The Seahawks and Rams have been the top two teams in the NFL for most of this season, and it’s only right that we’ll be treated to a rubber match between these division rivals in the NFC championship game on Sunday. They split two extremely close games in the regular season—Los Angeles held a narrow scoring edge, 58-57, in those meetings. The two teams are the perfect contrast of strengths; the Rams finished the regular season ranked first in scoring offense and the Seahawks did the same on defense.
But this isn’t just a matchup of the best squads in the league. It’s a battle for the schemelord crown. Rams head coach Sean McVay, the offensive mastermind, and defensive-minded Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald are two of the youngest head coaches in the league and they are revolutionizing their respective sides of the ball. It’s not just a result of the standard push-and-pull between offense and defense. Each coach has created a scheme and style of play that has pushed the other to evolve.
To understand the schemes that’ll decide who will prevail and make it to the Super Bowl, we have to understand how their teams were built and how they’ve adjusted their schemes, which will help us predict what we ultimately will see on the field.
In 2017, McVay arrived in Los Angeles after leading one of the league’s most efficient and balanced offenses in Washington, but the offense he devised with former Washington head coach Jay Gruden was still rooted in an old-school approach that relied on the common tactic of using heavy personnel groupings to control the line of scrimmage in the run game, and lighter ones on passing downs. With the Rams, in full control of his own offense for the first time, McVay built a roster that allowed him to take the runs and play-action passes he liked to call most out of those heavy personnel groupings and run them out of three-receiver sets. He was able to do that because of free agent signings like Robert Woods, Sammy Watkins, and Brandin Cooks at receiver—and the addition of draft picks like Cooper Kupp and Josh Reynolds, who could both catch and block. Today, YouTube is full of reels of the Rams offenses from McVay’s first two seasons in L.A. that totally flummoxed the league’s defenses.
McVay’s three-receiver sets forced L.A.’s opponents to put five or more defensive backs on the field, and kept defenses from using their best run stoppers. The Rams led the league in rushing attempts against sub defenses with five or more defensive backs on the field and ranked top-10 in almost every rushing efficiency metric in 2017-2018. It was revolutionary; it seemed like McVay was a generation ahead of nearly all his offensive peers. The 2018 Rams had 412 attempts against those nickel or dime defenses with five or more defensive backs, which was the most in the league since at least 2000 until both McVay’s Rams (as well as the Bills) eclipsed that mark in 2023. Defenses were left with both a math problem and a coverage problem: They needed more defensive backs on the field to contend with the multiple receivers, but in order to prepare for the real threat of the run with players who don’t typically defend it, coverage schemes became more predictable. The result was receivers getting open with ease, and Jared Goff routinely had big windows to attack. For a while, it was unstoppable. Los Angeles ranked in the top 10 by the old-school metric passer rating, and efficiency metrics like success rate and EPA per dropback over that two-year span.
Of course, their domination didn’t last forever. Defensive coordinators adjusted as they got more experience against McVay and other offensive play callers from his coaching tree; smaller defenders grew more comfortable stopping the run, and defenses got better at stopping the passes that McVay layered off of that once brutally efficient run game. Goff was traded after the 2020 season, and the next year, the Rams won a Super Bowl with a new iteration of the offense. The Rams still heavily relied on three-receiver sets, but the offense ran through quarterback Matthew Stafford and a dropback passing game.
And now, as Stafford has aged, McVay has made another adjustment to his scheme—one that now melds his innovations of 2017-2018 with some of the old-school approaches he once used in Washington.
McVay flipped his approach on its head, getting back into heavier personnel sets—often with three tight ends, forcing defenses to choose between prioritizing stopping the run and defending against deep passes. This season, the Rams have used three-receiver sets just 59 percent of the time—the lowest usage in the McVay era. But playing multiple tight ends instead created the same kind of run-pass conflict that his three-receiver sets did more than a half decade ago. When the Rams trotted out its heavier personnel packages featuring tight ends Colby Parkinson, Terrance Ferguson and Tyler Higbee, defenses often responded by getting into their base defense with four defensive backs, two safeties and two corners – the exact kind of defensive looks McVay tried to avoid more than a half-decade ago.
Now, the Rams offense is built to destroy heavier defensive personnel, and led the NFL in success rate on runs and in passer rating when defenses have just four defensive backs on the field this season. You can see that in the clip below from the Rams’ win over Detroit earlier this season. Los Angeles has multiple tight ends on the field and Detroit responds by putting five defenders on the line of scrimmage. The Lions rush those five defenders in anticipation of a run, but Los Angeles calls a play-action pass and Stafford delivers the ball into a void in Detroit’s pass coverage. That’s the calling card of McVay’s current offense—as soon as defenses try to match up in the trenches, the ball goes whizzing over linebackers’ heads.
When watching the 2025 Rams, you’ll still see some of the same runs and play-action passes that made this offense special in 2018—they’re just doing it with bigger bodies. In that way, McVay very much remains a pioneer in the arc of modern offense. But he’s met his schematic match in Macdonald, whose defense appears to have been built specifically to counter McVay’s innovations.
The foundation of Macdonald’s defense is rooted in an old-school approach: Pick a personnel package to best match up against the offense’s grouping, stop the run with heavy bodies in the trenches, and pressure the quarterback by dialing up blitzes. Those are core tenants of what the Ravens ran under former defensive coordinators Dean Pees and Wink Martindale as Macdonald climbed the ranks from assistant to eventual play caller in Baltimore. Once in Seattle as the head coach, Macdonald began shaping his own defense to create a unique edge—just as McVay had done at the start of his head coaching career.
Last season, Macdonald’s first as the Seahawks head coach, Seattle played its base 3-4 defense against two-back or two-tight-end looks 37 percent of the time. They ranked just 25th in the league for snaps out of that package. The Seahawks defense was decent at playing matchup football in Macdonald’s first year—finishing the season right at the league average in defensive success rate (57.5 percent)—but it wasn’t quite complete.
This season, though, the Seahawks defense has taken a major leap because Macdonald ditched the matchup-based scheme. The Seahawks spend little time rotating personnel packages and simply play Macdonald’s best 11 players. They’re able to do so because after the addition of rookie safety/slot defender Nick Emmanwori and veteran edge rusher DeMarcus Lawrence, the 2025 Seahawks had players with the perfect combination of skill sets to handle any personnel grouping an offense put on the field. No team in the league spent more time with at least five defensive backs on the field than the Seahawks in the regular season, while their base defense rate dropped from 12.5 percent to just 4.6 percent this season—the lowest mark in the league. With Emmanwori in the slot, Lawrence on an edge, defensive tackles Leonard Williams and Byron Murphy II on the interior, and linebacker Ernest Jones IV in the middle, the Seahawks have a stout run defense. Seattle ranked fourth in success rate against the run in the regular season and allowed the lowest rate of explosive runs in the league.
And because Seattle has players who are able to control the game in between the tackles, Macdonald can use two deep safeties to keep an umbrella over an opponents’ passing game. The Seahawks led the league this season in Cover 2, Cover 4, and Cover 6, all variations of a two-high safety look—and were more than 100 snaps ahead of Jacksonville in second place. Those shells helped Seattle hold opposing quarterbacks to the fourth-lowest average passer rating this season. Its defense is still tied for 10th in success rate against the run when offenses put at least two tight ends or running backs on the field. Simply: Macdonald’s defense refuses to let the offense dictate what players it puts on the field. It’s a fully actualized response to McVay’s innovations that began nearly a decade ago. In many ways, Macdonald’s unit is the epitome of a modern defense. It can handle the physical demands of stopping the run against any sort of offensive set, and his coverage scheme denies easy throws to the middle of the field.
That brings us to the NFC championship game matchup between these two coaches and their loaded rosters. The only two teams we’ve consistently seen push the Rams offense and the Seahawks defense to their schematic limits have been each other, and the NFC championship game shouldn’t be any different. Stafford’s worst game by EPA came against the Seahawks in Week 11—and his second-best game was against the same defense in Week 16. By success rate, Seattle’s worst game against the run came in that Week 16 matchup, and its fourth-best game by yards per pass attempt was in Week 11.
We should expect that Los Angeles will put several tight ends on the field and challenge Seattle’s defense to handle all its blockers in the run game, while Stafford and McVay will try to pry open windows for receivers Puka Nacua and Davante Adams in the passing game. The Seahawks defensive backs will sit in its two-deep safety shells, daring the Rams to run and jumping on every passing route they can.
You can see that schematic battle playing out in the clip below, as Stafford perfectly places a ball to Nacua between Seattle linebackers and safeties playing Cover 4. It’s the kind of passing concept that is a hallmark of McVay’s offense, but here, the Seahawks closed that throwing window as much as possible. If not for Stafford’s excellent throwing touch, this would have been a pass breakup (or an interception).
And there will be snaps in which Macdonald and Seattle’s defense have the upper hand. In the clip below, Seattle ran Cover 2 and totally took away Stafford’s throw to Adams. This is an example of Seattle’s coverage and pass rush working in sync, and how the Seahawks have dominated opponents all year long. The physicality of their defensive backs disrupt the Rams’ timing, the split safety shell protects those aggressive defenders underneath. Those two layers over coverage force Stafford to hold the ball just long enough for edge rusher Derick Hall to get to the quarterback.
For these two teams, the route to Super Bowl LX was always going to be through each other. These are the two best teams, with the league’s two best minds on their respective sides of the ball, and they are fighting not just for a shot at a title, but for the upper hand in the NFL’s never-ending scheme wars.
