“if we beat philly, all we have to do is sweep the Cards and then go 3-3 the rest of the way! that’s reasonable, right?”

my co workers are looking at me like i’m high, but seriously, i think it could work out. the Cards have been playing out of their minds this year, and our (should be top ten) defense has sucked. Can we hope for a little regression to the mean?

With him in (and healthy), I think a motivated Hawks team has a shot at Philly.

Otherwise… ugh.

I think this game is more about the defense. The PHI offense scares the crap out of me, but if the defense is up to the task, we can win this game. I’m far more concerned with their RB, QB, and WR speed than I am about missing Matt. Seneca can give us a solid game. Can the defense vs. this team?

As it has been said before…a “W” in the home SF game would look pretty damn good right now. We always seem to have one game that we should have won that bites us in the ass at the end (middle) of the year. See @ Arizona last year….

we’ll need some patented Philadelphia underachievement, or McNabb/Westbrook to come out.

I’m not yet ready to believe this is a significantly different team then the one that the Giants beat down or Green Bay sort of drooled over in a lazy fashion.

it would probably take….. well, a win over Philadelphia for me to start believing.

But at the same time, the St. Louis Rams have the same 2 games left against the Cards, as well as an easier schedule than us. Hell, they went 2-2 against the NFC East. The whole East has 4 total losses outside their division, and two of them are to the Rams.

ARI
NYJ
SF
CHI
MIA
ARI
SEA
SF
ATL

Taking out the opponents both teams have left, the Rams have to face SF twice, Chicago, and Atlanta. We have to face Eagles, Redskins, Cowboys, and Pats. If anything, the emergence of Donnie Avery, the three very good opponents the Rams just beat or played close, and the way they are playing defense makes them look every bit our equal at the very least. The 23-16 loss to the Pats was without Steven Jackson, and they still looked very competitive.

coostandings.com has the Seahawks playoff odds listed way up at 16.7%. I’m pretty sure that coolstandings’ model projects the outcomes of future games using a first order pythagorean wins formula — essentially factoring in points scored and points allowed to determine how good a team is — so it’s not as sophisticated as DVOA. I also know that at the beginning of the season coolstandings factored data from last season in to their projections, and I’m not sure if they are still doing that at this point in the season. If they are, it would obviously bias the results in the Seahawks favor.

As has been pointed out by myself and others here, if the Seahawks can win the two Arizona games it would make up our current two game deficit and give us the tie-break over Arizona. Then Seattle would have to at least match Arizona’s record for the remaining seven games — and hold off STL and SF — to win the division, feasibly with a final record of 9-7 or even 8-8.

DVOA loves the Cards and hates the Seahawks this year, so that should probably tell us two things:
1) It is rather optimistic for us to think the Seahawks will beat the Cardinals twice, and
2) If the Seahawks do pull these two upsets, we should see the DVOA of each team regress heavily towards the mean, signifying that the race for the division would likely be closely contested in this scenario.

I would tend to think that the Seahawks’ chances of making the playoffs are somewhere between the 16.7% of coolstandings and the 1.9% of footballoutsiders. I would put their odds perhaps in the 5-7% range, though I am admittedly pulling these numbers out my ass. However, it is interesting — given the small sample sizes and relative difficulty of statistically modeling football — that two rational and objective models can yield such different results for the same team.

Any chance we trade either of our Kickers to the Saints? Seems like they are ripe for that, having Gramatica on IR and just cutting Melhaff.