Yet defensively, these aren’t just the three best defenses. They stand a clear head and shoulders above the rest. By points per drive allowed: Seattle is best (1.48), Houston is second (1.52) and Denver is third (1.62). By first-down conversion rate allowed: Houston is best, Denver is second and Seattle is third. By defensive success rate: Denver is first, Houston is second and Seattle is … fourth. (Those pesky Browns ruined my perfect stats.)<\/p>\n
Defense doesn’t win championships, but thisseason, it just might. Denver and Seattle earned their respective conferences’ top seeds, so they play with home-field advantage after a first-round bye. Houston, playing from the No. 5 seed in the AFC, is the hottest team entering the postseason, having won nine consecutive games. And this is not a playoff field riddled with elite offensive play. Many of the league’s scariest individual threats at quarterback — Patrick Mahomes<\/a>, Lamar Jackson<\/a>, Joe Burrow<\/a> — failed to make the dance this season. Josh Allen<\/a> and the Bills’ passing game took a step back this season, while the Rams and Matthew Stafford<\/a> looked unstoppable until they ran into the Falcons on “Monday Night Football.”<\/p>\n A defensive revolution has been promised a couple of times in recent years. Vic Fangio’s emergence as the first Sean McVay answer in 2018 was a watershed moment. (Fangio remains a key player this postseason, as the Eagles try to ride an elite defense and average offense to a Super Bowl repeat.) From Fangio came Brandon Staley and two-high extremism, culminating in that wonderful leaguewide defensive start to the 2024 season in which we all wondered if split-safety coverages would ruin football for the rest of time.<\/p>\n I’m disinclined to call anything a revolution until I can look at it from several years in the future. From my perspective inside the 2025 season, it’s clear that defenses are fighting back. The charge was led not just by Vance Joseph, Mike Macdonald and DeMeco Ryans, but also by Fangio, Staley, Brian Flores, Lou Anarumo, Steve Spagnuolo and Jim Schwartz. Each has approached the problems presented in the modern NFL a little differently, and each is stealing a little from the others along the way.<\/p>\n This is the beauty of defense. There is no skeleton key. The paths to offensive excellence in the modern NFL are well-trodden: find a branch off the Shanahan\/McVay coaching tree, find an elite quarterback with dual-threat ability or do both. But the paths to defensive excellence meander, searching for answers under every unturned stone. In their wandering, we learn a lot. About where the league is going? I’m not sure yet; the paths are too muddled. But we certainly know about where we are.<\/p>\n Today, we are in an NFL playoff field<\/a> ruled by elite defenses. Here’s how they’re doing it.<\/p>\n Jump to a team:<\/p>\n Broncos<\/a> | Seahawks<\/a> | Texans<\/a><\/p>\n Joseph has been calling on defense since 2016 — back when Macdonald was a defensive assistant with the Ravens and Ryans had just retired as a player. Of our three defensive wizards, he’s the one with the long white beard.<\/p>\n Nobody gets to call plays for a decade straight without developing a defensive identity, and Joseph’s is crystal clear: aggression. His units have blitzed on at least 30% of opposing dropbacks in each of the past nine seasons and have been top-five teams in blitz rate in each of the past eight seasons. Seattle and Houston, for perspective, were both bottom-eight teams in blitz rate this season. Joseph, far more than his contemporaries at the top of the defensive mountain, sends the heat.<\/p>\n But even decade-long playcallers have to change their ways at some point. Opponents watch film and dial in on tendencies. Offensive schemes change, and suddenly the blitz path that worked great in 2018 keeps giving up easy completions in 2025.<\/p>\n It’s worth remembering that when Joseph joined<\/a> Sean Payton’s staff as the Broncos’ defensive coordinator in 2023, the team wasn’t immediately great. It finished the season 27th in defensive EPA per play and 28th in points per drive allowed. Payton had tasked Joseph with folding his defensive approach in with more Fangio-inspired principles. (Fangio defenses were all the rage in 2023, and the previous two defensive coaches in Denver had run the system, including Fangio himself.) A tall task, as the Fangio defenses don’t really blitz and Joseph really blitzes.<\/p>\n You might remember Week 3<\/a> of the 2023 season when the Dolphins scored 70 points on Denver. It was a truly embarrassing loss, and one that appeared to end Joseph’s tenure as the Broncos defensive coordinator before it even began. We know how the story ends, of course, with this world-ending unit just two years later. This season, Joseph recalled<\/a> speaking to Payton after that Dolphins game: “Let me be me, and I promise I’ll help you win.”<\/p>\n It took some time to turn the boat around, but Joseph got back to being himself. With a star cornerback in Pat Surtain II<\/a>, a competent CB2 on the outside in Riley Moss<\/a> and a standout young slot in Ja’Quan McMillian<\/a>, Joseph started playing far more man coverage. Denver went from 28% man coverage in 2023 (barely above league average) to 37% in 2024 (fourth-highest rate) to 39% this season<\/a> (third highest).<\/p>\n In 2025, the Broncos gave up an astonishing 4.4 yards per play in man coverage. Over the past five seasons, they were one of only three teams to give up fewer than 5.0 yards per play in man coverage while running it at least 35% of the time.<\/p>\n We’ve seen blitz-happy, man-happy defensive coordinators aplenty in the NFL. (Looking at you, entire Bill Belichick coaching tree.) But Joseph’s dalliance with the Fangio defense has changed how he calls coverages. Joseph has talked at length this season on how he thinks about specifically man coverage in the current league meta.<\/p>\n “I don’t call a lot of man. What we do is mostly pressure up front with matchup principles in the back end,” Joseph said in November<\/a>. “It’s like playing a box-and-one defense in basketball. It’s zoned inside and match outside. These days, the beauty of playing great defense in this league is the ability to have different structures. If you can get [defensive backs] close [to wide receivers] without giving it that ‘man’ tag, that’s the expertise.”<\/p>\n Again, in December<\/a>: “I think the beauty of playing defense in this new NFL, this pass-first NFL, is can you get [defenders] close without playing man? When you tell a defender he’s playing man, that means he has both sides of the route. If you’re playing, maybe, a fire zone, he has one side of the route. Confidence-wise he’s going to play more aggressive for you.”<\/p>\n Some of this is coach-speak — the Broncos do objectively call a lot of man coverage — but it provides a great insight into how Joseph thinks about coverage in “this pass-first NFL.”<\/p>\n We can find plenty of examples of Joseph’s box-and-one coverage — a basketball term for a defense that plays zone coverage save for one defender, who tracks the most dangerous opponent across the court in man-to-man. Joseph likes the box-and-one approach because it maximizes the competitive advantage offered by a truly elite cornerback in Surtain.<\/p>\n Here’s a second-and-6 against the Jaguars in Week 16<\/a>. Brian Thomas Jr<\/a>. is isolated to the backside of a 3×1 formation, and Surtain is across from him in true man coverage. Denver is sending a blitz and dropping a defensive end, eventually settling five players in coverage against the four remaining Jacksonville eligibles.<\/p>\n Quarterback Trevor Lawrence<\/a> comes out of the play fake and does the smart thing by quickly identifying the one-on-one on the boundary. But Surtain is running Thomas’ route for him. This is the “and-one” of the box-and-one coverage philosophy. Because the offense isolated Thomas, Surtain can isolate him in turn, chasing him across the field independent of safety help and the rest of the coverage distribution.<\/p>\n With Denver’s underneath droppers sitting in the quick windows, Lawrence is forced to hold the ball. After the routes develop, Moss (No. 21) ends up chasing Jakobi Meyers<\/a> (No. 3) across the field. This is Joseph’s second initiative: getting defenders in coverage on only one side of the route.<\/p>\n Moss is initially waiting for any out-breaking or vertical routes from the two receivers on his side of the field. He has good leverage on those potential routes, but when one receiver settles and Meyers starts crossing the field, he has to chase in space. If he were responsible for both sides of the route, he’d be beat.<\/p>\n But he isn’t. There’s a linebacker dropping into Meyers’ path right as he breaks, a dropping defensive end waiting for him at the numbers should he take the route shallow and a deep safety driving on the route as it climbs vertically. Because the Broncos can play true one-on-one coverage with Surtain, they get to use extra players to pack the other side of the formation.<\/p>\n It’s one thing to find the extra players. It’s another thing to yank them from unexpected places and create pass rush one-on-ones in the process. That brings us back to Joseph’s strength: blitzing. The synergy between Joseph’s pressure packages and deeper coverage bag is what has elevated Denver’s 2025 defense to new and rarefied air.<\/p>\n Here’s a third-and-10 against the Chiefs in Week 11<\/a>. The score is tied late in the fourth quarter — as gotta-have-it as a down gets.<\/p>\n Joseph lines seven potential rushers along the line of scrimmage: four down defensive linemen, two linebackers mugged up in the A-gaps and the nickel McMillian lurking in the shadows off the left tackle. The Kansas City back, Kareem Hunt<\/a>, is responsible for the linebacker closest to him and McMillian. When both come, Hunt takes the linebacker and leaves McMillian as a free rusher.<\/p>\n Mahomes knows McMillian is sprinting his way and that he has to get rid of the ball. But the Broncos have three defenders over two interior routes, as linebackerKwon Alexander<\/a>, safety Talanoa Hufanga<\/a> and safety Brandon Jones<\/a> build a triangle around the bending route from slot receiver Xavier Worthy<\/a>. If Mahomes wanted to throw this, he’d have to wait for Worthy to clear Alexander, but that’s taking too long.<\/p>\n Joseph got these numbers in part because he trusts Moss in man coverage on Rashee Rice<\/a> on the weak side. But Moss’ job is made easier by the threat of linebackerJonathon Cooper<\/a>(No. 0), whom Rice chips before he releases. This is the synergy. Cooper has one of the fastest get-offs in football, and because he demands extra attention, Moss doesn’t need to do as much in coverage.<\/p>\n Fearlessly, Joseph has left Surtain’s backup, Kris Abrams-Draine<\/a>, alone against Tyquan Thornton<\/a> on the other side of the field. But he doesn’t need to win forever — he just needs to hold on long enough for McMillian to get home. This was one of the Broncos’ 11 unblocked sacks on blitzes this season — the most by any team since the 2020 Buccaneers, who did it on 50 more dropbacks (and, you know, won a Super Bowl<\/a>).<\/p>\n The unblocked sacks are fun, but the real magic is how Denver wreaks havoc with a complementary rush. Cooper and teammate Nik Bonitto<\/a> have two of the fastest first steps in football — sixth and fourth, respectively, by NFL Next Gen Stats’ tracking. And in the Broncos’ true 3-4 defense, their wide alignments give them quick paths to the quarterback’s back shoulder. No team shuts the back door faster than Denver, which forces quarterbacks to climb the pocket.<\/p>\n This is where Zach Allen<\/a>excels. Signed in 2023<\/a> from Arizona — where he played under Joseph — Allen is one of the league’s premier pocket pushers. In fact, he might be the best, bar none. Allen can win one-on-ones with great hand usage and absurd torque, but it’s the way he quietly breaks pocket integrity by popping guards back into the quarterback’s lap that stands out. And he isn’t alone. John Franklin-Myers<\/a> and D.J. Jones<\/a> both know their roles perfectly, feasting on broken pockets with clean-up sacks or controlling escape lanes to pump up a teammate’s numbers.<\/p>\n It might sound silly, but the Broncos have clearly poured hours into mastering sacks as a team. Not just pressures, not just blitzes … sacks. Pressures become scrambles, throwaways, pass attempts — some negatives, but plenty of positives for the offense. Sacks are brutal, drive-ending plays, and Denver manufactures them better than any rush in the league. Denver ended the season with a sack on 10.3% of opponent dropbacks — one out of every 10. They are only the ninth team this century to pull that off.<\/p>\n Here’s a data visualization that you don’t need to understand completely. (I sure don’t.)<\/p>\n It’s a catch-all measure of defensive diversity concocted by Cody Alexander of Match Quarters. Up near the top, among the most diverse defenses — more personnel groupings, more coverage variety, more blitzes — you’ll see the Broncos, whom we just discussed.<\/p>\n Now look at that little purple bar way, way, waaay at the bottom. That’s the most homogeneous defense in the NFL by a country mile: the Houston Texans.<\/p>\n Houston has two personnel packages. Yes, just two. They’ve played 985 snaps this season, and 973 of those snaps have been in either base (three linebackers, four defensive backs) or nickel (two linebackers, five defensive backs) personnel. They played one snap of dime (six defensive backs), which might have just been an accident, and 10 snaps of goal-line personnel. If we remove goal-line snaps, they played all but two defensive snaps this season in base or nickel.<\/p>\n Why? Easy answer: Their best 11 players are better than your best 11 players. The big names are already known — Derek Stingley Jr<\/a>., Will Anderson Jr<\/a>. and Danielle Hunter<\/a>. But slot corner Jalen Pitre<\/a>, a converted safety, has the sort of physicality and fearlessness needed for a permanent replacement of the third linebacker. Deep safety Calen Bullock<\/a>, a second-year breakout star, has rare sideline-to-sideline range and blossoming ball skills. Linebacker Azeez Al-Shaair<\/a> has been one of the best at his position this season, and his running mate Henry To’oTo’o<\/a> is one of the league’s most aggressive playmakers against the run. Their defensive line rotation — including Derek Barnett<\/a>, Denico Autry<\/a>, Sheldon Rankins<\/a> and Tommy Togiai<\/a> — is deep and becomes more potent the longer the season goes.<\/p>\n How much better are Houston’s 11 than your 11? Its defensive success rate in nickel personnel was fifth highest through a full season over the past 20 years, which is as far back as the personnel data goes. The Rams had similar efficiency in 2025, but they played nickel nearly half as often and found success by switching up their personnel. Opponents know what the Texans are going to do, and they still can’t beat them.<\/p>\n You would think with such a tightly knit core group of personnel that the Texans could — and would — run a large variety of coverages. Surely with the same players on the field for every snap it would be easy to disguise intentions, and all that time together would foster strong communication and unlock complex coverages.<\/p>\n Yet, it goes the opposite way. Eighty percent of the Texans’ defense snaps this season were spent in Cover 3, Cover 4 or Cover 1. Only three teams relied on those three coverages more heavily. One of those teams was the 49ers, coordinated<\/a> by Robert Saleh, Ryans’ mentor<\/a> during his first stint as the defensive coordinator in San Francisco. Another was the Falcons, coordinated<\/a> by Jeff Ulbrich, who was most previously Saleh’s defensive coordinator with the Jets.<\/p>\n These three coaches share a common philosophy when it comes to coverage: The deeper the toolbox, the easier it is for the right tool to get lost somewhere in the bottom. A long menu of coverage options creates the space for mental errors and coverage busts. All those fancy rotations and droppers off the line of scrimmage work until a supercomputer quarterback plugs into the matrix. Yes, Ryans’ coverages are simpler — but that doesn’t mean they don’t have all the answers.<\/p>\n Take Cover 4, or what you’ll often hear broadcasters call “quarters.” There are roughly six billion ways to play quarters, and the Texans have all of them at their disposal. Against the Seahawks in Week 7<\/a> on third-and-7, Houston walked cornerback Kamari Lassiter<\/a> (No. 4) into press opposite wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba<\/a> to the bottom of the screen. To the top of the screen, Stingley (No. 24) is also a quarters corner, but is off by alignment.<\/p>\n As Smith-Njigba releases to the outside, weak safety Bullock (No. 2) is freed to work to the three-receiver side since Lassiter uses the sideline to squeeze the air out of JSN’s route. (Or at least he tries to; Smith-Njigba is pretty good.)<\/p>\n Darnold wants to work the three-receiver side, but watch how the Texans’ defensive backfield moves in concert. Al-Shaair occupies the window first for the seam, then for the in-breaking route behind it, while Pitre gets connected to the sit route from the slot. Both safeties can squeeze the seam as it bends. There isn’t an open throwing window anywhere.<\/p>\n Darnold stares, separates to throw, thinks better of it and bails into Anderson’s waiting arms. That’s seven points for the Texans’ defense on the sack fumble.<\/p>\n Again, this is just quarters. But week over week, game plan over game plan, the Texans’ defensive coaching staff can tweak how exactly it wants its rules in quarters to work relative to the opponent’s tendencies. Because quarters is such a versatile coverage, with chapters and chapters of adjustments available for a staff and roster that have been majoring in it for years, there are few — if any — offensive systems for which the Texans don’t have answers.<\/p>\n Here’s another play from that Seahawks game. This is Cover 3. Bullock steps down to replace Stingley in the box after the motion, but there’s barely any communication; they’ve changed roles off motion thousands of times. The linebacker turns to Bullock, and Bullock signals to the safety behind him. That’s all.<\/p>\n When the ball is snapped, see how every Texans defender seems to know the routes from Seattle’s receivers. Look at the two defenders squeeze the slant from the slot; watch Bullock give the curl route to the linebacker so he can drive on the flat from the running back.<\/p>\n When you hear defensive coordinators talk about “playing fast,” this is exactly what they mean. A small menu of coverages, understood perfectly by all 11 players, so that everyone can play instinctually and trust their 10 teammates are seeing it the same way. Stingley exemplifies this, jumping the route the whole way and snagging the pick.<\/p>\n There is a second aspect to “playing fast” that cannot go discussed enough with Houston’s defense: physicality. Ryans’ defense hits. It hits harder than any other defense in football. I don’t think it’s remotely debatable.<\/p>\n One of the reasons the Texans have neither interest nor need in running a high variety of complex coverage calls is because the best-laid plans of coaches and schemers disintegrate when face masks start getting caved in. Nobody knows this better than Ryans, who was detonating on running backs a little over a decade ago. Sure, the crosser might be open — but hit that receiver enough times, and he won’t want to catch the ball anymore.<\/p>\n Schemers get all the credit these days for drawing up cool play designs. But Ryans built the culture of this defense just as intentionally, just as meticulously, turning over the defensive roster in his first few offseasons to fill the field with banshees. Bullock, Lassiter, Al-Shaair, To’oTo’o and LB3 E.J. Speed<\/a> are all acquisitions of Ryans. Pitre and Stingley were drafted one year before Ryans arrived, but they have taken up the mantle with aplomb. Pitre hits so hard that Derrick Henry<\/a> named him<\/a> the hardest tackler in football, which is the rare case of the unstoppable force commending the immovable object.<\/p>\n “For the players that we get on the defense, for me, it all starts with No. 1: the mindset of a defensive player. Do you really enjoy and love playing football?” Ryans said in December. “If you do, then you’re able to play defense for us because you’re going to play fast, you’re going to play physical. It means a lot to you.”<\/p>\n This is why the Texans keep it simple on the defensive backfield. The truer they can stay to their base coverages, the more they free up their back seven to fly. The defensive front is almost exclusively a four-down, one-gap group. There’s no two-gapping, no read step and no slowing the ball carrier down. Houston solves its problems with aggression. It gets upfield. It finds something to hit and hits it as fast as it physically can.<\/p>\n This is, obviously, super sick. The 2025 Texans are the best iteration we can get of the “Legion of Boom.” No, they don’t have a Kam Chancellor to really lay the wood, but the simplicity and flexibility of the coverage menu gives them a speed and a confidence that most defenses lack.<\/p>\n Since they are predictable, they can be had. Seattle and Denver both have historically low explosive play rates allowed; Houston’s is much higher. Every coverage has beaters, and it’s not hard to figure out what coverage Houston is in.<\/p>\n But down-to-down, we’re still talking about the fifth-best passing defense of the past 15 years by success rate. They’re 19th by EPA per dropback against, which puts them above Denver and Seattle alike. You might get the occasional big play, but Ryans’ bet is that in the long run, his defense can make you pay too high a price for hunting explosives. The long dropbacks invite too many quarterback hits. The yards after the catch invite too many crunching blows over the middle. Ryans’ defense accumulates in a way the Broncos and Seahawks don’t, and the longer the season gets, the more that matters.<\/p>\n Plenty of defensive coordinators drop the “play fast” buzz word and don’t execute; the Texans do. Plenty of defensive coordinators also drop the “multiple” buzz word when describing their scheme; the Texans pass on that effort entirely. The Seahawks, however, do not.<\/p>\n The Seahawks fulfill the assumption we wrongly made about the Texans’ defense — that when you live in one personnel grouping, you can easily disguise and effectively run a deep variety of coverages. Seattle’s grouping, like Houston’s, is nickel. It has played it on 76.5% of its snaps, second only to Saleh’s 49ers this season. Unlike the Texans, who wrinkle out of their nickel packages with base personnel, Macdonald’s change-up is dime (six defensive backs). Seattle played only 66 snaps of base personnel this season; the next closest team (the Ravens) played 113.<\/p>\n The Seahawks also fulfill the promise made by Staley, when his defensive philosophy took the league by storm in 2020.<\/p>\n Staley was a revelation on two fronts. The first was philosophical. He was more willing than any coordinator before him to sit in light boxes and invite the opposing offense to run, especially on early downs. Safeties would come from depth to add to the run fit, while defensive linemen played gap-and-a-half techniques to slow the ball behind the line of scrimmage. The Rams’ willingness to play two deep safeties and lighten the defensive box dared opposing offenses to run the ball consistently, never suffer a negative play and never get bored.<\/p>\n The second was one of scheme and disguise. Because Staley always showed two-deep safeties pre-snap, he could rotate into different coverages, changing which safety dropped into which zone. For offenses like Sean McVay’s and Kyle Shanahan’s, which often asked the quarterback to turn his back to the defense and execute a play-action fake, this unpredictability presented a particular challenge. The QB couldn’t see the coverage rotation until well into the down.<\/p>\n Even as Staley’s success waned when he left the Rams<\/a> (turns out defense is much easier with Aaron Donald and Jalen Ramsey<\/a>), the theory was sound. Build a defense that invites the run on early downs but still dominates with light boxes. Consistently create third-and-longs. Keep opposing quarterbacks guessing with a variety of coverages.<\/p>\n The 2020 Rams under Staley were the best early-down run defense from two-high over the past five seasons, posting minus-52.3 total rushing EPA allowed, a 36.7% success rate allowed and 3.9 yards allowed per carry. Then, the 2025 Seahawks hit with minus-57.8 total rushing EPA allowed, a 33.0% success rate allowed and 3.7 allowed yards per carry.<\/p>\n I’m not totally capable of putting into words the coolness of this. It’s the golden goose. It’s the platonic ideal. Here’s how Macdonald described it<\/a> this offseason: “If you can defend the run in split-safety, that’s some high-powered stuff. It’s not easy to do … guys have to play multiple gaps, so it’s heavy lifting. It’s not easy. You got to know who you’re using in run fits and when you can use them. If you can do it, it just gives you such an advantage.”<\/p>\n Macdonald’s tool kit for run defense solutions from two-high is vast and effective. The first and easiest tool is one he shares with the Texans and Broncos. All three teams have really, really good players. The Seahawks’ defensive tackle duo of Byron Murphy II<\/a> and Leonard Williams<\/a> is the best run-defending pair in the NFL. Of all the essential lynchpins that make a defensive system like this work (heavy-handed edge rushers with great power, highly instinctive and slippery linebackers, physical safeties), these two are at the top of the list.<\/p>\n Here’s a great example. On first-and-10, the Rams have three tight ends on the field — personnel that would demand base defense from any other opponents. The Seahawks are in nickel and showing two-high pre-snap, respecting the Rams’ prolific play-action game out of these looks. At the snap, safety Ty Okada<\/a> (No. 39) will fly down into the box as the eighth run defender, but the Rams still have eight blockers in the core of the formation.<\/p>\n Mathematically, this is a losing down for the Seahawks.<\/p>\n Watch the play of the defensive tackles. Murphy (No. 91) gets his hands on the center and bench presses him back into the gap that the back would like to hit. Because Murphy lost no vertical ground and slowed the climb of left guard Steve Avila<\/a> (No. 73), linebacker Ernest Jones IV<\/a> (No. 13) is able to get good leverage and force the runner to bounce this backside.<\/p>\n Now, there’s Williams (No. 99) eating a double-team. He never lets right guard Kevin Dotson<\/a> (No. 69) roll him upfield, which again forces the back to slow in the backfield. That creates time and space for other run defenders to arrive clean to the point of attack. Okada, who was 12 yards off the ball at the snap, contributes to the tackle just 2 yards beyond the line of scrimmage.<\/p>\n When the Seahawks bring that safety from depth at the snap, it allows them to also fire a linebacker at the line of scrimmage, which changes the front structure. Seattle is far from the only team to plug a linebacker and stunt its front on run downs, but it certainly does it more often and more effectively than the Broncos or Texans. This is their calling card at the table of defensive elites.<\/p>\n Here’s an example against the Titans. The Seahawks initially look to be in a four-down front, but when linebacker Drake Thomas<\/a> blitzes at the snap, Seattle functionally gets five players at the line. As if on a string, Okada is pulled down into the linebacker level while Thomas fires through the defensive line. The stunting action of the defensive tackles creates penetration and yanks the offensive line off its path, allowing a clear run-through for Okada to reach the backfield.<\/p>\n The Seahawks’ run defense is nearly immune to failure because it wins through scheme and personnel. Macdonald can scheme around injuries if they lose key cogs on the defensive line, and star players such as Williams, Murphy, Jones and DeMarcus Lawrence<\/a> — what a season Lawrence is having — can create wins even when Macdonald loses on the chalkboard. They’re deep, too. Right when the starters get tired, Uchenna Nwosu<\/a>, Jarran Reed<\/a>, Boye Mafe<\/a> or Derick Hall<\/a> trots onto the field.<\/p>\n A team that relies this much on pre-snap shenanigans to buttress the run defense on early downs should be liable to the play-action pass. But Seattle is 10th in defensive success rate against play-action passes on early downs (Broncos are first, Texans are third). A team that relies this much on space-eating defensive line play should struggle to get after the passer. But Seattle is fourth in both pressure rate overall and pressure rate on exclusively four-man rushes.<\/p>\n Again, some of this is scheme — some of the Seahawks’ four-man rushers are simulated pressures, in which a linebacker blitzes while a defensive end drops into coverage — and some of this is talent. (See again: Lawrence, DeMarcus.) But it is astonishing how sound Seattle is. The defense rarely makes mistakes, but when someone does, teammates are there to minimize the damage. Seattle gave up an explosive play rate of 7.4% this season, second only to the 2012 49ers for the lowest explosive play rate allowed in the past 15 years.<\/p>\n Denver is right there with them — 7.7%, fourth best over the same time span. But the Seahawks get takeaways (12.8% of their drives) where the Broncos don’t (6.8%). The Texans also take the ball away (14.6% of drives), but they flounder in the red zone, giving up a touchdown on 94% of the opponent’s goal-to-go situations. Seattle is at 63.3%.<\/p>\n There isn’t an area of defensive football in which Seattle doesn’t excel. It had the best third-down conversion rate allowed this season at 32.1%, as well as the 10th-best fourth-down conversion rate despite defending the NFL’s most fourth-down attempts. The Seahawks also did all of this despite enduring worse starting field position than the average defense. Plus, only five teams have lost fewer expected points on defensive penalties. I’d say I’m running out of stats, but I’m not. They’re the best short-yardage defense in the league, giving up a conversion rate of 52.4% on all plays with 2 or fewer yards to go. They travel well, giving up fewer points per drive on the road than at home over the past two seasons.<\/p>\n This laundry list of achievements coalesces into one conclusion: coaching. The only way to be this good situationally is with an elite staff, from the head coach down to the assistant defensive backs coach. And the only way to execute this defensive philosophy is with a real mastermind at the helm, and that’s Macdonald.<\/p>\n From the 2024 midseason trade for Jones and 2025 signing of Lawrence (both of whom could deservedly be All-Pros this season), to the unique role and success of rookie safety Nick Emmanwori<\/a> (who is doing his best Kyle Hamilton<\/a> impersonation), to the key roles of UDFA’s Okada, Thomas and Josh Jobe<\/a>, this Seahawks defense is a towering achievement of Macdonald’s vision and acumen. Everyone knows their job, is built correctly for their job and executes their job.<\/p>\n A word of caution<\/p>\n The Seahawks are one of the most impressive defenses I’ve seen in the past five years, and the Broncos and Texans are right there with them. I cannot remember a playoff field with three defenses of this caliber. Looking at the numbers, it was probably 2008, when the Jim Johnson Eagles, Rex Ryan Ravens and legendary Dick LeBeau Steelers all made it to the big dance. But I was in middle school back then, so forgive my memory.<\/p>\n With that said … the Rams just dumped 37 points on the Seahawks less than a month ago. The Jaguars put 34 on the Broncos. And the Raiders scored 21 on the Texans, which — adjusted for inflation — might be the worst outing of the three. This is the modern NFL. The rules are skewed to the offense at a historic and ever-steepening angle. Elite defenses can easily suffer bad performances, especially against playoff-caliber offenses.<\/p>\n The defensive path to the Super Bowl is thinner than the offensive path for exactly this reason. With new kickoffs and more fourth-down attempts and spot fouls, it is much harder to get stops on every single drive than it is to get scores on every single drive. Defense in the NFL is building a dam and surviving the pressure for 60 minutes. But eventually, that levy breaks.<\/p>\n Houston has to hold its water for four games; Seattle and Denver, by virtue of the 1-seeds, only three. It’s not easy, but if a defense can win a Super Bowl in today’s NFL, one of these three fits the bill.<\/p>\n ]<\/p>\n Copyright \u00a9 2026 ESPN Internet Ventures. All rights reserved.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/1746016215_769__end_rule.png\"\/)
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