📈 Ten plays that made Seattle's season

I have spent the past few days sorting through every football games that the Seahawks have played this season.

Well, every meaningful football game. I didn’t dip into the preseason.

I was putting together the definitive, not-at-all-subjective list of the 10 plays that put Seattle in the Super Bowl for The News Tribune.

You can read the result here:

• 10 plays that defined the Seahawks run to the Super Bowl

  By Danny O’Neil | (Hint: special teams occupies three of the top five spots)

I relied on two statistical measures: win probability and expected points added (EPA).

I also put a lot of stock into my highly calibrated and entirely personal opinion.

It occurred to me after finishing the list that I did not include the play that had the single largest impact on the single most important game of the regular season:

• Eric Dallas Saubert’s catch on the two-point conversion in overtime of the Week 16 victory over the Rams.

Two-point conversion rates in the NFL are essentially a coin flip, and that’s what ended up deciding the game.

That wasn’t the play I picked from that game, though.

In fact, the play I picked — Rashid Shaheed’s 58-yard punt return for a touchdown — wasn’t among the six biggest plays of THAT GAME in terms of win probability.

That says a lot more about the nature of win probability than it does about the importance of Shaheed’s return, though.

Win probability emphasizes big plays that happen late in very close games, and while I do not believe that Seattle would have won that game without Shaheed’s return, the fact is that even after Seattle made the two-point conversion, they were still trailing by eight and kicking the ball to a team they’d been largely unable to stop.

Seattle’s win probability went from 1% before the punt to 9% as it prepared to kickoff.

I’m not rethinking my decision.

I am, however, amazed at just how many huge emotional swings took place down the stretch of that Week 16 game, and THAT is something that win probability clearly illustrates.

There were 17 plays over the course of this Seahawks season in which win probability changed by more than 20%.

Six occurred during that Week 16 contest against the Rams.

SIX!!!!!!

The more that I think about it, the more I believe that Thursday night game against the Rams was the single most thrilling regular-season Seahawks game I’ve seen since I began covering the team in 2005.

That includes some incredible games, too. The 2005 victory over the Cowboys when Seattle scored 10 of its 13 points in the final minute, Jordan Babineaux picking off Drew Bledsoe so Josh Brown could kick a game-winning field goal on the final play.

The comebacks in Chicago in 2012 and in Houston in 2013.

Anyway, here’s the list of the nine plays that increased Seattle’s win probability by 20% or more this season:

As for the single most damaging play of Seattle’s season in terms of win probability, it’s exactly what you’d expect.

The Week 1 fumble when San Francisco’s Nick Bosa pushed Abe Lucas into Sam Darnold. The Seahawks had the ball, second-and-5 at the San Francisco 9 with 42 seconds and one timeout remaining. At that moment, the Seahawks’ win probability was pegged at 53%. When San Francisco recovered the fumble, it plummeted down to the region where only an Act of God would help you.

Here are the plays that negatively affected Seattle’s win probability by 20 percent or more:

I can put together similar charts for expected points added (EPA) if you want, but I worried that might be a little too nerdy. You can reply to the email or let me know in the comments if you want to see them.

One thing that did jump out to me in looking through this Seahawks season was the possibility that this Seahawks team is actually underrated.

They led the league in point differential despite committing the second-most turnovers in the league. The sheer absurdity of this fact is best demonstrated by the Seahawks’ Monday night victory over Houston in Week 7.

First, you need a brief explanation of EPA. This measures how much a specific play increases or decreases the likelihood of a team scoring on a given possession. It does this by taking down, distance, field position and time into consideration. This is considered the best way to measure the efficacy of a given plan, and turnovers will always result in the largest swings in EPA.

Against Houston in Week 7, the Seahawks had six different plays in that game that logged an EPA of -4 or less:

• Four turnovers, including one recovered by Houston for a touchdown.

• Two fourth-quarter conversions on fourth-and-5 and third-and-15.

The Seahawks had two plays with an EPA of 4 or more:

• Ernest Jones’s interception on the second play of the second half;

• Seattle’s stop of Houston on fourth-and-1 with just over 3 minutes left in the third quarter.

Put differently: 75 percent of the big plays were in Houston’s favor in a game where the Seahawks never trailed. In fact, Houston never even had the ball with a chance to tie in the final period.

This is a testament to how thoroughly the Seahawks defense suffocated the Texans offense.

Seattle’s dominance was even more pronounced in Week 10 against Arizona.

The Seahawks committed three turnovers that game. The Cardinals also scored two touchdowns on fourth-down conversions in the final period … which allowed them to cut the deficit to 22 points.

It’s not just that the Seahawks won 14 games while committing 28 turnovers, it’s that eight of those 14 victories were by double digits even though they committed 28 turnovers.

The Seahawks had fourth-quarter comebacks against the Colts and the Rams, but this wasn’t a Houdini act. Seattle wasn’t waiting until the last minute to pull out games in spite of the mistakes they’ve made.

Seattle spent much of this season sitting on large leads in spite of the mistakes that they made.