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Unsurprisingly, a lot of people are going to be down on the Seattle Seahawks following a 14-5 loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers this week. Lest we forget the same people had the Seahawks as the consensus best team in the NFL a week ago after easily beating the Philadelphia Eagles (and two weeks after beating the Patriots in New England), and were without three major defensive starters and their best offensive lineman, or that all of those players could be back when they host the Carolina Panthers this week ... But when it comes to Power Rankings well, that’s just the nature of an arbitrary and ultimately meaningless system of ranking your opinions.
I strongly encourage you to read John Fraley’s ranking system that will be out later today and thinks things through a little bit more than the average writer.
That being said, the consensus for Seattle after falling to 7-3-1 was that there were only three teams better than them now: The Dallas Cowboys, the Patriots, and the Oakland Raiders. But that’s just an average. According to Reddit’s aggregate power rankings, SB Nation, WaPo, CBS, and BR all have the Seahawks at sixth or worse. Yahoo! has them at five. For attention, or just to push an agenda, Pete Prisco has pushed them down to 8th. Seattle is aided by the fact that USA Today still has them at two and that none of the other teams behind them have that one high ranking to push them up; nobody has the Kansas City Chiefs above four, surprisingly.
It’s easy to understand why people would be annoyed that the Seahawks are at two. It would also be easy to understand how Seattle could win their next five games and be 12-3-1 and in the top three of every ranking by season’s end. It doesn’t really matter either way.