Home field is an advantage only if you make it matter.
It didn’t matter for the Philadelphia Eagles, Carolina Panthers and Jacksonville Jaguars, home teams that tumbled in the wild-card round. It didn’t matter in nearly half (46.3%) of all NFL regular-season games this season, either.
Heck, does it matter in an era where rising prices boot blue-collar fans from stadiums? Where replay reviews prevent persuasive crowds from coaxing calls? Where season-ticket holders sell prime seats for pretty pennies? Where road fans have easy access to travel and tickets? Where quarterbacks use silent counts and teams pipe in crowd noise during practice? Maybe home-field advantage doesn’t matter much at all.
But in Seattle? It’s supposed to matter here more than anywhere. Here, where fans earned a game ball from Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren after forcing 11 false starts against the Giants in 2005. Here, where fans once unglued so aggressively that Marshawn Lynch’s 67-yard steamrolling of the New Orleans Saints registered as an actual earthquake. Here, where the Legion of Boom went 34-6 from 2012-16. Here, where the 12s wear that number as a not-so-silent vow.
Here, where the Seahawks are 6-0 in playoff games as the NFC’s No. 1 seed, with the seventh kicking off Saturday at Lumen Field.
In 2017, ESPN reporter Bill Barnwell used nearly three decades of data — particularly a team’s point differential between home and road games — to declare Seattle’s home-field advantage the NFL’s best.
The 12s have a reputation to maintain.
Or reclaim.
In recent years, that reputation has ridden a roller coaster. The Seahawks went 16-19 at home from 2021-24, including 3-6 in coach Mike Macdonald’s debut season. After a 31-10 drubbing by Buffalo last October at Lumen Field, then-Seahawks quarterback Geno Smith said: “Their fans travel well. It was really loud in there and kind of felt like we were on the road at times.”
The next morning, ESPN mouthpiece Pat McAfee took it several steps further, saying, “The Seattle Seahawks fan base, the 12th Man or whatever, it’s not real anymore.”
I say to you — the 12 who refused to sell their ticket for a bag of uncaring cash; the dad who spent a slice of salary to sit a mile from the football with his son or daughter; the fan with old eyes and knees that never stop him, who keeps coming back; the kid who got a Jaxon Smith-Njigba jersey for Christmas and is too young to know this column is also printed on paper:
Come Saturday, you get to show the world how real you are.
You get to make the Seahawks’ home-field advantage matter.
The team is also taking measures to make that happen. This week, the Seahawks sent notices to some season-ticket holders whose tickets for Saturday’s game are available on resale sites, warning that their season tickets could be revoked if they use them primarily for resale purposes.
The emails stated in part: “To avoid any impact to your renewal eligibility, we ask that you remove your resale listing and ensure your tickets are used by another 12. We encourage you to distribute your tickets directly to friends, family members, neighbors, or community groups that will help us pack Lumen Field with blue and green.”
Not that home fans alone will beat the 49ers. It’ll take an efficient (read: not disastrous) day from quarterback Sam Darnold to do that. It’ll take an increasingly reliable running game. It’ll take a defense that swarms San Francisco signal caller Brock Purdy (again) and bottles up do-everything running back Christian McCaffrey.
It’ll also take a defense that communicates effectively despite the decibels. After all, the Seahawks surrendered an average of 14.4 points on the road in the regular season … and 20.3 points at home.
“We know that our home crowd is a weapon,” Seahawks safety Julian Love said. “But on defense, it affects our communication, it being so loud. So we fine-tune it. I’m sure you guys are out there at practice when they have all 17 speakers blasting. I’m not a fan of that. But we just work it all week. We know that (home crowd) is an advantage, but we have to make it an advantage.”
Just ask Jarran Reed.
In the defensive lineman and veteran leader’s first five seasons (2016-20) in Seattle, the Seahawks went an enviable 30-13 at home. After spending the 2021 and 2022 seasons in Kansas City and Green Bay, respectively, Reed returned to Seattle in 2023.
The Seahawks went 8-10 in Reed’s next 18 home games, culminating in a season-opening 17-13 thud against these same 49ers on Sept. 7. It was Seattle’s seventh loss at Lumen Field in its last eight tries.
After which, rows of red jerseys remained in an otherwise empty stadium, while Reed declined to blame the loss on rust or fatigue from a long offseason.
“We practice for almost three hours. We do that for a reason,” Reed said, after San Francisco possessed the ball for nearly 38 minutes and ran 22 more offensive plays than the Seahawks. “That’s part of the game. This is what we’re paid to do, and we have to handle our job.”
He paused, then added for punctuation: “We’ve got to win at home. Point blank, period.”
The Seahawks have gone 6-1 at home since.
It’ll take two more wins at Lumen Field to reach the franchise’s fourth Super Bowl. It’ll take you, too.
“It’s everything,” tight end AJ Barner said of the opportunity to bring playoff football back to Lumen Field. “It’s the vision we’ve had since we got here. To do it in front of our home crowd, we know what it is. We know it’s going to be loud, and it’s an advantage for us.”