Once again, Seahawks will meet Panthers while at a crossroads

Carolina is always a crossroads for this Seattle team.

At least that seems to be the case recently. It certainly seemed true in 2012, Game 5 of Russell Wilson’s first season when everyone worried that a championship defense was being frittered away because of a rookie quarterback or a year ago when the Seahawks headed to Carolina with a record of 3-3, no Percy Harvin and a host of questions about Seattle’s resiliency.

And after beating Carolina four times over the previous three seasons – including the playoffs – here come the Panthers once again for their seemingly annual meeting against the Seahawks, which is even more important for Seattle this time around for two reasons.

1. Seattle isn’t at .500 this time. The Seahawks are under it, and a loss would leave Seattle as many as three games back of the division leader with back-to-back road games on the horizon.

2. This game is at home where Seattle has won 28 of its last 30 games, including the playoffs.

The only real silver lining to Seattle’s 2-3 start is the fact that all three of those defeats have come on the road, and not only that, but the Seahawks have held a fourth-quarter lead in each of those games.

A loss at home to a team that Seattle has beaten four times in the previous three seasons would result in a sense of crisis this team hasn’t really faced since Russell Wilson arrived.

There may be doubts about this Seahawks team from the inability to hold a late lead to its inconsistency on offense, but there’s an underlying belief in the talent on this roster. The stars who’ve helped Seattle average 12 regular-season wins over the past three seasons, a 6-2 record in the playoffs and back-to-back trips to the Super Bowl.

That track record earns the Seahawks some equity. After all, this was a team that returned from Miami in November 2012 having lost a fourth-quarter lead to the Dolphins twice before falling to 6-5 and then learning that both starting cornerbacks were facing the possibilities of four-game suspensions. All Seattle did that year was outscore its final five opponents by a combined score of 193-60 to go 11-5.

This was also the team that stood at 6-4 last season with five of its final six games scheduled against opponents that won 10 or more games the year before. Seattle ran the table again.

So 2-3 isn’t all that big of a deal. They’re going to get back to the postseason, right?

That’s a question that would become more like a crisis if Seattle loses to Carolina.

“We’re hoping to get on track this weekend,” coach Pete Carroll said Friday during his weekly interview with Dori Monson on KIRO 97.3 FM, “Get going and start building a momentum that can totally change everybody’s perspective and outlook and all of that. We’ve been there before. I don’t know that we can repeat it, but we’re certainly going for it.”

Carolina plays a similar style to Seattle. Both have defensive-minded head coaches. Each has a playmaker of a quarterback who’s involved in the run game and asked to make the most of those passes attempted in a run-first offensive scheme.

And for the past three years, Seattle has been simply better at it than the Panthers. It’s why Seattle won three regular-season meetings the past three years, each one in Carolina and all decided by five points or fewer. It’s also why the Seahawks defeated the Panthers in a divisional playoff game last season.

All that serves as a backdrop to Sunday’s game when the Seahawks take on the most formidable team they’ve faced at home this season, one of five unbeaten teams left in the NFL.

A win won’t make everything better in Seattle, but a loss would make the start to this season immeasurably worse for the Seahawks. That makes Sunday just one more crossroads moment against Carolina.

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