The Seattle Seahawks are making their return to “Thursday Night Football” and not a moment too soon, as the team – and all the 12’s out there – are looking for an opportunity to wash the bad taste of their ugly loss to the Rams out of their mouths.
Losers of three of their last four games, the bottom has started to fall out from underneath the Seahawks, who have gone from the top seed in the entire conference to third place in their own division.
Unfortunately, attempting to get things back on track won’t be a walk in the park. The Seahawks will be playing their first divisional rematch of the season as they host the Cardinals at the newly renamed Lumen Field. Regardless of what the name of the building is, the Cardinals will likely remain unphased, as they have made Seattle a bit of a home-away-from-home this year.
Arizona has won five of the last seven games in this series in the Emerald City. Its most recent victory was last year’s 27-13 slugfest, an embarrassing loss in which the Seahawks offense only crossed the 50-yard line twice all afternoon.
The peculiarity of this rivalry over the years has been the fact that the road teams seemed to win. Except this year, the Cardinals managed to defend their home turf, leaving the Seahawks in the daunting position to figure out how to follow suit for only the third time since 2012.
In fact, it was the loss to the Cardinals in Arizona which started to unravel the Seahawks this season. Instead of leaving Glendale with a solid division win and an unblemished 6-0 record, the Seahawks squandered a 10-point lead with only minutes remaining due to poor defense and untimely penalties.
Now the Seahawks are reeling and hardly feel competitive. Not only is the defense arguably worse from when these two teams met, but the offense has regressed drastically as well. Russell Wilson has turned into a turnover machine and the offense cannot run the ball due to more cluster injuries at the running back position.
The Seahawks have never lost three games in a row under Wilson, but this could very well change.