SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The best team in the NFL spent the 2025 season hiding in plain sight. Led by defense and special teams, armed with a quarterback nobody believed in and run by a 38-year-old, second-year coach whose personality remains opaque to almost everyone outside of his building, the Seattle Seahawks kept their heads down and kept winning.
Preseason expectations did not shine on Seattle the way they did on the two better-known offensive mainstays in their own division. As late as mid-December, it was the division rival Rams who were being hailed as the Super Bowl favorites. Seattle’s wild Week 16 comeback victory over those Rams was dismissed as fluky, even as it set them up in full control of the NFC playoff race.
But Sunday night, in the home stadium of the division rival 49ers, the Seahawks smothered the New England Patriots 29-13 to claim the second Super Bowl title in franchise history and put an emphatic championship stamp on a season nobody but them saw coming.
“You talk about a group of guys who battle every day, who believe in each other, believe in their coach,” star cornerback Devon Witherspoon told NBC after the game. “I mean, you can’t describe this group no better. It’s just a one-of-a kind feeling.”
Seattle’s dominant defensive front was a bad matchup for Drake Maye and a Patriots offense that came into the Super Bowl struggling. Eight of the Patriots’ first nine possessions Sunday ended with a punt, and the other ended with a kneel-down to close the first half. When the third quarter finished, the Patriots had 78 yards of total offense and as many first downs — five — as the Seahawks had sacks.
“I’ve always felt like this year I never had to force anything,” Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold said during the week leading up to the game, when asked what his defense meant to him. “Kind of a security blanket almost, I can feel really confident moving on to the next play and letting our special teams and our defense get to work and understanding that we really just need to take care of the ball as much as possible.”
To its credit, the Patriots’ defense was holding its own. It shut down star wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba and made life miserable for Darnold. Through those same three quarters, four field goals by Seattle’s Jason Myers represented the only scoring. Running back Kenneth Walker III ripped off a few long runs, but the end zone remained elusive to both teams until well after the sun went down. Seattle punter Michael Dickson had a monster night and might have been the game MVP (the honor went to Walker) if no touchdowns had been scored.
It was that fifth Seahawks sack — and Derick Hall’s second of the game — that tilted the Super Bowl for good. On third-and-six from his 44-yard line, Maye dropped back to pass and, as was the case for most of the night — found no one open. Hall broke through the line to sack him and force Maye’s seventh and most costly fumble of the season. Byron Murphy fell on the ball and Seattle was in business at the New England 37. Five plays later, Darnold beat an all-out blitz and found a wide-open AJ Barner in the end zone for the game’s first touchdown to put the Seahawks up 19-0.
A 35-yard touchdown catch by Mack Hollins finally put the Patriots into the scoring column, but it was too little, too late. The fourth quarter saw Maye throw two interceptions — one to safety Julian Love and another that was returned for a touchdown by Uchenna Nwosu — to cap a dominant night for the league’s most dominant defense.
“It’s unbelievable. Just everything that’s happened in my career,” Darnold said. “But to do it with this team, I wouldn’t want it any other way.
“I can’t say enough about our defense and special teams.”
It wasn’t the prettiest Super Bowl of all time, but the Seahawks — to paraphrase their coach’s one truly viral moment — do not care. This is a franchise that traded its past two starting quarterbacks when they wanted more money than the team thought they were worth and pivoted to Darnold and the reasonable price of $33.5 million per season. It’s the franchise that moved on from a legendary, Super Bowl-winning coach after 11 winning seasons in the previous 12 years because it felt it needed fresh defensive ideas to keep up with the high-powered offenses in its division. The Seahawks believe in their culture, their roster-building principles and their ability to scout and identify top talent in the draft. All of those things were on display Sunday night.
So this was an affirmation for Seahawks general manager John Schneider and his front office, which aggressively pursued Macdonald two years ago to replace longtime coach Pete Carroll, and for Macdonald, the young defensive genius coach who has taken what Carroll helped build and made it his own in a very short period of time.
One of the team mottos of the Macdonald Seahawks is “loose and focused.” It’s a phrase they use a ton around the building, where competitive shadowboxing took over the locker room at some point this season and the players use words like “love” and “brotherhood” when talking about the way they responded to Macdonald’s offseason message about “becoming” the type of team that can win the biggest games.
“It takes leadership being OK with ‘loose and focused,'” Love said earlier in the week. “Not every coach is going to enjoy us standing on the side on a walkthrough shadowboxing or messing around. But this staff and the leaders on this team understand that when the horn blows, if guys are dialed in on the details, then it’s OK. You don’t have to be in control of everything a player does every day.”
Macdonald’s defensive acumen and head coach culture-setting was rewarded Sunday night with a Super Bowl title that validated everything about the way the Seahawks operate their franchise. They went 12 years between Super Bowl titles, but they always stayed competitive and never lost sight of who they were and what they stood for. Even showing up in the Super Bowl — a first for the vast majority of the roster — didn’t rattle them.
“I think that’s been an edge for us all season,” Macdonald said Wednesday. “Every time we’ve gone into a new experience together, knowing that we have principles that we want to abide by and those are kind of our guiding lights in terms of how we want to operate and make our decisions. At some point, you’re going to get distracted, and that’s OK, but it’s about how relentless can we be in coming back to center, back to being in this moment.”
The result was the moment for which they’ve all spent their entire lives working — one that will live in franchise and NFL history forever. Loose. Focused. Champions.
