Seahawks stifle Drake Maye, Patriots to capture Super Bowl LX

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — The NFL’s best team spent the 2025 season hiding in plain sight. Led by defense and special teams, armed with a quarterback no one believed in and led by a 38-year-old second-year coach whose personality remains opaque to almost everyone outside his building, the Seattle Seahawks kept their heads down and kept working.

“Loose and focused” was the mantra Mike Macdonald established for his Seahawks, and they lived those words until Sunday night, when they smothered the New England Patriots 29-13 to win the second Super Bowl title in franchise history.

“We love each other,” said aptly named Seahawks safety Julian Love, who threw one of two interceptions of Patriots quarterback Drake Maye in the fourth quarter that sealed the victory on a dominant night for Seattle’s defense. “We’re always messing around, we never take ourselves too seriously, but when that whistle blows and it’s between the white lines, that’s when it’s serious. When there’s work to be done, we get to work.”

That’s exactly what they did Sunday night against a Patriots offense that, frankly, hasn’t played very well all postseason. Maye had been sacked five times in each of the Patriots’ first three playoff games, and Seattle one-upped the Los Angeles Chargers, Houston Texans and Denver Broncos by sacking him six times in the Super Bowl. Seattle’s defensive front came at Maye in waves, cutting off any chance the Patriots offense had of getting into any rhythm and making the game go the way it wanted.

“That group up front, they knew they had to play the most unselfish game they’ve ever played,” Seahawks defensive coordinator Aden Durde said. “Someone was going to get fired, and it didn’t matter who.”

Byron Murphy, who had seven sacks in the regular season, had two on Sunday. But the others came from unlikely places. Derick Hall matched his regular season sack total with two. Fifth-round rookie Rylie Mills, who played in just four regular-season games and had no sacks in any of them, had one. And the other went to cornerback Devon Witherspoon, who was asked to blitz a lot in this game and did so enthusiastically.

“Just from watching film and studying, we knew how their tackles were going to perform in pass protection, and we know they struggled in the playoffs,” Witherspoon said. “So we were going to attack them.”

The Patriots were ill-equipped to combat Seattle’s strength, and the Seahawks played like they knew it. Eight of the Patriots’ first nine possessions ended with a punt, and the other ended with a knee-down to close the first half. By the end of the third quarter, the Patriots had 78 yards of offense and as many first downs – five – as the Seahawks had sacks.

It was a triumph for defensive player Macdonald, who is as good at building pressure as any defensive coach in the league and put on a masterclass. Love said they were still installing new parts through Saturday, which is not unusual for Macdonald.

“He’ll follow his game plan until he gets it done,” defensive lineman Leonard Williams said. “We sometimes put on a new play on Saturday morning, we sometimes put on a new play on Sunday at halftime. DeMarcus Lawrence says you have to have a Harvard education to play in this defense because you’re constantly learning new things. But I think we trust Mike and his genius and it works.”

Preseason expectations didn’t shine in Seattle like they did with the Los Angeles Rams and San Francisco 49ers, two more well-known offensive stalwarts in their own division. As recently as mid-December, it was the division rival Rams who were being hailed as the Super Bowl favorites. Seattle’s wild Week 16 win against these Rams was considered random, even though it put them in complete control of the NFC playoff race.

Seattle’s offense has not been consistent throughout the season. The running game took months to get going, and quarterback Sam Darnold struggled with the kind of performance lull that fueled lingering doubts from the outside about his ability to deliver in big games. The Minnesota Vikings let him go after leading them to a 14-3 season in 2024, and Seattle picked him up on the free agent market for the reasonable price of $33.5 million per year.

But Darnold delivered a monster performance in the NFC Championship Game against the Rams, proving the doubters wrong and confirming the Seahawks’ belief that what he did in Minnesota was no fluke. He struggled Sunday night against the Patriots defense, but he was finally able to beat the New England blitz with a fourth-quarter touchdown pass to AJ Barner that made the score 19-0.

“I didn’t have my best today, but the team supported me,” Darnold said. “The defense and special teams had our backs, and we just played like we always play.”

Seattle’s special teams – a key part of its success all season – are also worth mentioning. Punter Michael Dickson was an absolute weapon all night when the game was all about field position and field goals.

They also kept running, even when it wasn’t working, and it got better as the season went on. Even after Zach Charbonnet tore his ACL in the playoff game against the 49ers, the running game had elevated to the point where Kenneth Walker III could carry the load. And after rushing for 135 yards on 27 carries, it was Walker who was named Super Bowl MVP.

“The K-9 is special, man!” said Love. “To see how hard he works and the time he puts in, and to see him win the Super Bowl MVP, it’s just crazy.”

However, he couldn’t get into the end zone, which is why the score was still stubbornly 12-0 at the end of the third quarter. But it was the Seahawks’ fifth sack – and Hall’s second of the game – that turned the Super Bowl on its head for good. On third-and-6 from his own 44, Maye dropped back to pass and, as was the case for most of the night, found no one open. Hall crossed the line to sack him and force Maye into the seventh and costliest fumble of the season. Murphy fell on the ball and Seattle was in business at the New England 37. Five plays later, Darnold beat an all-out blitz and found a wide-open Barner in the end zone for the first touchdown of the game.

“I’m just sticking with what we’re doing, what we’ve been doing all year,” Williams said. “We said, ‘All we have to do is be us, but we have to be us.’ And that’s what we did. When we have guys performing their role to the best of their ability, we can’t be stopped. »

It may not be the greatest Super Bowl ever, but the Seahawks — to paraphrase their coach’s truly viral moment — don’t care. This is a franchise that traded away their last two starting quarterbacks when they wanted more money than the team thought they were worth and pivoted to Darnold. This is the franchise that left a legendary Super Bowl-winning coach after 11 winning seasons in the previous 12 years because it felt it needed new defensive ideas to keep pace with the high-powered offenses in its division. The Seahawks believe in their culture, their roster building principles and their ability to scout and identify top talent in the draft. All of these things were on display Sunday evening.

So it was an affirmation for Seahawks general manager John Schneider and his front office, who actively pursued Macdonald two Januarys ago to replace longtime coach Pete Carroll, and for Macdonald, the young defensive genius whose “loose and focused” mantra builds on the culture Carroll established in Seattle for years, but also transformed it into something fresh and new. Macdonald told his team in the offseason that they were embarking on a new program and needed to “become” the type of team that could win the biggest games.

“Loose and focused” was the Seahawks’ way of doing things. It’s a phrase they use a lot in the building, where competitive shadowboxing took over the locker room at one point this season and players use words like “love” and “brotherhood” when talking about how they came together around Macdonald’s message during the offseason.

“It takes leadership to be OK with ‘loose and focused,’” Love said. “Not every coach will appreciate us being around them shadowboxing or messing around. But this staff and the leadership of this team understand that when the horn sounds, if guys are paying attention to detail, then everything is fine. You don’t have to control everything a player does every day.”

Macdonald’s defensive acumen and culture were rewarded Sunday night with a Super Bowl title that validated everything about how the Seahawks run their franchise. They may have gone 12 years between Super Bowl titles, but they always remained competitive and never lost sight of who they were and what they stood for. Even their Super Bowl appearance – a first for the vast majority of their team – didn’t shake them.

“I think it’s been an advantage for us all season,” Macdonald said Wednesday. “Every time we go through a new experience together, knowing that we have principles that we want to live by and that those are sort of our guiding lights in terms of how we want to operate and make our decisions. At some point you’re going to get distracted, and that’s OK, but it’s about how relentless can we be about getting back to center, getting back to the present moment.”

The result was the moment they all spent their entire lives working for – a moment that will forever live in franchise and NFL history. Coward. Concentrate. Champions.