The Seattle Seahawks, as all 12s know, won the Super Bowl last season, but even though the team won its last 10 games, some tough lessons were learned along the way. Perhaps the hardest one was losing to the Los Angeles Rams in Week 11, the team's final loss of the year.
By that point, rookie defensive back Nick Emmanwori was already an integral part of the defense, but the team was winning so much, and Emmanwori didn't have enough experience to have had to go through NFL turmoil, that he wasn't suddenly ready for a reality check.
During a recent talk on the Seattle Seahawks' Making a Champion podcast, Emmanwori confessed that he didn't think the team would suffer any dips, and that Seattle was the alpha of the NFC West. The Rams, meanwhile, said, "Not so fast."
Seattle Seahawks star Nick Emmanwori confesses to learning a hard lesson against the Los Angeles Rams
Emmanwori said, "The loss to the Rams was a turning point for the season in a couple of different ways. I think it cemented the team as this really close-knit unit. That defense went on a run...We were super confident, and that was the first game of the Rams series. That game kind of caught me by surprise because it was like, ‘All right, this is real football.’ We didn’t play our best in that game, but we barely lost. As a team, we took a step back and said, ‘Listen, we know what we have to do from here on out. We know what our goal is.’"
The six key words there are, of course, "All right, this is real football." In other words, everything that Nick Emmanwori had learned in his previous football life (in youth, high school, and college) wasn't quite preparing him for what life would be like as a professional.
One might wonder, and maybe even Emmanwori does, what would have happened if Seattle had won the first matchup against Los Angeles. Instead of suffering a difficult loss, the team might have thought they were good enough to win even when not at their best.
The loss definitely helped the team be mentally prepared for the next time they played the Rams, and then again in the NFC Championship game victory. Grinding out wins is needed more often than not in the NFL, and understanding how to do that, even if the lesson was learned during a loss, is invaluable.
2026 will be a different kind of season for the Seattle Seahawks, of course. For the first time since the 2014 season, they will be the hunted, and they will be the ones hoping to teach the difficult lessons to others. Hopefully, the other team doesn't learn easily, and Nick Emmanwori's team can repeat as Super Bowl champions.
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