The Sports Xchange

The Seattle Seahawks, who lost three regular-season games in 2013 and four last year — a total of seven defeats in 32 games — already have lost three of five games in 2015.

There are indications this is a trend, not an aberration.

On offense, Seattle can’t protect its quarterback; the Seahawks are worst in the league in allowing sacks. On defense, tellingly, their defense has blown second-half leads in all three defeats.

The Seahawks can point to lots of explanations, from Marshawn Lynch’s injury to Kam Chancellor’s two-game holdout, but the fact is this just sounds like the excuses we hear all the time or simply, as “explanations” from teams that drop from the top perch into the middle of the pack.

In the Super Bowl era, Seattle is the sixth team to lose the title game within two years of winning it, and whether it is the disappointment of failure, the long, unfulfilled chase or the phase of the moon, the fall-off has tended to indicate a structural issue among these teams.

One thing this check of history reveals, if we did not already know it, is that the accomplishment of the Buffalo Bills, in getting to four consecutive Super Bowls, although all were defeats, was probably even more remarkable than we realized at the time.

NFL seasons are a long, grueling grind. It’s great for the champion to exhale when it’s over but miserable for the loser to realize they put all that work in and came so close but ultimately failed. That failure is magnified for a team that has tasted a title so recently.

What was general manager Ron Wolf’s quote after the Green Bay Packers, who won the Super Bowl following the 1996 season, lost it a year later?

“We’re a one-year wonder, just a fart in the wind,” Wolf said.

Even with Brett Favre at quarterback, the Packers did not so much as advance to a conference championship game for the next decade after that Super Bowl defeat.

In the next 10 years, with Favre as their quarterback, Green Bay managed just two wild-card playoff victories while cycling through four coaches before Mike McCarthy showed up and found already there a quarterback, Aaron Rodgers, who had been spurned by McCarthy’s then-team, the San Francisco 49ers.

If not for San Francisco’s blunder in passing on Rodgers – and most of the rest of the NFL, for that matter — you have to wonder if the Packers would have ended that drought even now.

Of course, few teams have experienced as dramatic a fall-off as the Greatest Show on Turf, a.k.a., the St. Louis Rams.

The Rams steamrolled through the NFL in 1999 and won the Super Bowl. Two years later, they made it to another Super Bowl where they were shocked by a New England team led by a young quarterback, Tom Brady.

In 2004, the Rams made it back to the playoffs as a wild card and won one game before getting bounced out. Since 2004? They have not had another winning season.

Pittsburgh won the Super Bowl following the 2008 season, lost it to Green Bay following the 2010 season and is looking for its first postseason victory since then.

Washington, with future Hall of Fame coach Joe Gibbs, won the Super Bowl following the 1982 season, lost it the following year to the Raiders, and did not win another playoff game until 1986.

And it can be argued that even the great Patriots suffered a Super Bowl hangover after their undefeated 2007 team came crashing down in a Super Bowl loss to the Giants. There were, of course, extenuating circumstances in 2008, when Brady missed almost the entire season due to injury, but nonetheless, it was seven years before New England won another championship.

One of Seattle’s problems is that it plays in a division which suddenly has become quite competitive with Arizona a legitimate Super Bowl contender and St. Louis on the upswing.

The Seahawks’ usual sparring partner, the 49ers, is in the toilet, but with losses already to the Rams and the only two playoff contenders (Packers and Bengals) they have faced, the Seahawks are definitely on the ropes.

–Ira Miller is an award-winning sportswriter who has covered the National Football League for more than four decades and is a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Selection Committee. He is a national columnist for The Sports Xchange.