Seahawks illustrate ‘stacking wins’ with helmets of defeated foes
The Seattle Seahawks officially unveiled something they had kept under wraps from the prying eyes of the public this year Tuesday night — the pole featuring helmets stacked from bottom to top in order of every team they defeated this season.
“Stacking wins,” read a post on the team’s account on X, showing the stack of helmets, with the Patriots spiked through the top of the spear.
The pole is located in the team room where the Seahawks hold news conferences during the season. When that room is used for news conferences the pole is usually covered.
It was briefly unearthed in the background of a video the team posted earlier this season that at least one eagle-eyed watcher spotted and a screen shot quickly made the rounds on social media.
With the job for the season completed, the Seahawks presented it for the world to see on Tuesday in a post that had more than one million views by the time they were parading down Fourth Street in Seattle on Wednesday.
The helmet pole is representation to the players of one of coach Mike Macdonald’s core philosophies of “Stacking wins.”
That means not just stacking wins on the field, but stacking victories in days practices and in the offseason and all of the work it takes to get to days like Sunday, when the Seahawks captured their second Super Bowl title.
The team illustrates the “stacking wins” philosophy on the walls of its practice facility in Renton. Over the past year, the team completed a projected placing photos of every win in the team’s 50-year history.
On another wall the team added a photo under a “stacking wins” banner of every win for the completed season.
Macdonald earlier this year said it was a concept he borrowed from his former boss, John Harbaugh. Macdonald began his NFL coaching career as an assistant under Harbaugh with the Ravens from 2014-23 (interrupted by one year at Michigan in 2021) before coming to Seattle.
“Harbs had a thing in terms of stacking, which was when he was talking about like compound interests and things like that we did at Baltimore,” Macdonald said. “So, that got me thinking about, ‘OK, well, how does that apply to how we want to operate from day to day?’”
After Sunday’s win over the Patriots, Macdonald made further reference to the important of stacking wins.
“When you talk about stacking and stacking wins, which is one of our core philosophies, you have to believe and have faith in the power of doing that over the course of time,” Macdonald said “So you can take really any element of our team and you can kinda go back to that philosophy..”
The photo of the helmet pole surely won’t go unnoticed by the opponents on the schedule in 2026.
But the Lombardi Trophy the team held up after Sunday’s win is the biggest target a team can have.