Seattle wakes up Wednesday as the defending champion and, by nearly every projection making the rounds this week, not the team most people expect to hold the belt in February. That is the whole story of a Seattle Seahawks Super Bowl repeat bid: the football is the easy part, the twenty-two weeks around it are not.
Start with the plain fact that hangs over every champion. No franchise has won back-to-back Super Bowls since the Patriots did it in the 2003 and 2004 seasons. Two decades and change of the best rosters in football taking a run at it, and every one of them ran out of road. The salary structure claws at you, the schedule stiffens, the coordinators get hired away, and eighteen other teams spend an offseason building specifically to beat the thing you just did.
Seattle has lived this exact chapter before. The 2013 team was a wrecking ball, won Super Bowl XLVIII over Denver 43-8, and came back the next year good enough to reach Super Bowl XLIX. That one ended a yard away from a second ring, with New England on the other sideline. Which is a strange thing to type on a Wednesday when New England is the team coming to Lumen Field at 8:20 ET.
The hurdles this fall are the ordinary ones, and ordinary is what gets champions. Division games do not care about your banner. The NFC West has been the meanest neighborhood in football for most of a decade, and San Francisco and the Rams open their own season a night later, which tells you nobody in that group is rebuilding. Add the rules tweaks and points of emphasis that reshuffle things every September, and a team that won a title on the margins has to find those margins all over again with a target on its chest.
Here is my honest read. Being picked to finish behind your own division rivals after winning it all is not an insult, it is a description of how thin the gap is at the top of this league. Seattle already proved it can be the best team on the last Sunday. Proving it twice is the hardest trick in American sports.
What I am watching next is Wednesday night itself: whether the champs look like the same violent, disciplined outfit in September that they were in February, or whether the hangover is real.
