Seahawks in danger of letting playoff spot slip away

The Seattle Seahawks 41-35 loss to the Dallas Cowboys on Thursday night not only extended their current losing streak to three consecutive games, it also dropped them to 6-6 and into a very shaky spot in the NFC playoff race.

It is not going to get any easier for them in the coming weeks.

That is bad news for their suddenly fading playoff hopes. 

After losing to Dallas on Thursday, the Seahawks now face a back-to-back stretch of games where they will have to play at San Francisco (who just beat them 31-13 on Thanksgiving) and at home against the top-seed Philadelphia Eagles. It is not much of a stretch to imagine that Seattle could lose both of those games and find themselves in a potential five-game losing streak. 

It was only a little more than a month ago that Seattle was 5-2 and sitting atop the NFC West standings looking like a playoff certainty. 

That was when everything started to fall apart.

They were blown out by Baltimore, barely snuck by Washington, and then started their current losing streak against the Rams, 49ers and Cowboys. 

The problem for Seattle isn't just its stretch of bad football or the upcoming schedule. It is all of those things combined with the fact that the Rams and Green Bay Packers are starting to trend in the opposite direction and are playing their way back into contention. Both of those teams are not only playing better football than Seattle right now, they also both have significantly easier schedules, including the Packers who play one of the league's easiest remaining schedules by opponent winning percentage. 

For Seattle, it is a perfect storm of a defense that has consistently gotten worse all season, and some major regression from quarterback Geno Smith from his 2022 performance. Geno had a nice bounce-back game in the loss to Dallas, but he'll now need to keep that performance up against some of the best teams in the league.

It will probably take nine wins to secure a playoff spot in the NFC. That means Seattle will have to win three of its remaining five games against San Francisco, Philadelphia, Tennessee, Pittsburgh and Arizona. That is far from a guarantee, especially the way it is playing throughout the month of November.