SEATTLE – Seahawks defensive lineman Leonard Williams left no doubt Wednesday what he expects for an encore in 2026.
“We’re not done,” Williams said during a trophy ceremony at Lumen Field that preceded a parade through downtown Seattle celebrating the Seahawks’ 29-13 Super Bowl victory over the New England Patriots last Sunday.
“We’re coming back next year!”
The exhortation drew the expected roar from the estimated 50,000 in attendance.
If only it were that easy.
In fact, the Seahawks are tasked with what is statistically harder to pull off than winning a Super Bowl.
In the 59-year history of the Super Bowl before this year, a team has repeated as champion only nine times.
Statistically, it’s almost twice as likely not to make the playoffs the year after winning the Super Bowl than it is to repeat.
Almost one-third of teams that won the Super Bowl missed the playoffs the next year – 17, the most recent being the 2022 Los Angeles Rams.
Seahawks fans don’t have to look far into their history to see how difficult it is to repeat.
Williams’ statement echoed one made by then-coach Pete Carroll at the same ceremony in the same stadium in 2014 following the Seahawks’ first Super Bowl title.
Carroll said, “We’re just getting warmed up, if you know what I’m talking about.”
You may not need a reminder of how close that Seahawks team came to repeating. They failed to get near that close again in the Legion of Boom era.
Every team’s story is unique. It’s easy to boil down the LOB’s failure to repeat to not giving the ball to Marshawn Lynch in the 2015 Super Bowl and everything going downhill from there.
But every Super Bowl-winning team faces similar challenges, some of which befell the 2014 Seahawks.
Let’s look at a few:
From hunter to hunted
The Seahawks entered the 2025 season with few expecting they would contend for the NFC West title, let alone a Super Bowl victory.
They entered the season with 60-1 odds to win the Super Bowl, worse than every NFC West team and better than only 12 other teams.
Now Seattle enters the 2026 season on the other end, listed almost the minute Sunday’s game ended as 8-1 favorites to win next year’s game in Inglewood, California.
As Seahawks middle linebacker Ernest Jones IV said Tuesday:
“I think mentally you’ve got to enjoy it now but realize, like, everybody is going to want your head now. Everybody is going to want that spot and what you just felt.”
Or as coach Mike Macdonald said Monday: “We know that we are target No. 1 now.”
That means getting every team’s best shot all 17 weeks of the regular season.
Macdonald’s comment indicates that he will address the challenge head-on with his players.
Carroll took a similar approach, saying in May 2014:
“I think it would be wrong just to ignore it. We do put it into perspective, and really it’s a long time ago already. It’s already way in the past; it really doesn’t have anything to do with how we go forward unless we take it with us. We have our sights set on what we’re doing now, which is getting a great offseason put together with great work ethic with guys busting and competing like always. We’re real proud, we’re real proud of what happened, but that really was in the past so we just look ahead.”
Finding motivation
As much as going from hunter to hunted changes the emotional equation, so does simply having to retrace all the same steps that got you to the top.
As safety Julian Love said this week, the challenge now is to “reset and climb that mountain again.”
That’s something that members of championship teams say presents its own issues.
Former Denver Broncos running back Terrell Davis was a star of one of the nine teams to win back-to-back Super Bowls (in 1997 and 1998). In an interview with the Seattle Times in 2014 he said that the feeling was vastly different the second time.
“I wish I could say that they both felt the same,” he said. “But the second one did not feel nearly as gratifying as the first one. It just didn’t. And I mean it was night and day. … We knew we were good, we were supposed to win it, and we won it. And it was like, ‘OK, we won it.’ I know you shouldn’t feel that way at all about a world championship. But it was almost like diminishing returns. It’s almost like eating nothing but pizza. At some point it’s not going to taste as good, even if you love it.”
The Seahawks in 2025 also appeared to have a truly rare chemistry in their locker room. It included a mix of veterans who hadn’t won a Super Bowl and were determined to win one, such as Williams, Love, Jarran Reed and Uchenna Nwosu. It also had a couple who had won one but were determined to prove they could to it again after the way their careers with the Rams ended (Cooper Kupp and Jones), and a lot of young players on the way up.
Replicating the unique atmosphere that existed this season won’t be easy, especially with around one-third of the roster expected to change, as typically happens every season.
Jones said he’s confident the Seahawks can recreate the feeling they had in 2025 but acknowledged it’ll take some work.
“You start over from scratch again,” he said. “But you take the experiences (of this season) and let them prepare you.”
Managing the cap
Few around the NFL find it a coincidence that of the nine teams to repeat, six did so before the league established the hard salary cap in 1994.
Those six? The 1966-67 Green Bay Packers, the 1972-73 Miami Dolphins, the 1974-75 and 1978-79 Pittsburgh Steelers, the 1989-90 San Francisco 49ers and 1992-93 Dallas Cowboys.
The only three to do it since the cap arrived are the Broncos, the 2003-04 New England Patriots and 2022-23 Kansas City Chiefs.
As Hall of Fame executive Bill Polian once told the Seattle Times: “NFL history, in my humble opinion, ought to be judged pre-salary cap and post-salary cap. With the cap and free agency, it’s a completely different game. … The system is designed to weaken good teams. That’s what it’s all about.”
The three teams to repeat since the cap also had a quarterback considered among the best to play the game – John Elway with Denver, Tom Brady with New England and Patrick Mahomes with the Chiefs – which can go a long way toward mitigating personnel changes.
The Seahawks are set up well for the 2026 season with all but three of the position group players who started the Super Bowl under contract next season.
Still, a few free agents may get away, creating at least some change to the lineup and the dynamic in the locker room. The cap will also influence how Seattle handles re-signing some of its key players to new contracts over the next year, such as receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba and cornerback Devon Witherspoon, which can have a domino effect in adding to the current roster and in locker room culture.
Staying healthy
An underrated key to the 2025 Seahawks was their health.
By any measure, the Seahawks were one of the league’s healthiest teams. To cite one, according to RotoWire.com the Seahawks had the fifth-fewest games missed due to injury. Many of those came in a secondary that proved deep enough to handle it.
As Macdonald noted at the Super Bowl, the health was a credit to the team’s training staff led by director of player performance and development Ivan Lewis.
But football is football, and sometimes things just happen.
And maybe a forgotten aspect of the 2014 team’s Super Bowl loss was how banged up the defense was by the end of the game. Kam Chancellor injured a knee that week in practice, Earl Thomas separated a shoulder and Richard Sherman injured an elbow in the NFC title game, and Cliff Avril (concussion) and Jeremy Lane (ACL, arm) were injured during the Super Bowl.
Players on those teams also talked of the toll that playing three extra games those years took on them. And not just three extra games but three extra weeks of practice all at the most intense level imaginable, also resulting in a shortened offseason.
Expect Macdonald and staff to spend ample time this offseason studying how to best manage those challenges.
Winning one is difficult
Consider that Seattle has won just two Super Bowls in its 50-year history.
Maybe that doesn’t seem like much, but 12 teams haven’t won even one, including eight that have been around since the dawn of the Super Bowl era in 1967 – Atlanta, Cleveland (which had a three-year hiatus from 1996-98), Buffalo, the Tennessee Titans (previously the Houston Oilers), the Los Angeles Chargers, Detroit, Minnesota and Arizona.
The others are the Houston Texans, Jacksonville Jaguars and Cincinnati Bengals (first season in 1968).
Three have won only one, all of which have been around longer than the Seahawks – New York Jets, Chicago Bears and New Orleans Saints.
“That’s the thing,” former Baltimore Ravens coach Brian Billick, whose team won Super Bowl 35, once told the Seattle Times. “Everybody talks about how hard it is to repeat as Super Bowl champions when it’s so hard just to win one.”