Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Respect For Seattle's Five Playoff Births in Five Years

After a Peter King-inspired rant by TheBigLead sparked a fire (with the kindling laid by Tirico monday night), I thought I might deal with some revisionist history as to how easy Seattle's path to the playoffs have been over the last five years.

2003 - Seattle (10-6) grabs a wild-card birth. The NFC West-winning Rams have the second seed in the playoffs, and the NFC West has the best average winning percentage of the four NFC divisions.

2004 - Seattle (9-7) grabs its first division title since 1999. The NFC West again sends two teams to the playoffs.

2005 - Domination. Seattle (13-3) goes 10-2 against the NFC in the regular season and goes on to win the NFC, concluding with a ridiculous blow-out of the national media's darling team, the Carolina Panthers. Wha happened?

2006 - Seattle (9-7) wins a third-straight division. For all the talk of the NFC West being weak, it had teams with 9, 8, 7, and 5 wins. Meanwhile, the 'powerhouse' NFC East had teams with 10, 9, 8, and 5 wins. Not much difference. Also, the NFC East went 1-3 in the playoffs, with the one win coming when two NFC East teams played each other. Oh, and Seattle beat an NFC East team in the playoffs.

2007 - Seattle (10-6) earns its easiest playoff birth by going 5-1 in a horrendous division. No way to make this one look tough.

Mainstream NFL commentary is a lot of 'what have you done for me lately?' All the Seahawks have done lately is make the playoffs five years in a row. Maybe the national media should put two and two together and consider Seattle's 7-3 record against Arizona over the past five years when wondering why the Cardinals continually fail to meet expectations.

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