It hasn't been very easy to figure out this edition of the Seattle Seahawks. I mean, if the coaches can't do it, how are the 12s supposed to make heads or tails of this team? As it turns out, there was a lot of reason to expect Seattle would win in Dallas.
I meant to write this article the day before the Seahawks-Cowboys game. As happens all too often, real life got in the way. It doesn't just happen to you, ya know. Life intervenes to internationally famous writers, too (one guy in Iceland commented on one of my articles back in 2018). Happily, I can still write most of what I had planned, anyway. I'm not about to let the fact the Hawks lost change my prediction of a Seattle win in Dallas.
Yeah, I get it. You're used to people backtracking and saying they never said any such thing. You've probably been following the political scene too long. Take a breather, and come back to the Hawks. Here at 12thManRising, we own up to our silliness. Heck, I rarely pass up a chance to mention how great I thought Eddie Lacy was going to be. For now, I'll build my case to prove that the Seahawks should have defeated the Cowboys. Or at least, show that it wasn't just a fan's pie-in-the-sky opinion That's right, 12s; we're about to get mathy. Again.
The Seattle Seahawks had all the math on their side. Well, a lot of it
Just to reiterate, I predicted on our weekly podcast that the Seahawks would beat the Cowboys. I didn't go into as much detail as I'm about to here, because I feared all seven of our listeners would jump over to an old episode of Night Vale. I also predicted Seattle would prevail on their second straight Thursday night game in my full-season prediction. Hey, give me some credit. I expected the Hawks to be 6-5 going into the game, even if they took a different route to get there. Those predictions, and specifically the Dallas game, are the reason we need to delve into the numbers.
Before the season started, I simply expected the Cowboys wouldn't post quite as good a record as they have. Even though I predicted the Seahawks record correctly, I thought they'd have shown more consistency. While I expected them to lose both games, I certainly didn't foresee blowout losses to the Ravens and Niners. But we'll set that aside for now. Let's look a bit more closely at the Cowboys, and that 8-3 record they sported coming into this contest.
The Cowboys looked much better on the surface than in depth
As others have noted, Dallas hadn't beaten a single team with a winning record up until they met Seattle. Yes, they led the league in points scored, but who did they run up all those scores against? Look at their record (thanks, pro-football-reference.com). The Cowboys scored 40 or more against the Giants (twice), the Rams, and the Commanders. And yeah, now the Seahawks. Again, we'll get to that. They also hung 30 or more on the Jets, the Panthers, and the Patriots. That last truly makes me happy, but my animus toward the Pats could fill an entire book, let alone one article.
In those seven games, the Cowboys had rolled up 278 of their 347 points through 11 games. That's 39.7 points per game in those wins. Somehow, Dallas managed to mix in an anemic 16 points in a loss to Arizona, another awful team. They did post a 20-17 win over the Chargers, so they did manage to win a difficult game, too.
Without getting too mathy, you can see why I wasn't too impressed with the quality of the 'Boy's wins. The aggregate won-loss record of those seven teams (you know, the crappy teams Dallas beat) is 24-56. That's a .300 winning percentage; not quite as good as the Giants, who I counted twice, as Dallas has played them twice. Add in the three-point win over the 4-7 Chargers, and the winning percentage of their victims skyrockets to .307. Dallas just hadn't beaten anyone, to that point.
And who did the Cowboys lose to, other than the almost-as-atrocious-as-the-Panthers Cardinals? Dallas lost a close game to the Eagles, 28-23, and got obliterated by the 49ers, 42-10. Hey, we feel your pain, Dallas. So in their three losses, the vaunted Cowboys offense managed just 16.3 points per game. Two of those losses just happened to be against the only two teams with a winning record Dallas had faced all season. There are serious benefits to playing in the NFC East.
The Seahawks look worse on a deep dive, too
Of course, there should be serious benefits to playing in the NFC West, too, but the Seahawks managed to bungle that by losing to the Rams twice. As if you needed a reminder, Los Angeles has beaten only one team not based in Seattle or Arizona. That was a win over Indianapolis in overtime.
That's what makes this team so maddening, and so inexplicable. The Hawks beat a very good Lions team on the road and came back for a last-minute win against one of the league's best defenses in Cleveland. But you simply cannot predict what the Hawks will do next. If the offense doesn't completely disappear one week - at least for a half - you can count on the defense to evaporate the next.
Our own Boade Rowe was right, you know. The Seahawks were built to compete with the Cowboys. The Hawks are a competitive and prideful team. They needed explosive plays from Geno Smith, and they got them, Their defense matched up well with the Cowboys' offense, too. The problem is, they didn't play well, at least not often enough. Dallas did convert on just four of their eight trips to the red zone, so that's good. The fact they scored without reaching the red zone hurt. It isn't exactly great that the Cowboys even got to the red zone eight times, either.
Seattle's offense was humming along quite nicely for most of the game. They hadn't topped 30 points since week 3 against the Panthers. If not for some inexplicably bad calls by the officials and a couple of stupendously bad calls by the Seahawks' OC Shane Waldron, Seattle could have won. Geno Smith, DK Metcalf and the rest of the crew did enough to win this game, That's the worst part about this loss to me. The Cowboys aren't a very good team. As Buddy the Elf would say, their record has been built on a throne of lies. Yes, they've won the games they were supposed to (other than that Cards loss), and that's more than the Hawks can say, But this was a very winnable game, and once again, the enigmatic Seahawks found a way to lose. Solving the riddle of the Hawks is simply too mathy for me.