, an NFL record, and players celebrated heartily in the moment.

“It’s awesome,” Sherman said after the Seahawks clinched the scoring title with a 36-6 win at Arizona to close the regular season in which touchdowns were scored by the likes of Bryce Brown and Chase Coffman, proof of how quickly things were changing. “That’s the heart of a champion.

When the Seahawks won the Super Bowl in 2014, the Seahawks did so with a 53-man roster that was the youngest for a title-winning team in NFL history, just ahead of the 2010 Green Bay Packers, 2006 Indianapolis Colts and 1999 St. Louis Rams.

None of them won another Super Bowl either.