National Football League

Are the Seahawks good enough to win outside Seattle?

Published Jan. 8, 2017 12:24 a.m. ET

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Chris Chase

The Seattle Seahawks never really were threatened in a playoff game they won by 20 points; saw their star quarterback have a crisp, efficient, high-percentage 224-yard and two-touchdown performance; had their top receiver go for more than 100 yards; watched their disappointment of a running back break a franchise postseason record on the ground, and kept one of the highest-powered offenses in the NFL to two 50-yard field goals. And somehow, Seattle was thoroughly unimpressive in victory, looking far more like the team that was down 31-7 to Carolina in last year's playoffs rather than the one that went to back-to-back Super Bowls in the two years before.

The key similarity between this year and last: a road playoff game in the divisional round. The key similarity between 2013 and 2014: home-field advantage throughout. Seattle, empowered and almost invulnerable at CenturyLink Field, is feeble away from it and just like last season it'll be their undoing. The Seahawks need to be a great football team at home to compensate for when they go on the road, and they're merely a good football team when surrounded by the 12th man in their raucous, ref-friendly confines.

One of the most yawn-inducing days of NFL playoff football in recent memory ended with the Seahawks 26-6 winners over a Lions team that entered the postseason on a three-game losing streak and ended it with their ninth-straight playoff loss (dating to 1991), a new NFL record. Russell Wilson played with the sharpness that's eluded him for much of his injury-plagued season and Thomas Rawls lived up to the fantasy of all Seahawks fans (and Thomas Rawls fantasy owners) by running like Marshawn Lynch — finally.

But in the end, Seattle beat a team with a four-fingered quarterback, a quarter-century of playoff failure and nearly 60 years of playoff failure on the road. The Lions were like the Raiders, the losers in the other of Saturday's playoff games — a good, but not great, team that got out to a tremendous start this season because of unlikely fourth-quarter comebacks and then had its playoff chances ruined with an injury to its MVP-candidate quarterback. If Matthew Stafford was at 80% of the level he played at this season, Seattle doesn't win by 20 points and perhaps doesn't win at all.

Detroit's offense, which was 30th in the league in rushing anyway, couldn't sustain any sort of running game without the threat of Stafford beating Seattle deep. Because of that the team got off the field too quickly and lost the time of possession by nearly 14 minutes. And that extra time led a defense that had bent for the first three quarters but never broke to give up 16 fourth-quarter points and turn what had been a one-score game with nine minutes left into a blowout when the clock hit zeroes.

Seattle is 8-1 at home this season and 3-4-1 on the road, with losses at venues both understandable (Lambeau and the Superdome) and not (L.A. Coliseum, Raymond James). A win over the Patriots at Gillette Stadium was a signature road victory the team will try to emulate next week in a Georgia Dome that'll be just as raucous and acoustically friendly as CenturyLink was on Saturday.

Maybe they'll do it again. But a win on Saturday took Rawls going for 161 yards and a touchdown, Paul Richardson doing a blind Odell Beckham impersonation, the refs treating visitors to Washington with the deference shown them ever since the Fail Mary, Matthew Stafford rocking the middle-fingered glove that caused his passes to float, dip or miss like he was Joey Harrington and, of course, that intangible home-field advantage, the one that's given Seattle one of the longest home winning streaks in playoff history — 10 straight dating to 2006. And even with all that, Seattle wasn't free of the Lions until midway through the fourth quarter.

It's easy to win when you've got 12 on your side. The problem for the Seahawks is they're only playing 11 in Atlanta.

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