The Seahawks this year are a tale of two teams. One team is able to look elite and compete with other elite teams before spontaneously combusting in the fourth quarter. The other dominates lesser competition and tricks itself into believing they are back at Super Bowl strength.

Last night they were the latter, therefore rather than review that game, let’s worry about what lies ahead and see if Pete & Co. can recover to even make the playoffs.

As it stands right now they have five games against losing teams. Yes they play the Rams again, but that’s at home where the Rams have not been able to replicate their success against the Hawks in St. Louis. Let’s say they win those five. Among the winning teams they’ll face there’s two games versus the Cardinals, one at Minnesota and one against the Steelers at Century Link. Ben Roethlisberger is listed as questionable this week so he should recover enough to play Week 10.

At 4-2 Pittsburgh is weathering the storm while Big Ben is out and whether or not the Seahawks beat them or not depends on if they can truly solve their woes on both sides of the ball. I’ll chalk this up as a loss for now.

The Cardinals are interesting as they came into Seattle last year and won. Granted the Seahawks went to Arizona and won convincingly, but Carson Palmer was out. Arizona had to trot no.3 QB Ryan Lindley out there against the defending champs, so we really don’t know if the Seahawks can actually win against the Cardinals.

The Vikings have a 3-2 record but have not beat a winning team and were dominated Week 1 in San Francisco, by the same score Seattle beat the Niners by, 20-3. This could be a winnable game, even on the road as the Vikings are 30^th in points per game on offense, although they do have the second ranked defense in the league. They haven’t really beat a good team and likely won’t put up any points against this Seahawks defensive unit.

Based on these estimations the Seahawks’ playoff chances are weak if they come in at 9-7. If the season ended today, the Seahawks would be left out with the Giants above them plus the two wild card teams, the Vikings and Falcons. The Giants have a pretty tough schedule with at least five games against winning teams. The Vikings have at least four games against winning teams plus the Seahawks. Meanwhile the Falcons are 5-1 with only three games remaining against winning teams, so it’s likely they won’t be caught.

After their victory in the Bay Area we still don’t know what to make of the 2015 Seahawks,. They could use the victory to rip through the rest of the schedule though based on what they’ve shown 9-7 or 10-6 is their best case scenario. Unfortunately that might not be enough to give them even a chance to defend their NFC crown.

Photo credit: Flickr/Keith Allison