The NFL is a short-memory league. It's never about what you did last week as much as it is about what you can do next Sunday, and teams can lose momentum as quickly as they looked like a Super Bowl contender.
That might be the situation in the NFC West right now. On the one hand, the Seattle Seahawks got off to a slow start to the season but took down the undefeated Kansas City Chiefs. On the other hand, the formerly undefeated San Francisco 49ers are banged up and just suffered their first loss of the season.
Kyle Shanahan's team has always seemed on the verge of implosion because, well, that's what usually happens to them. That's why veterans Fred Warner and George Kittle put the team on notice after their loss to the Atlanta Falcons.
The Seattle Seahawks still have a chance to win the division
“But at the end of the day, you can’t beat yourself," Warner said. "Unfortunately, we’re not going undefeated this year. That’s how I look at it. I said all along, it’s not just about winning. We have to continue to get better as a team. I feel like today we didn’t get better. We took a step back.”
Kittle was a little easier on himself and his teammates. That said, he also sounded like a player who knows his team might not be as good as the record shows, and that will only be more exposed with all the injuries:
"Losing’s never great but when you do lose I think, especially in this organization, like it makes everyone look at yourself in the mirror and all I think it’s going to do is spark a bigger fire underneath us,” Kittle said.
The Seahawks got off to a disappointing start to the season. Objectively, there was no reason or excuse not to be undefeated at this point in the season. In fact, they had a legitimate chance to win every game they've lost during this stretch, even with their miscues.
Still, while most claim that you're only as good as your record shows, sometimes records can be misleading. No one can say with a straight face that the Seahawks are a 4-3 team and the 49ers are a 6-1 team.
The Seahawks still have multiple opportunities to close the gap. Injuries will keep catching up to the 49ers, and Mike Macdonald's team still has one game against them, another against the Arizona Cardinals, and two late-season encounters with the Los Angeles Rams, who might be way out of the playoff picture by the time these teams meet.
Of course, this works both ways. The Seahawks won't just win every game until the end of the season only because they're the defending Super Bowl champions. If anything, they've learned it the hard way over the first seven weeks of the season.
However, it would be better to lose and go through these growing pains early in the season rather than late in the campaign. Peaking at the right time is what separates the great teams from the good ones.
The 49ers sound like a team that knows what's coming. They know they have no margin for error with a team like Seattle in the division breathing on their necks. And sometimes, that's precisely what can make a team implode.
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