Seattle Seahawks

The Seattle Seahawks joined the NFL in 1974 as one of the league’s first expansion franchises following the NFL-AFL merger of 1970, bringing top-tier professional football to the Pacific Northwest for the first time. Like most expansion teams, the Seahawks struggled at first, registering a calamitous 2-12 record in their first season and failing to make the playoffs until 1983. Their first postseason was a memorable affair, however, as the Blue Wave (as they were soon to become known) surged all the way to the NFC Championship game, where the team broke at last against the immovable force of the Oakland Raiders. The Seahawks made the playoffs a couple more times in the 1980s, but then spent ten straight seasons on the outside looking in (or bottom looking up) with the 2-14 season of 1992 proving the nadir of this fallow decade. Things really picked up for the Seahawks in the early 2000s, when they not only finished first in the NFC West four regular seasons in a row, but also made a run all the way to Super Bowl XL in 2005 only to be denied by the Pittsburgh Steelers by a score of 21-10. After more promising seasons and determined but unsuccessful playoff runs, persistence finally paid off for the ‘Hawks in 2013 when their “Legion of Boom” secondary annihilated the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII to win the franchise’s first-ever championship by a healthy 43-8 margin. The Seahawks tried for a repeat in 2014 but lost out to the New England Patriots in a tightly contested 28-24 Super Bowl XLIX, a game remembered bitterly by many Seattle fans for their team’s unfortunate decision to pass when they probably should have tried to run the ball in for a touchdown to win the game. In the years since, the Seahawks have remained consistent playoff contenders, driven on by a strong home field advantage provided by their acclimatization to Seattle’s weather (rainy, windy, cold) as well as by their legions of wild fans* (measured in decibels as the loudest crowd in recorded sports history). 

*As the only NFL team in their region, the Seahawks draw fans not only from their home state of Washington, but also Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Utah, Alaska, and even from across the border in the western provinces of Canada.