After a lengthy nomination process, five rounds of voting, and 31 head-to-head matchups, we—and you—have crowned a champion. The 2013 Seahawks are the greatest team of the NFL’s quarter century.
Poetically, it was an incredibly close matchup. If you logged in early Friday morning, you probably saw a tilt that favored the 2007 Patriots by a margin of 55-45. By midday, that shrank to 52-48.
Reddit kicked into gear. And the Seahawks kept surging. As the afternoon stretched on, things stuck at 50-50 for a long stretch. But finally, when the polls closed at 6 p.m. ET, we had our winner: Seahawks, by a margin of 51-49.
(And while the Patriots won our Instagram poll, more votes came into the website and ultimately made the Seahawks the champion).
A question we wanted to answer with this bracket was how great a team could be without a Super Bowl ring. After all, the whole point of sports is to win championships, is it not? The pursuit of ultimate victory makes sports entertaining—even if random variance and the irregular shape of a football ensures that sometimes the “best” team doesn’t always win. If we just wanted to award the best squad, we’d give a trophy to whoever achieved the highest DVOA at the end of a season. That wouldn’t be very fun.
More on the Best NFL Team of the Quarter Century
In most cases, our voters sided with teams that won championships. The 2010 Packers topped the 2011 Packers in the opening round. The 2000 Ravens beat the 2001 Rams in the Sweet 16. Super Bowl winners won their matchups at such a strong rate that by the time we hit the Elite Eight, the 2007 Patriots were the only non-champions remaining. It wasn’t clear then that they could go all the way. But it was always possible that they were the one non-champion that could buck the trend.
Ultimately, though, our readers stuck with the Lombardi trophy and the Legion of Boom Seahawks. Even though Russell Wilson, Richard Sherman, Marshawn Lynch, Earl Thomas, Kam Chancellor, and Co. won just one Super Bowl together, this squad ran the league to such an extent in the early 2010s that they always felt a bit like a dynasty. And now they finally have another title to add to the mantle. —Riley McAtee
2013 Seahawks
Record: 13-3
Result: Won Super Bowl XLVIII (43-8 vs. Broncos)
There are a million things I could write about the peak era of the Seahawks Legion of Boom defense, but perhaps the easiest explanation for just how ludicrously good that unit really was is this: On the biggest stage, in Seattle’s 43-8 blowout victory over the Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII, the Seahawks made league-MVP Peyton Manning and the NFL’s all-time highest-scoring offense look like a bumbling JV squad.
The much-anticipated heavyweight bout quickly turned into a lopsided rout. The Broncos, who had racked up an NFL-record 606 points (37.9 points per game) on the back of Manning’s league-record 55 touchdown throws, were left completely disoriented by the LOB's extraordinarily disciplined, hard-hitting style. The Seahawks forced a failed-snap safety on the Broncos’ first play from scrimmage before picking Manning off on his team’s first and third possessions following the safety—the second, a 69-yard pick-six, made it 22-0 and more or less put the game away before the first half even ended. The trio of Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, and Kam Chancellor held things down in the back end, bolstered up front by the likes of Bobby Wagner, K.J. Wright, Michael Bennett, Cliff Avril, and a host of others.
That outcome came as no surprise to the uniquely brash, trash-talking Seahawks defense, which had allowed the fewest points (14.4 per game) and fewest yards (273.6 per game) of any team in the NFL that season while generating a league-best 39 takeaways. That unit ranked first in defensive DVOA that year, obviously, and ranks sixth best on the all-time DVOA list. The team’s offense, led by plucky then-second-year quarterback Russell Wilson, carried its own weight, of course, finishing the year tied for eighth in points per game and seventh in DVOA. Wilson paired up with Marshawn Lynch to help reanimate the read option in pro football, and Lynch gave the offense an identity of toughness that rivaled that of their defensive counterparts. Add in the team’s highly efficient special teams group (which ranked fifth in DVOA that year), and it’s clear that the team general manager John Schneider and head coach Pete Carroll built that year will go down as one of the most complete, most fun, and most dominant we’ll ever see. —Danny Kelly
