The Seattle Seahawks obviously want to beat the San Francisco 49ers and secure home-field advantage throughout the playoffs when the two rivals meet in Week 18. Mike Macdonald’s team wants the first-round bye. They want to play their games in the friendly confines of Lumen Field.
But the Seahawks do not need those things to be successful in the postseason. They have been a tremendously successful road team under Macdonald, and though the rest would certainly benefit the veterans and the injured, being worn out and beat up in January is just the price of admission in the NFL.
As the college playoffs have suggested in recent years, sometimes a week off can actually put a team at a disadvantage.
Still, the Seahawks really need this game. They need to prove to themselves and to their opponent that they can beat the San Francisco 49ers. No one is going to say it out loud, but that type of confidence can be crucial should they meet again in the playoffs.
The Seattle Seahawks need to beat San Francisco for psychological reasons
This brings us to one of the most common fallacies in modern sports. I’m sure you have heard it. Maybe you’ve used it yourself. It is typically applied to pro football or college basketball, sports in which teams often play their rivals twice in the regular season and then, if they are good enough, again in the postseason. It goes like this…
“The hardest thing to do in sports is to beat another team three times.”
Wrong.
There are about a million things that are harder to do in sports, but we really don’t have to reach into the absurd to disprove this adage. We just have to look at the numbers.
Since the 2002 season, when the NFL revamped its playoff scheduling, there have been ten occasions in which one team faced a rival having already beaten them twice in the regular season. If beating a team three times in one season were indeed a very difficult thing to accomplish, what would you assume the records in those ten games would be?
Wouldn’t the team that had already lost twice win most of them? Maybe all of them? That’s not what has happened. The team that entered the game with a 2-0 record won six of the ten contests.
Of course, that means that a team that had already lost twice did win four games. But more often than not, the team that came in with the winning record did in fact win for the third straight time.
The reason for this is absurdly simple, yet it seems to require constant repeating. The team that won the first two games did so because they were better. Barring a major injury, they are probably still better when they play for a third time. And so they tend to win again.
Of course, there are exceptions. Flukes and luck can decide a close game. In one of the playoff games in which the 0-2 team prevailed, it was because they were riding a huge wave of momentum that would carry them to the Super Bowl championship. That was the Giants, who beat Dallas in the 2007 season.
Another time, it was due to an adjustment period with a new quarterback. New Orleans beat Tampa Bay twice in the regular season in 2020, but by the time they met again in the playoffs, the Bucs’ new QB, Tom Brady, was fully integrated, and they won.
Still, the team that has proven itself better in the regular season usually stays better in the postseason. That is why Seattle needs a win over San Francisco on Saturday. They lost at home to the 49ers in week one. Fine.
They were breaking in a new QB and a new offensive coordinator. They are fully broken in now. If Seattle is better, they should win the game. And then, should they meet up again, they should win again.
The last time the “it’s hard to beat a team three times in the same season” adage was put to the test? It happened twice in 2022.
Philadelphia beat Dallas – on their way to the Super Bowl – for the third time.
And San Francisco beat Seattle for the third time. Apparently it wasn’t that hard after all.
As Seattle fans all know, that was in the middle of a stretch in which the Seahawks lost seven of eight games to their rivals from NorCal. That stretch is ongoing. If Seattle wants to make a deep playoff run this year, that streak needs to end Saturday. Not because of the home-field advantage it would bring. Because of the psychological boost it would give to a team knocking on the door of greatness.