Why the 2024 Seahawks are an outlier in the history books

Jan 5, 2025, 5:46 PM | Updated: Jan 6, 2025, 7:20 am

Seattle Seahawks Zach Charbonnet run Los Angeles Rams 2024...

Seattle Seahawks running back Zach Charbonnet carries the ball against the Rams on Sunday. (Harry How/Getty Images)

(Harry How/Getty Images)

BY CAMERON VAN TIL

Seattle Sports

The 2024 Seattle Seahawks will go down as an outlier in the NFL history books.

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After being eliminated from playoff contention last weekend, the Seahawks beat the NFC West champion Los Angeles Rams 30-25 on Sunday afternoon to finish 10-7. In doing so, Seattle became the first team with double-digit wins to miss the playoffs since the NFL expanded to a 17-game regular season in 2021.

Below are some nuggets that put into perspective how rare it is to miss the postseason despite reaching the 10-win mark. All historical information is according to Stathead.

• Since the NFL went to a 17-game slate in 2021, 15 teams have finished with exactly 10 wins. Fourteen of those 15 teams reached the playoffs – nine as wild cards and five as division winners. The 2024 Seahawks were the lone exception.

• Since the NFL went to the current eight-division format in 2002, 81 teams have finished with exactly 10 wins. Seventy of those 81 teams (86.4%) reached the playoffs. The 2024 Seahawks were among the 11 teams (13.6%) who didn’t.

• Over the past nine seasons, the 2024 Seahawks and 2020 Miami Dolphins were the only 10-win teams to miss the playoffs.

• Since 2021, there also have been 20 teams that finished with exactly nine wins. Eight of those 20 teams reached the playoffs – two as division winners and six as wild cards. That included the 2022 Seahawks, who were a 9-8 wild-card team.

• Since 2002, 33 of the 83 teams (39.8%) that finished with exactly nine wins reached the playoffs. Over that span, there also were eight eight-win playoff teams and three seven-win playoffs teams – including the 2010 Seahawks, who won the NFC West title at 7-9.

How it happened

How did Seattle become one of the rare 10-win teams to miss the playoffs?

The simple answer is that the Seahawks were on the wrong side of a rare tiebreaker with the Rams.

Seattle and Los Angeles each finished 10-7, but the Rams claimed the NFC West title by virtue of having a higher strength of victory – the combined win percentage of the opponents they beat. Strength of victory is the fifth item on the NFL’s tiebreaker criteria. It came down to that because the Seahawks and Rams had identical records in each of the first four tiebreakers – head-to-head record (1-1), division record (4-2), record against common opponents (7-5) and conference record (6-6).

But from a bigger-picture perspective, the Seahawks caught a bad break with how the NFC shook out this year.

The NFC had five teams with 11-plus wins: The Detroit Lions (14-2), Minnesota Vikings (14-2), Philadelphia Eagles (14-3), Washington Commanders (12-5) and Green Bay Packers (11-6). And in an extreme rarity, all five of those teams came from two divisions – the Lions, Vikings and Packers from the NFC North and the Eagles and Commanders from the NFC East.

It was just the second time that two divisions in the same conference combined for five teams with 11-plus wins.

As a result, the NFC North and NFC East locked up all three wild-card spots. That meant the only path to the playoffs for the NFC West and NFC South teams was to win their respective divisions. And in the NFC West, the Seahawks ended up being the odd one out.