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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 working.
“Loose and focused” was the mantra that coach Mike Macdonald established for his Seahawks, and they lived those words right up and through Sunday night, as they smothered the New England Patriots 29-13 to win the second Super Bowl title in franchise history
“We love each other,” said appropriately named Seahawks safety Julian Love, who had one of the two fourth-quarter interceptions of Patriots quarterback Drake Maye that sealed the victory on a dominant night for Seattle’s defense. “We’re constantly messing around, never taking ourselves too seriously; but when that whistle sounds and it’s between the white lines, that’s when it’s serious. When there’s work to be done, we go to work.”
The Seahawks did just that against a Patriots offense that, frankly, didn’t play very well all postseason. Maye had been sacked five times in each of New England’s first three playoff games, and Seattle did the Los Angeles Chargers, Houston Texans and Denver Broncos one better by sacking him six times in the Super Bowl. The Seahawks’ defensive front came at Maye in waves, cutting off any chance the Patriots had to get in any kind of rhythm and making the game go the way it wanted it to go.
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“That group up front, they knew they had to play the most unselfish game they’ve ever played,” Seahawks defensive coordinator Aden Durde said. “Someone was going to get a sack, and it didn’t matter who.”
Byron Murphy, who had seven sacks in the regular season, posted two Sunday. But the others came from unlikely spots. Derick Hall matched his regular-season sack total with two. Fifth-round rookie Rylie Mills, who played in only four regular-season games and didn’t get a sack in any of them, had one. And the other one went to cornerback Devon Witherspoon, who was asked to blitz a ton on Sunday and did it with gusto.
“Just from watching film and studying, we kind of knew how their tackles were going to set in pass protection, and we know they were kind of struggling this postseason,” Witherspoon said. “So, we were going to attack them.”
The Patriots were ill-equipped to combat Seattle’s strength, and the Seahawks played as if they knew that. Eight of the Patriots’ first nine possessions ended with a punt, and the other concluded 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.
It was a triumph for defensive playcaller Macdonald, who is as good at dialing up pressures as any coach in the league and pulled off a masterclass. Love said the Seahawks were still installing new plays as late as Saturday, which is not unusual for Macdonald.
“He will game-plan up until whenever,” Seattle defensive lineman Leonard Williams said. “We’ll sometimes put a new play in Saturday morning. We’ll sometimes put a new play in Sunday at halftime. DeMarcus Lawrence says you have to have a Harvard education to play in this defense because you’re just constantly learning new stuff. But I think we trust Mike and his genius, and it works.”
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Preseason expectations did not shine on Seattle the way they did on the Los Angeles Rams and the San Francisco 49ers, two better-known offensive mainstays in its own division. As late as mid-December, it was the NFC West 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 up the Seahawks in full control of the NFC playoff race.
Seattle’s offense wasn’t consistent throughout the season. The run game took months to get going, and quarterback Sam Darnold fought through the kinds of performance lulls that fed into the persistent doubts from the outside about his ability to deliver in the big games. The Minnesota Vikings let him walk after he led them to a 14-3 season in 2024, and Seattle scooped him up in the free agent market on a reasonable contract of $33.5 million per year.
But Darnold delivered a monster performance in the NFC Championship Game against the Rams, proving the doubters wrong and confirming the Seahawks’ belief that what he did in Minnesota was not a fluke. He struggled Sunday night against a game Patriots defense, but Darnold eventually managed to beat the New England blitz with a fourth-quarter touchdown pass to AJ Barner that made the score 19-0.
“I didn’t have my best stuff today, but the team had my back,” Darnold said. “The defense and special teams had our back, and we just played the way we always play.”
Seattle’s special teams — a key part of its success all season — deserves a mention too. Punter Michael Dickson was an absolute weapon on Sunday, as the game was all about field position and field goals.
The Seahawks stuck with the run this season too, even when it wasn’t working, and it got better as the weeks progressed. Even after Zach Charbonnet tore an ACL in a divisional round playoff game against the 49ers, the run game had elevated to the point where Kenneth Walker III could handle the load. And after rolling up 135 yards on 27 carries against New England, it was Walker who was named Super Bowl MVP.
“K-9 is special, man!” Love said. “Seeing how hard he works and the time he puts in, and to see him win Super Bowl MVP, that’s just crazy.”
Walker couldn’t get into the end zone, though, which is why the score was stubbornly still just 12-0 late in the third quarter. But it was the fifth Seahawks sack — and Hall’s second of the game — that tilted the Super Bowl for good. On third-and-6 from his own 44, 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. 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 Barner in the end zone for the game’s first touchdown.
“Just sticking with what we do, what we’ve done all year,” Williams said. “We told ourselves, ‘All we have to do is be us, but we have to be us.’ And that’s what we did. When we have guys filling their roles to the best of their ability, we can’t be stopped.”
Year, TeamTime Trailing1991 Washington0:001977 Cowboys0:001973 Dolphins0:001971 Cowboys0:002025 Seahawks1:351983 Raiders2:48– Elias Sports Bureau
It may not have been 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 away its last two starting quarterbacks when they wanted more money than the team thought they were worth and pivoted to Darnold. 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 Januaries ago to replace longtime coach Pete Carroll, and for Macdonald, the young defensive genius whose “loose and focused” mantra builds on the culture Carroll set in Seattle for years but has also evolved it into something fresh and new. Macdonald told his team in the offseason that it was getting in on the ground floor of a new program and that it had to “become” the type of team that could win the biggest games.
“Loose and focused” was the way the Seahawks went about it. 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 came together around Macdonald’s offseason message.
“It takes leadership being OK with ‘loose and focused,'” Love said. “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 culture-setting were rewarded Sunday night with a Super Bowl title that validated everything about the way the Seahawks operate their franchise. They may have gone 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 their 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.
