Super Bowl 2026: Tom Rock details why the Seahawks will lift the Lombardi Trophy
The Seahawks' Julian Love speaks to the media during Super Bowl LX Opening Night at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center on Feb. 2, 2026 in California. Credit: Getty Images/Chris Graythen
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Fifteen months ago, before a trip to San Francisco’s Levi’s Stadium, the Seahawks were at a crossroads.
It was Week 11 of the 2024 season. They were 4-5 after two straight losses. They were coming off a bye, getting some not-so-steady quarterback play and hadn’t yet learned to trust one another on defense.
“We were on a little bit of a roller coaster, some ups and downs in the season, facing some adversity,” coach Mike Macdonald recalled. “We had some turnover on our roster. I think we were at an inflection point of: Where do we want to go?”
In a team meeting that week, they basically decided. They wanted to go all the way.
“We just made a kind of a pact with each other, like, we’re going to be a great defense no matter what it takes. And they bought in,’’ Macdonald said.
“It didn’t happen overnight. But that’s the type dedication it takes, moving in the same direction to actually make this thing come to life.”
They won six of the last eight games that season to finish 10-7 but missed the playoffs. Then they won 14 of 17 regular-season games this season, marched through a pair of postseason victories and now are in Super Bowl LV.
And in an act of perfect symmetry, the game is back where this whole thing started: Levi’s Stadium.
It’s where the Seahawks decided they could be champions, where they learned they could be champions, and, on Sunday, where they will become champions.
The Seahawks — behind a stifling defense with a haunting nickname, a wide receiver with a name few can pronounce (so they just use his initials) and a quarterback who has spent most of his career being called unprintable names by the many teams disappointed by his lack of production — will beat the Patriots.
They will avenge their loss to New England in Super Bowl XLIX, the one that ended with Russell Wilson being intercepted by Malcolm Butler when the Seahawks opted to throw a pass from the Patriots’ 1-yard line rather than handing the ball off to Marshawn Lynch.
They will do it because unlike most teams that spend a season chasing a Lombardi Trophy — as the Patriots have with their first-year head coach and second-year quarterback — these Seahawks have spent the past year and a half in pursuit of theirs. It’s something they envisioned for themselves in November 2024.
“We felt like we were always supposed to be here,” safety and former Giant Julian Love said. “We felt like we had a really special team that could do really special things.
“Now, everybody else didn’t see that or know that at the time. They didn’t know what was cooking in Seattle. But it was a constant belief from the jump. We have talent, we have a connectiveness, we have coaches we believe in, and we just have an identity that is swagger-forward.”
And they had that meeting in which their usually docile coach spelled all of that out for them.
“We always joke around with Mike about his speeches,” linebacker Ernest Jones IV said, a nod to the bookish coach’s delivery; some players have compared him to an AI bot created by some tech company right here in Silicon Valley. “But he did a great job that day.”
“That was a time for us as a group to say: ‘Look, this is what we are trying to create, it doesn’t really matter what it’s going to take, let’s be committed to the process and let’s go make it happen,’ ” Macdonald added of that fateful meeting in November 2024. “To the guys’ credit, they have done it. It’s been a wild journey. It’s been a lot of fun.”
Sam Darnold wasn’t even on the team back then. He was quarterbacking the Vikings, leading them to the playoffs. Signing him in free agency seemed like a risk at the time, but no longer. He has stepped up when needed and played the position with aplomb.
Of course, it has helped to have a dynamic weapon in the passing and running games with Jaxon Smith-Njigba and Kenneth Walker III, respectively.
But even if the Patriots can take away one of those offensive players, they still have to face a defense so tough that it decided halfway through this season that it needed a nickname like their “Legion of Boom” predecessors.
So in the back of Bus 3 after they had just posted a shutout win over the Vikings, several of the veteran defensive players — Jones, Leonard Williams, DeMarcus Lawrence, Jarran Reed and a few others — started kicking around ideas.
“Mike always talks about people coming to the Pacific Northwest and how it’s a place where not many people want to play in that cold, rugged type of weather,” Williams said. “And we talked about how after the first three games of the season or so, it’s pretty much dark in Seattle for the rest of the year. And that’s when we came up with the name.”
The Dark Side was born.
They come in waves after opposing quarterbacks and will force MVP runner-up Drake Maye into making mistakes. His team was able to help him out of such errors throughout this postseason, but against the Seahawks, there will be no such safety net.
The Dark Side is real.
“The on-field mentality of our defense is suffocating,” Williams said. “I would say towards the end of the third quarter, once we get into the fourth quarter, we all talk about it as a defense that, you know, we’re looking at the opposing team’s eyes and they’re dropping their eyes. And sometimes we’re talking smack and they’re not saying anything back. They’re just walking back to the huddle with their heads down. And towards the end of the game, we feel like we suffocated them.”
Fifteen months ago on the eve of a trip to Levi’s Stadium, they started talking about this game. Not in the specifics of the opponent or the exact path, and they probably didn’t even recognize at the time that their ultimate goal would wind up within their grasp in the very same building. But they knew they would get here.
“It takes a leap of faith to really buy in and stick to the process of what we’re trying to achieve,” Macdonald said.
The Patriots are young. Maye is in his second season. They are starting two rookies on the offensive line, the first Super Bowl team to do so.
They are good and promising, but they are a work in progress.
The Seahawks are complete and ready.
And they will ascend to the throne.
Tom Rock began covering sports for Newsday in 1996 and became its NFL columnist in 2022. He previously was Newsday's Giants beat writer beginning in 2008.
