Seattle Seahawks cornerback Devon Witherspoon (21) hits New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye (10) as he throws the football during Super Bowl LX at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, on Feb. 8, 2026. (Tribune News Service)
Seattle Seahawks cornerback Devon Witherspoon (21) hits New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye (10) as he throws the football during Super Bowl LX at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, on Feb. 8, 2026. (Tribune News Service)
Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba celebrates after a 31-27 win over the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC Championship Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, at Lumen Field in Seattle. (Tribune News Service)
Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba celebrates after a 31-27 win over the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC Championship Sunday, Jan. 25, 2026, at Lumen Field in Seattle. (Tribune News Service)
Seattle Seahawks cornerback Devon Witherspoon (21) hits New England Patriots quarterback Drake Maye (10) as he throws the football during Super Bowl LX at Levi's Stadium in Santa Clara, California, on Feb. 8, 2026. (Tribune News Service)
Bob Condotta
SEATTLE – Fifty-nine teams have won a Super Bowl and tried to repeat that feat the following year.
Nine have done so.
Of the 50 that haven’t — including the nine teams that won consecutive Super Bowls and were unsuccessful in winning a third — no team has come closer to repeating than the 2014 Seattle Seahawks.
Cheap shot?
Well, if you’re looking for lessons from what the Seahawks didn’t do in 2014 in failing to repeat, most observers would likely respond, “Yeah, just don’t throw the ball from the 1-yard line and hand it to Marshawn, instead.
Conventional wisdom might say that if Mike Macdonald is lucky enough to face that situation Feb. 14 at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, Calif. — the site of Super Bowl 61 — he’ll tell offensive coordinator Brian Fleury to call anything but a slant pass.
Conversely, how better to exorcise every Seahawk demon than getting to the 1 with a chance to win and repeat, and this time throwing it and completing it?
One can dream.
Certainly, you might be asking, there must be lessons that can be learned from teams that not only got back to the Super Bowl but won it, which is the task facing the 2026 Seahawks?
Indeed there are.
As a reminder, here are the nine teams to repeat — the 1967 Green Bay Packers, 1973 Miami Dolphins, 1975 Pittsburgh Steelers, 1979 Steelers, 1989 San Francisco 49ers, 1993 Dallas Cowboys, 1998 Denver Broncos, 2004 New England Patriots and 2023 Kansas City Chiefs. No team has won three in a row.
Here are some things those teams had and challenges they were able to overcome to get to the repeat promised land.
Beating the odds
Most who have done it will tell you that winning one Super Bowl is hard enough, let alone trying to win two.
Of the four major men’s North American professional sports — NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL — repeating in the NFL has proved as difficult as any.
Consider that in the 60 years that the Super Bowl has been played, there have been 14 seasons in which there has been a repeat NHL champ and 12 seasons in which there has been a repeat NBA champ.
Oddly enough, given the current debate over how having no salary cap is ruining its competitive balance, the only sport to have fewer repeat champs in that time is MLB, with just eight teams successfully defending their World Series titles in the last 60 years.
Those numbers show that in any sport, repeating is simply a tough chore.
Not only does every team feature different personnel every year, but factors such as injuries, schedule strength and fortunate bounces of the ball weigh heavily in ways no one can predict ahead of time — just think how different things might have been if Zach Charbonnet doesn’t pick up the ball for the two-pointer against the Rams?
The last team to repeat — the 2023 Chiefs — needed a missed 44-yard field goal by the Bills in a divisional round game and had to survive overtime in the Super Bowl to beat the 49ers with three seconds left.
And consider all the Seahawks had to battle in 2014 just to get back to the Super Bowl, notably pulling off one of the biggest comebacks in playoff history from 16 points down to beat Green Bay in the NFC title game?
Along with the nine teams to repeat, seven other Super Bowl champs have gotten back to the big game the following season and lost (1978 Dallas Cowboys, 1983 Washington, 1997 Green Bay Packers, 2014 Seahawks, 2017 New England Patriots, 2020 Chiefs and 2024 Chiefs).
That’s 27.18% of Super Bowl champs who made it back and 15.25% who’ve made it back and won it. Not impossible, but you’re not going to make money betting on it to happen.
Keeping the band together
Increasing the challenge for the 2026 Seahawks is that getting back to and winning another Super Bowl has only gotten more difficult since the salary cap was instituted in 1994.
Only three teams have repeated in the 32 seasons since the cap came into being, which was a year after the modern free-agency system was put into place.
Consider the famous 1972-73 Dolphins.
They went undefeated in ‘72, still the only NFL team to pull off that feat, returned every player who started in that Super Bowl the following season and won the Super Bowl again in ‘73 with a team many felt was better. The starting defensive 11 in the Super Bowl was the same each season. The Green Bay, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Dallas dynasties had similar numbers (22 Steelers were a part of all four Super Bowl winning teams from 1974-79).
Such continuity is a lot harder to maintain with the cap and free agency.
The three teams to repeat in the cap era had some semblance of continuity. The ‘98 Broncos started 16 of the same players in the Super Bowl each year, while the ‘04 Patriots and ‘23 Chiefs had 14 of the same starters.
The 2014 Seahawks returned 17 of the players listed as starters from the team that beat Denver in the Super Bowl.
The Seahawks so far have beaten the odds when it comes to keeping a Super Bowl team together. They return all but two players listed as starters for the Super Bowl — game MVP running back Kenneth Walker III and safety Coby Bryant.
That’s tied for the third most of a defending Super Bowl champ in the last 20 years behind only the 2021 Tampa Bay Bucs and 2011 Green Bay Packers (neither of those teams got back to the Super Bowl, losing in the playoffs, though they did finish 13-4 and 15-1, respectively).
Two key rotational players departed via free agency — rush end Boye Mafe and cornerback Riq Woolen.
The Seahawks have all but six players who got snaps in the Super Bowl (losing receiver Dareke Young to free agency and releasing running back Cam Akers).
The Seahawks were aggressive in securing two foundational young players for the next six years — cornerback Devon Witherspoon and receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba — making each as of this writing the highest-paid player in NFL history at their position. They also signed rush end Derick Hall to a three-year extension in the spring.
Those are the kind of deals they hope will help maintain a locker-room culture many players cited last season as uncommonly close and a key to winning the Lombardi Trophy.
During his appearance on the team’s pregame radio show on Seattle Sports 710 before the first preseason game against Dallas, general manager John Schneider called re-signing Witherspoon and Smith-Njigba — who were both under contract for two more years — “extremely important” and part of the plan prioritizing which players were most vital to keep.
“You have to be very careful coming off a championship run there like we just had and not get too emotional about your decisions and try to keep making our decisions the way we would normally,” Schneider said. “… But obviously you’ve got to keep moving forward. To get all those guys back was a big deal for us. This league is about making hard decisions after every season and this is no different whether you win a world championship or you don’t.”
Starting a Hall of Fame quarterback
One thing every team to repeat as Super Bowl champs had on its roster is a quarterback either in the Hall of Fame or who someday will be.
Here’s the list of QBs to lead teams to repeat titles:
* Bart Starr, Green Bay (Super Bowls 1-2);
* Bob Griese, Miami (Super Bowls 7-8);
* Terry Bradshaw, Pittsburgh (Super Bowls 9-10, 13-14);
* Joe Montana, San Francisco (Super Bowls 23-24);
* Troy Aikman, Dallas (Super Bowls 27-28);
* John Elway, Denver (Super Bowls 32-33);
* Tom Brady, New England (Super Bowls 38-39);
* Patrick Mahomes, Kansas City (Super Bowls 57-58).
All but Brady and Mahomes are already in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and those two someday will obviously be.
Consider that the list of QBs who got to two in a row without winning is almost as daunting — Fran Tarkenton, Minnesota (Super Bowls 8-9); Roger Staubach, Dallas (Super Bowls 7-8), Joe Theismann, Washington (Super Bowls 17-18); Jim Kelly, Buffalo (Super Bowls 25 through 28); Brett Favre, Green Bay (Super Bowls 31-32) and Seattle’s Russell Wilson (Super Bowls 48-49).
Tarkenton, Staubach, Kelly and Favre are all in the Hall, while Theismann won an MVP award and might have made it to the HOF had his career started a little earlier (he began his career with three years in the CFL) and not ended abruptly with a horrific leg injury at age 36.
Then there’s Wilson, whose HOF credentials are hotly debated now but for much of his 10 years in Seattle, he seemed a shoo-in and might still be if he’d gotten that one yard in Glendale.
Sam Darnold — a backup just three years ago who might never have become a full-time starter again after flaming out in Carolina — has a chance to join the list not only of those to get to two in a row but to repeat.
Will he prove up to the task? Consider that one of the biggest questions and storylines of the Seahawks’ 2026 season. After last season, there’s obviously no reason to say he can’t.
Dominating on defense
Along with a Hall of Fame QB, one thing every team that repeated had was one of the best defenses in the NFL.
Every team to repeat ranked eighth or better in fewest points allowed, and seven of the nine were in the top three.
Five of the teams ranked higher on defense than they did on offense in the year they repeated — ‘67 Packers (third defense, ninth offense), ‘73 Dolphins (first defense, fifth offense), ‘75 Steelers (second defense, fifth offense), ‘04 Patriots (second defense, fourth offense) and ‘23 Chiefs (second defense, 15th offense). The ‘93 Cowboys were second in each category.
Only the ‘79 Steelers (first offense, fifth defense), ‘89 49ers (first offense, third defense) and ‘98 Broncos (second offense, eighth defense) ranked higher in points scored than points allowed in the years they repeated.
The Seahawks should have that covered, returning all but Bryant, Mafe and Woolen of key players from a defense that allowed the fewest points in the NFL and helped give them a 246-point differential, the most by a Super Bowl champ since the 1999 Rams and tied for 13th all time.
The Seahawks brought in veteran free-agent Dante Fowler Jr. to replace Mafe, and four-year vet Ty Okada appears in line to take over for Bryant. It’s unclear yet exactly who replaces Woolen — the signings/pursuits of Trevon Diggs and Terrion Arnold made clear the uncertainty at that spot.
On paper, there’s little reason to think the play of the Seahawks defense will drop much.
After the Seahawks joint practice with the Titans in August, middle linebacker Ernest Jones IV said he thought the defense played well but not well enough in a statement that seems to set the expectation for this season.
“When I say perfection, we don’t want you to get a yard,” Jones said. “We don’t want none of that. When you do get that, it pisses us off. That’s just where my frustration is. I don’t want them to get nothing. I want it to be no bueno, no good for them.”
Embracing the challenge
To circle back to the top, what’s often the biggest obstacle in trying to repeat is finding the same desire to tackle the months of unglamorous work — offseason programs, training-camp practices, early-morning meetings going over each week’s game plan — to try to climb the mountain one more time.
Terrell Davis, a Hall of Fame running back with the Broncos on teams that won titles in 1997-98, said in an interview with The Seattle Times in 2014, when the Legion of Boom team was trying to repeat that in his experience, the second Super Bowl title season felt like “almost a sense of duty.”
“I wish I could say that they both felt the same,” Davis said. “But the second one did not feel nearly as gratifying as the first one. It just didn’t. And I mean it was night and day. … We knew we were good, we were supposed to win it and we won it. And it was like, ‘OK, we won it.’ I know you shouldn’t feel that way at all about a world championship. But it was almost like diminishing returns.
“It’s almost like eating nothing but pizza. At some point it’s not going to taste as good, even if you love it.”
Macdonald has tried to head off that feeling by framing this season as a completely new challenge and not simply attempting to repeat what the 2025 team did.
Running it forward instead of running it back, as he began saying in March.
“We’re really not saying we’re running anything back,” Macdonald said. “We’re not defending anything. We’re a new team, and we have to re-become the team that we’re destined to be.”
While there is a lot of continuity — as of the third week of August, 67 of the 91 players on the roster were with the Seahawks in 2025 — there is enough change to validate Macdonald’s assertion that this is a new team.
There’s a new offensive coordinator in Fleury, replacing Klint Kubiak (now head coach of the Raiders), a rookie first-round pick in Jadarian Price probably starting in place of Walker for the season opener against the Patriots and even a new owner.
There’s also a new team favored to win the NFC West and Super Bowl — the rival Rams, who the Seahawks managed to beat by a combined five points in two late-season clashes, one in the regular season and one in the NFC title game, one in overtime.
In moves obviously aimed at getting past the Seahawks and earning the right to play the Super Bowl on their home turf, the Rams added former Husky and two-time All-Pro cornerback Trent McDuffie and reigning NFL Defensive Player of the Year defensive end Myles Garrett via trade in the offseason to beef up a defense that ranked 10th in the NFL last year to pair with the top-ranked offense in yards gained and points scored.
Maybe that’s a good thing for the Seahawks because it gives them a more immediate hurdle to climb before facing the historical one that could await at the end of the season (and how great would it be to win a second Super Bowl title on the Rams’ field after winning the first one on the 49ers’ field?)
“We’re in a good spot because a lot of other people have done a lot of offseason stuff,” safety Julian Love said late in training camp, making an obvious reference to the team down south. “You guys know, Seattle, we don’t get the most love over here, which is perfect. It’s how we want it. It’s how last year was. With a target on our back, we embrace the challenge.
… That’s how we’re built, that’s how Mike has shaped this thing. From top to bottom, that’s how the guys operate, they want that challenge. That’s how we’re embracing this year.”