Seahawks: Just how good is the Carolina team they’ll play on Sunday?

The Seattle Seahawks head to Charlotte to take on the Carolina Panthers in the NFL Playoffs on Sunday. Just how good is the NFC’s No. 1 seed?

The Seattle Seahawks are on the road against the Carolina Panthers this week. There’s a spot in the NFC Championship game on the line, and Carolina is favored by three points. The question remains though: just how good are the Panthers?

The Panthers were 15-1 this season. They easily had the best record in the NFL. Their one hiccup was a 20-13 loss against the Falcons. With the division and first-round bye wrapped up already, it is reasonable to suggest it was just a one-time mental letdown.

Of course, that record is clearly inflated from playing in the NFC South, which is one of the worst divisions in football this year. Throw in that Carolina’s schedule also included eight games vs. the AFC South and NFC East, and you have the makings of a very easy schedule.

The advanced metric agree on this point. Football Outsiders says Carolina played the easiest schedule in the NFL. Team Rankings says their schedule was 29th, so only three played easier schedules.

Panthers fans would argue otherwise. Carolina beat six teams with a record of .500 or better. That is the 2nd most of any team in the NFL, behind only New England’s seven.

The difficulty here is that some of the teams that Carolina beat had records inflated by playing in awful divisions. The win totals of Washington, Atlanta Indianapolis and Houston were clearly inflated by being in terrible divisions.

The other two teams Carolina beat that had winning records were Seattle and Green Bay. They beat Seattle early in the season before the Seahawks woke up and started playing well. They beat the Packers in the middle of a three-game losing streak caused by a hash of injuries.

So Carolina did beat two good teams, but both wins came at points where their opponent was most vulnerable.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with beating bad teams. Carolina doesn’t make their own schedule. They can only play the against the team that shows up on the other sideline.

This is where advanced metrics come in. They’re able to adjust for the schedule differences and separate teams based on how the dominate opponents.

These advantaged metrics aren’t as nice to the Panthers as the NFL standings page. They may have the NFL’s best record, but they aren’t the NFL’s best team according to the advanced metrics. They are somewhat close though.

Football Outsiders has Carolina as the 4th-best team in the NFL, behind Seattle, Cincinnati and Arizona by DVOA. In weighted DVOA, which adjusts puts a larger emphasis on recent performance, they were third.

In my own NFL Power Index, Carolina finished sixth. That was also the highest they’d been all season. Despite all their wins, Carolina spent most of the season as a borderline top-10 team, but then made a steady push up the rankings in the season’s final weeks.

Despite being ranked high, there is still a huge quantitative gap between the Panthers and the league’s elite teams in both ranking systems. 21% is a massive gap in weighted DVOA. The same goes with the difference of 32 in the NFL Power Index.

So where does that leave us in terms of the original question? Unfortunately, it leaves us right where we started.

Carolina is a very good football team that feasted on the extremely easy schedule to appear to be an elite team at times.