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.