What’s the most disappointing Seahawks season in team history?

We’re entering the 48th season in existence for the Seattle Seahawks, and it’s safe to say that over the past two decades we’ve had a lot of enjoyable seasons, even if not all of them resulted in a deep playoff run and only one of them led to a Super Bowl championship. But through Seahawks history and including more recent years, there have been some clunkers that have left fans disappointed.

This is a discussion post inspired by Seattle Sports 710’s article on the most disappointing years for each Seattle major sports franchise, as well as the Washington Huskies men’s basketball and football teams. The word “disappointing” can hold different meaning to different people, so your answers a very much up to your own interpretation of what you’d anticipated prior to and during the season.

For instance, the 1992 team had a great defense and pretty much the worst passing offense the NFL has ever seen. They didn’t even suck badly enough to get Drew Bledsoe, either. Then you have the 2004 team, which under-delivered off the back of a 10-6 season in which they went unbeaten at home and took the favored Green Bay Packers to overtime at Lambeau Field. Something about a coin toss and some words from Matt Hasselbeck transpired, and the rest is history. Seattle started fast out of the gates at 3-0, winning as many road games in two weeks (2) as they did the whole of 2003. Then there was the epic collapse against the St. Louis Rams, a crash back to .500, and another collapse against the Dallas Cowboys on national TV, and of course the Shaun Alexander vs. Curtis Martin rushing title controversy.

Fittingly, the season ended with a dropped pass by Bobby Engram in the end zone. Dropped passes plagued the Seahawks that entire season, and the playoff win drought continued for another year. Luckily, 2005 was a truly special year.

Then you have the 2008 season and the Mike Holmgren farewell tour, which turned into a season from hell. Nate Burleson tore his ACL in Week 1, Matt Hasselbeck’s decline started that year, Walter Jones had his own swan song due to injuries, and a team that had won four straight NFC West titles crashed to 4-12.

I don’t have to say much about the 2017 team that you don’t already know yourself (or from reading the article). Lastly, the 2020 season was a bigger disappointment to me than the 2021 mess that marked the actual end of the Russell Wilson era. It looked like “Let Russ Cook” was working (when in hindsight, given the insanely inflated numbers in this COVID season, it might have been a bit of a mirage), the team was 5-0 for the first time in franchise history, and obviously they made the big Jamal Adams trade beforehand. The passing game came down to Earth, the defense remained pretty awful until they traded for Carlos Dunlap and started playing really poor offenses, but the good news was they still won the NFC West at 12-4. Then they got beaten down by the Rams in their own building in the Wild Card game, and that was just a lousy end to a season that obviously peaked in October.

You can pick a bad team you thought would be good, or a good team that didn’t perform up to par in the playoffs, a bad team you knew would be bad but you didn’t think it would be unbearably awful, or whatever else suits your vision of disappointment.

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