You’d be surprised how many people accurately predicted the Seahawks would miss the playoffs despite winning 10 games.
With the Seattle Seahawks done for the season following a 10-7 regular season record, I figured now is a good time to look back at how Field Gulls readers (and the staff) predicted how Seattle’s season would go.
We had over 1,300 responses (with a handful of accidental duplicates) to this form dating back to Aug. 31, and the wonders of Google Sheets allowed me to easily look at the data and see how you all fared!
Few had the Los Angeles Rams winning the NFC West
Only 49 people thought the Rams would take the division. We’re talking less than four percent of the survey respondents. The San Francisco 49ers were the overwhelming choice for first but they were overwhelmingly last. Seattle was second at 31.4%, while the Arizona Cardinals didn’t make a dent with just nine measly votes.
Roughly 80 percent predicted the Seahawks would make the playoffs
Yeah… so that didn’t happen. I think some of you who had no grand expectations of a playoff appearance with a new coaching staff forgot what you wrote, submitted your form based on hope rather than reason, or lied. Nothing wrong with a little preseason optimism, though!
About 37 percent had the Seahawks making it to at least the NFC Divisional Round, including those who had Seattle there via first-round bye as the No. 1 seed. Less than nine percent were bold enough to pick the Seahawks to reach the Super Bowl.
The accuracy on the NFC West divisional wins was scarily accurate
The Seahawks swept the Cardinals, split with the Rams, and split with the 49ers. How it happened and the context of those wins doesn’t matter one bit. If we go by the majority of respondents, this was an outstanding set of predictions for the Seahawks against the NFC West.
- 68.2% predicted the Seahawks would split with the 49ers;
- 78.7% predicted the Seahawks would sweep the Cardinals;
- 69.3% predicted the Seahawks would split with the Rams.
About 82 percent projected 9-12 wins for the Seahawks
About one third of participants accurately picked 10 Seahawks wins. The next most popular answers were (in order) 11, 9, and 12. Excluding one submission that was clearly improperly done (had the Seahawks winning 17 games and losing in the Wild Card while also dropping games to the 49ers and Rams), I counted 13 people who believed a 17-0 season was on the horizon. On the flip side, three people had Seattle going 0-17 and I’m truly doubting if they are even Seahawks fans.
How many people correctly said 10 wins, no playoffs for the Seahawks?
Believe it or not, 15! In fact, three had the right combination of wins, no playoffs, and how many games they’d win against each NFC West rival. However, none of them had the Rams winning the division. I know these were not rigged because I have the timestamps for all submissions.
The only person with a Field Gulls username in that group of 15 is Sonxfan. If you’re reading, congratulations! You don’t win anything and I wish you weren’t correct, but full marks for your prescience.
How about the Field Gulls staff?
Of the 11 staff writers who made their preseason picks, none said the Seahawks would finish below .500. Yours truly and John Tapia were bang-on with 10-7 but I thought they’d win a playoff game. Ted Zahn and John Fraley did not see a playoff berth in Seattle’s future and they were correct.
That was fun! We’ll tweak this format just a tad for next season. If you’re curious as to any other details from the dataset, please let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them!