5 Seahawks Games Most Likely to Decide the NFC’s No. 1 Seed

The Seahawks have the talent to earn home-field advantage, but these five matchups may determine whether Seattle controls the NFC playoff race.

The Seattle Seahawks have reached the Super Bowl every time they’ve earned the number one seed and without that playoff advantage last season there’s a good chance they would not have gotten their second Lombardi Trophy. Because reaching the Super Bowl as a wild card team is not the same as winning three coin flips in a row. It’s like three flips of a coin weighted for you to LOSE in a row.

The number one seed is a bigger advantage than ever since the NFL expanded to a 7-team playoff and only hands out one bye per conference. What must the Seahawks do to earn that advantage again in 2026 after their schedule was announced on Thursday?

Question of the day: Would you rather go 14-3 and lose the division or 11-6 and win the NFC West?

Week 16 - Seahawks vs. Rams, December 25 (Friday)

When the Seahawks host the Rams, exactly 11 months will have passed since the NFC Championship game. And then it will only be two weeks until they face each other again.

It’s sort of like how it took James Cameron 13 years to release an Avatar sequel, so he filmed parts 2 and 3 back-to-back. (Hopefully in Seattle’s case the sequels are worth the wait.)

No surprise here that beating the Rams will probably be pivotal if the Seahawks want to earn the number one seed again. Most national analysts still pick L.A. over Seattle in Super Bowl and NFC West predictions.

And even though there’s a rematch two weeks later, it’s possible that whoever wins the Week 16 game will have already gained enough of an advantage to render the regular-season finale moot. By scheduling these two Seahawks-Rams games so close together at the end of the season, the NFL may have lowered the stakes of the rematch more than it increased the tension.

Asked about the two games against Seattle, Sean McVay made it clear that he’s nowhere close to thinking about Week 16 yet:

"You're getting ahead of yourself, big boy. It is week 16. Here's what I know. I know there's a ton of respect for for the reigning Super Bowl champs. They earned it. They were a great team from the very beginning all the way through. Um but we're going to take it one week at a time. And you know, when that game comes, we'll be excited about it. And I'm hoping for a good good day after Christmas with the family."

What McVay said is very important for everybody to clock:

Yes, the Rams games are more likely to carry weight in a playoff race than the two games against Arizona or a midseason tilt against the Raiders…but you have to get there with playoff hopes first. Christmas is over seven months away.

So many things can go wrong in the NFL. The Chiefs dropped from 15-2 to 6-11 and it wasn’t because Patrick Mahomes tore his ACL late in the season.

The league is taking a slight gamble to backload their current best rivalry for the last three weeks of the 2026 season, but if these two teams get to Christmas in good shape then the number one seed could be at stake both times.

Week 5 - Seahawks vs. 49ers, October 11

The most important win-loss record is the total win-loss record, a simple fact that gets lost when we shine a big, bright light on division rivalry games. If the 49ers win 14 games and the Seahawks win 13 games, it wouldn’t even matter if two of San Francisco’s three losses were against Seattle.

If teams finish with the same record, the next-most important factor becomes the tiebreaker:

1. Head-to-head (if only between two teams)

2. Division record

3. Common games record

4. Conference record

There are more after conference record (which came into play in 2024 when the Rams won the division over the Seahawks) but most of the time it won’t go that deep.

Whichever NFC West team wins the most division games will naturally be in the driver’s seat for first place—and therefore the number one seed. Last season’s NFC West race was so close that all three playoff teams went 4-2 in the division:

Although the Seahawks won the division by 2 games, if they had lost either of their two wins over the 49ers or Rams, they would have lost the division to that team. Then they’re a wild card team, then they’re not getting a bye week, then they’re potentially on the road for the entire playoffs, then their chances of winning the Super Bowl go down significantly.

Only a few NFL teams have gone 3-0 on the road in the playoffs to reach the Super Bowl.

If the Seahawks go 0-2 against either L.A. or San Francisco, that feels like curtains for the number one seed in a division certain to be this close. And Sam Darnold knows what it feels like to go 14-3 and be a wild card team from his one season with the Vikings, so just two losses in general could be difficult to overcome.

If you could guarantee one Seahawks sweep, would you choose the Rams or 49ers?

Now the next one could be my most controversial pick of the list …