Seahawks Enter Last Quarter of 2021 Needing Miracle

Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll chose to focus on Seattle's past success entering the last four games of the season. Matty F. Brown explores why, then looks at how successful Carroll's Seahawks have been in the last quarter of the regular season relative to their overall winning percentage.

The Seahawks have four games of the 2021 regular season left to play. We know that, if the 5-8 team makes the postseason, they must win each of their remaining games. The statistics website FiveThirtyEight.com has Seattle’s playoff percentage at three percent; winning out increases this to 42 percent. 

Essentially, the Seahawks are heavily reliant on other teams losing.

A big week 14 result in the league was not kind to the Seahawks: the 49ers beat the Bengals, moving them two wins clear of Seattle. Ultimately, the Seahawks losing to the 6-7 Saints, 6-7 Washington and 6-7 Vikings—and subsequently not having the head-to-head tiebreakers—was, and is, massively damaging to their slim postseason hopes.

Nevertheless, rather than getting lost in the uncontrollable, head coach Pete Carroll chose to focus on this last quarter of Seattle’s schedule in his comments after Sunday’s victory over the Texans.

“No matter what the situation of the early part of the season," Carroll told Mike Salk of 710 ESPN Seattle. "Here we are entering the last four games of the year, what would we be thinking? We gotta win this game, and we gotta win the next one, we gotta win all four of them. It’s like we did last year. We have to do that again. And if that happens, we’ll see what that means and it may mean something, it may not, we may have screwed it up too much early to get anything out of that, but it wouldn’t matter what the records were.”

“You know I can’t figure out when the fourth quarter starts in a 17-game schedule but we’re gonna consider that it’s the next four and see what we can do with that,” Carroll replied post-game when asked about Seattle going on a run. “And take it as far as we can. These guys are excited. They know. They can feel it. They can see it happening. And there’s nothing to keep us from moving ahead. And so I’m really looking forward to this challenge. And seeing what we do with this last month.”

How good have the Seahawks finished in Carroll’s past decade as head coach? Very, according to Carroll.

“We’ve always finished really well, I mean you check our numbers, you know the last four games of the year have been where we’ve always been at our best,” Carroll stated in Houston.

“And I’ve been talking about it.”

In his 10 campaigns in Seattle, Carroll’s total regular season win percentage sits at 70 percent. Focusing just on the last four games lowers that win percentage figure to a still-impressive 67.5 percent.

However, removing the seasons without star quarterback Russell Wilson changes the equation. The eight years of the Carroll-Wilson partnership has led to a winning percentage of 77 in the regular season, with 75 percent of the last four games ending in wins.

So, while Carroll likes to focus on finishing strong, he has been slightly worse than his overall regular season win percentage in the last four games over the years. On a wide level, this doesn’t matter. The Seahawks have won a lot of games whatever the case.

Yet the smaller focus on purely 2021 makes the history meaningless: Seattle must win every game; even matching the average of 3-1 would not be good enough. The Seahawks will instead hope to replicate the seasons that ended with all four victories: 2012, 2014 and 2020.

“Really, because we’ve been so consistent over the years, that this is that time again and I’d love to see, after all of the stuff we’ve had to get through, if it does turn and we have a great finish."