Welcome to the Dark Side: Seattle’s brutal, Super Bowl-winning defense is here to stay | Super Bowl LX

Super Bowl LX was a two-score game with less than five minutes left. New England had the ball at the Seahawks’ 44-yard line and — after finally reaching the end zone in the fourth quarter — that familiar feeling of possibility. But that quickly vaporized when Devon Witherspoon initiated a corner blitz and released the ball from Patriots quarterback Drake Maye mid-throw. Uchenna Nwosu grabbed it in stride and raced 45 yards to the end zone, sealing Seattle’s 29-13 victory.

The fact that the league’s best defense was able to punctuate this moment, more than a decade in the making, with an interception while Super Bowl XLIX hero Malcolm Butler looked on made the Seahawks’ revenge all the sweeter. “They lived up to the dark side today,” Seattle head coach Mike Macdonald said of his defense. “This will go down in the history books.”

It seems like every great Seahawks defense deserves a clever nickname to live up to its reputation. At its peak in the 2010s, the Legion of Boom was the most feared gang in the NFL. This year, the dark side has taken over this torch. As references to geek history suggest, both of these defenses have proven to be rough, relentless, and ready to be brought down at any moment.

Retracing the Legion of Boom arc and winning the grand prize, The Dark Side is also primed for a few sequels. The Seahawks not only have youth and space on their side, but also continuity under longtime general manager John Schneider. His speed and ability to put together a championship-caliber defense in Macdonald’s second year, after stripping the roster down to studs, constitutes one of the NFL’s all-time renovations.

The teardown began in 2022, when Schneider shipped quarterback Russell Wilson, a mainstay of the franchise’s Super Bowl victory 12 years ago, to Denver in exchange for linebackers Boye Mafe and Derick Hall, a 2023 draft pick who became Witherspoon, then followed it with a late-season trade for tackle Leonard Williams.

In 2024, Schneider made an even more difficult decision, replacing Pete Carroll, his collaborator in 137 regular-season wins and two Super Bowl appearances, with Macdonald (then the Ravens’ defensive coordinator), a move that bucked the trend of hiring offensive assistants.

Schneider didn’t stop there, trading for linebacker Ernest Jones IV that same year while spending the team’s first-round pick on standout University of Texas nose tackle Byron Murphy II. For a coup de grace, in 2025, Schneider added Pro Bowl passer DeMarcus Lawrence to energize Macdonald’s swarming defensive schemes.

“Even before I got here, Mike was doing special things with this team, special things with this defense,” Lawrence said heading into the game. “I’ve been able to see it from afar. Now, just being here and seeing the creative mind that he has, the way he prepares all of us to play and chase the quarterback, it’s really amazing.”

Every move paid off Sunday as the Dark Side held New England scoreless in the fourth quarter and hammered Maye 11 times — including a brutal second-quarter sack by rookie defensive tackle Rylie Mills, a fifth-round pick out of Notre Dame, with New England’s 310-pound guard Jared Wilson caught squarely in the middle. (On social media, many onlookers wondered if “flogging a Drake” had become a Super Bowl rite.) The Seahawks held the league’s second-best offense to its second-lowest point total of the season, while Maye, a regular-season MVP favorite, turned the ball over three times and posted his third-worst QB rating of the year.

The defensive effort — buoyed by a masterclass on special teams, an MVP performance from running back Kenneth Walker III and steady if unspectacular quarterback play from Sam Darnold — was easily the most lopsided defensive display of the Super Bowl since the Legion of Boom throttled Peyton Manning and the Broncos in February 2014. It reduced another politically charged edition of the show, this one fueled by Bad Bunny’s halftime set, to a standard blowout.

And yet, despite all the obvious dark side comparisons to their ancestors, they have been particularly reluctant to trade on that pedigree. Unlike the Legion of Boom, which was littered with local blue-chip prospects, many members of Seattle’s current defense arrived with something to prove, having been overlooked and undervalued before Schneider and Macdonald handed them over to Aden Durde – himself away from England..

Safety Julian Love, who spent years buried on the New York Giants’ depth chart before Seattle drafted him in 2023, quickly became a 100-plus tackle force under Macdonald and Durde. Lawrence, long among the league’s best passers, saw his star fade in Dallas as the Cowboys defense reconfigured itself around linebacker Micah Parsons.

When Lawrence joined the Seahawks last March, he seemed to do so with some reluctance and a touch of nostalgia about what he left behind. “A change of scenery is always a good thing,” he said, “but Dallas is my home. My family lives there. I’ll be here forever, but I know for sure I won’t win a Super Bowl there. So yeah. We’re here.”

Last week, Williams revealed that he, Lawrence, Jones and colleague Jarran Reed — on his second Hawks tour after brief stops in Kansas City and Green Bay — came up with the Dark Side nickname during a midseason bus ride. They wanted to distinguish themselves from the Legion of Boom and leaned into the menacing ambiance of the Pacific Northwest winter.

But their reference to Star Wars doesn’t evoke the same feelings as the New England nickname. The Patriots of the Tom Brady-Bill Belichick era were likened to an evil empire comparable to that of the New York Yankees. But under Maye and head coach Mike Vrabel, they have become eerily Jedi-like: principled, disciplined and almost likable in a way that defies the old narrative.

Seattle’s dark side, on the other hand, appears to be made up of actual Sith Lords who rule with emotion while beating their opponents into submission. But because they have overcome so much, including the shadow of those old Boston tyrants, we can’t help but admire these new iron oppressors.

“They’re obviously the best team we’ve played this year,” Vrabel said of the Seahawks after Sunday’s game. “We had a really, really good year and one that I’m proud of. This game is not a reflection of our year. But we lost and got beat and outplayed and outplayed. Give them credit.”

After an intense shower of confetti, the Seahawks cracked beers and puffed cigars in the locker room — a marked contrast to 2014, when I watched them spend the aftermath of their Super Bowl victory complaining about failing to shut out the Broncos. But their victory this year was a sunny scene for a group that embraces the dark side, and a clear reminder that the moniker is all about fun — even if the misery they inflict on their opponents still isn’t.