Barnwell: 2013 Seahawks are 2nd-best NFL team of past 25 years

The 2013 Seattle Seahawks were one of the greatest teams in recent NFL history, according to one of football’s most respected writers.

In an article published Tuesday, ESPN’s Bill Barnwell ranked the Seahawks’ lone Super Bowl-winning team at No. 2 on his list of the top 25 NFL teams since 2000.

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The only team Barnwell ranked ahead of the 2013 Seahawks was the 2007 New England Patriots, who finished 18-1 after losing to the New York Giants in a stunning Super Bowl upset. That makes the 2013 Seahawks the greatest Super Bowl champion of the past 25 years, in Barnwell’s view.

The 2013 Seahawks, of course, were led by one of the greatest defenses in NFL history. Their famed Legion of Boom defense allowed a league-low 14.4 points per game, which Barnwell calculated as the fourth-best defense since 2000 when normalized against each year’s league average.

But as Barnwell wrote, the 2013 Seahawks also had a better offense than most realized. Seattle tied for eighth in the league at 26.1 points per game that season, which Barnwell ranked in the 80th percentile among offenses since 2000 when normalized against each year’s league average.

It also helped that the 2013 Seahawks capped their championship run in style, soaring past the Denver Broncos and their record-setting offense with an emphatic 43-8 rout in the Super Bowl. Those Peyton Manning-led Broncos averaged an NFL-record 37.9 points per game in the regular season, but were held scoreless by the Legion of Boom until the final minute of the third quarter.

For context, Barnwell ranked the 2013 Broncos as the 15th-best team since 2000.

According to Barnwell, the only reason he didn’t place the 2013 Seahawks at No. 1 was due to some “sloppy” performances in the regular season. They needed overtime to get past the 2-14 Houston Texans, they fell behind 21-0 before rallying for another overtime win over the 4-12 Tampa Bay Buccaneers and they needed a last-second goal-line stand to beat the 7-9 St. Louis Rams.

In Barnwell’s ranking, the next three teams behind the 2013 Seahawks (16-3) were the 2004 Patriots (17-2), the 2024 Philadelphia Eagles (18-3) and the 2017 Eagles (16-3).

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