Last season, Seattle beat the Patriots (23-20), Falcons (34-14) and Jets (26-21) on the road in 10 a.m. PT kickoffs. In the last 24 early kickoffs, Seattle has won 19 of those matchups. The travel from the West Coast out to the east, according to Leonard Williams is tougher than the other way around.
"For me it's a lot harder going west to east for sure," he said. "When you're traveling east to west, you still leave the day before because you're gaining time. You get back really late though. So the recovery after kind of sucked. But once I started playing for Seahawks, that was my first time ever learning teams would travel two days before and it is tough. You don't get adjusted to the time change and things like that. But I mean, we've been making it work."
Like Williams said, when traveling out east, Seattle, since they're out west, travel two days before a game, meaning leaving on a Friday before a Sunday game. This gives the players some time to try to get their body clocks adjusted and ready for a 1:00 p.m. ET kickoff that feels more like a 10 a.m. PT kickoff for them.
Despite it being tough, the Seahawks seemed to have found a road process that works for them. And traveling to an opponent's stadium also adds in extra juice too.
"Because we're in enemy territory, because we're traveling, because we have all these things going against us, sometimes we have no choice but to come together and just know that it's us against the world type of feeling," Williams said. "And I think in those moments it just makes us play together as a team."
While the road record had been very good, the same can't be said about the home record and that is something that is top of mind for players and coaches alike.
"It is definitely something that we've been trying to figure out," Williams said. "Definitely something that we owe it to our fans, we owe it to our stadium. I'm definitely tired of seeing other fans and jerseys and stuff like that in the stadium, but we can't blame the stadium or the fans for that. It's like we have to take accountability and we haven't been doing a good enough job of winning at home, so we're trying to figure it out."