The 2025 NFL season is fully complete and the Seattle Seahawks are the last team standing. And while the fantasy football season is also over, we can still gather intel based on postseason performances for 2026. Yahoo analyst Matt Harmon shares what the two Super Bowl teams have to do to improve.
Seattle Seahawks: Nail another OC hire
The Seattle Seahawks were, in my view, the best team in the NFL for most of the 2025 season and ultimately finished that run with a Super Bowl win.
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It felt right; a season that wasn’t defined by “who had the best quarterback” but rather, who were the most well-built teams with strong fundamentals, well-designed scheme(s) — and who brought it defensively. In almost all of my conversations in San Francisco for Super Bowl week, the themes addressed and lessons learned from the year pointed us toward these Seahawks being the defining team of this past football season.
The frightening thing to consider for the entire league and certainly outfits in the NFC is that this roster will not only return largely intact, but they also enter the offseason with the sixth-most effective cap space in the NFL, per Over The Cap. Not only that, but they own all their own picks in the first three rounds of the NFL Draft. Their list of upcoming free agents includes Coby Bryant, Josh Jobe, Tariq Woolen and Boye Mafe on the defensive side. Those guys all held critical roles and the first three names would take a chunk out of the secondary if they all departed. However, none of them were superstar players and Seattle has the resources to retain any of the combination that it wants.
On offense, it’s a little bit more of an interesting situation. Wide receiver Rashid Shaheed and now-Super Bowl MVP Kenneth Walker III are the biggest names on the free agent ledger. Shaheed may wish to re-sign, but I’ve heard the team remains high on rookie Tory Horton (a sentiment I share with Seattle) and could look to save money at that position as they prepare to give Jaxon Smith-Njigba a mega-extension soon enough. Shaheed will find appealing offers in free agency, as would Walker, if he’s able to hit the open market. I do think “if” is the optimal word here.
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Considering that none of the defensive players or Shaheed rise to the level of the franchise tag, it would be all too easy for Seattle to retain Walker’s services with it. The running back tag will be valued at just over $14 million this offseason, which, in the grand scheme, is nothing for a one-year retention of Walker’s services for a team with over $73 million available in cap space. One month ago, I would have thought there was no shot Seattle would consider doing this, but now that fellow back Zach Charbonnet tore his ACL in the Divisional Round and Walker went on one of the best postseason runs we’ve seen for a player at his position in recent memory, you imagine it’ll at least think about it.
Taking absolutely nothing away from his awesome game in the Super Bowl and performance all postseason, it remains true that Walker is a tricky evaluation. He’s an electric runner with an undeniably rare combination of size and speed. Yet, he’s somewhat limited as a receiver — Walker is pristine at making big plays on checkdowns and screens, but doesn’t run routes downfield to create those coveted mismatches. It’s also difficult to get him on the field for passing downs, since he’s not reliable in protection. In many ways, he’s like a version of Derrick Henry, which is obviously a compliment but comes with caveats; he needs the right environment to be fully maximized. Henry found it in Baltimore but we’ve seen that it needed to blend his and Lamar Jackson’s rushing styles and also keep another back in the mix on passing downs.
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My guess right now is that Seattle will view itself as that right environment and even if that infuriates fantasy managers who, likely incorrectly, think K9 could have been doing what he did in the postseason all regular season, it’s probably a good thing considering it knows him best.
Speaking of the environment, we finally arrive at the biggest X-factor for the Seahawks this offseason. Klint Kubiak confirmed to NFL Network’s Stacey Dales that he is indeed taking the Las Vegas Raiders’ head coaching job, as had been widely reported last week. That will mean that Mike Macdonald will be searching for his third offensive coordinator in as many seasons on the job. So far, he’s had a major strikeout — in what was likely an arranged marriage — with Ryan Grubb, and a home run with Kubiak. Even coming down somewhere in the middle would be a nice win considering how late we are in the coaching cycle. You’d imagine that Seattle will want to stay in the same schematic family after a rousing success with Kubiak. Easier said than done, considering that this Shanahan/McVay tree has been pretty picked clean in recent years.
However, this should be a coveted job, so perhaps Seattle can pry someone loose from another team. The Seahawks have quarterback stability with Sam Darnold, an elite receiver in Smith-Njigba, an ascending offensive line, quality role players and proof of concept that with success here, you can springboard to a head coaching gig. It doesn’t get much better than that for an offensive mind.
Seattle was a good offensive ecosystem in 2025 with some extremely high moments. Its NFC Championship game and second matchup with the Rams in Week 16 were some of the best performances we saw all season. However, the Seahawks finished 14th in overall offensive EPA after being inside the top 10 in the first five weeks. Seattle never bottomed out by any means but that shows there is room for improvement, a scary reality for the rest of the league.
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The Seahawks have the team-building resources to do that but they also need to nail the offensive coordinator hire in the coming weeks.
New England Patriots: Get more talented on offense
The 2025 New England Patriots’ magical run came to an end on Sunday night as they fell to what was the best team in the league this season.
We can now officially call this a magical run to a Super Bowl, as Sunday’s loss confirmed what I’d been saying all week in San Francisco: this Patriots team is way ahead of schedule in what should be their rebuild timeline by being in that game at all. That’s a credit to the Patriots for winning on the margins and putting out a great defensive performance in the postseason to way over-perform their overall roster talent, but when they ran into a fully healthy, true Super Bowl contender, we all saw what happened.
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New England’s offensive performance in the Super Bowl loss cemented it as one of the worst units we’ve seen go on an extended postseason run in quite some time.
New England ranking 75th out of 76 teams to play three or more playoff games since 2000 in points per drive is the stat that really tells the story. Not just because it shows how inadequate its offensive performance was in the playoffs, but it demonstrates how that side of the ball was clearly carried by a strong defensive showing, along with some good breaks. Additionally, this points out just how much of an outlier the 2025 Patriots are among recent Super Bowl teams. Look at some of the other teams in the bottom 10; you’ll find just one other team since the 2020 season and only three others since 2014. We just don’t see many operations with this level of offense reach the big game, much less win it.
The Patriots were a top-five offense in EPA per play in the regular season and one of the worst we’ve ever seen in the playoffs by the same metric. Outside of maybe some nagging injuries, nothing changed about the coaching staff or the roster. The level of competition, however, did rise, and the Patriots offense sank in response.
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The playoffs are a magnifying glass; your strengths will be clearer than ever before against the best of the best but your flaws will be revealed for all to see. The Patriots have shown us for a month now that, while they enjoyed a strong overall season in Mike Vrabel’s debut, they still have many flaws.
In Drake Maye’s rookie season, he played with perhaps the 32nd-ranked offensive line and group of pass catchers. The goal in Year 2, and Vrabel’s first as head coach, was to get them from the league’s basement to closer to average. Mission accomplished. The problem is that just below average isn’t good enough to go against the best defenses in the NFL. In the Wild Card Round, they played the Chargers (sixth in EPA per play allowed in the regular season), the Texans in the Divisional (second), the Broncos in the AFC Championship (eighth) and the Seahawks in the Super Bowl (first). They got demolished.
Pass protection has been a significant issue all throughout the postseason. For me, that’s where the improvement needs to start. Wide receiver will be the subject of much of the offseason chatter, and that does need to improve, but the entire offensive ecosystem can’t take a step forward without better play up front in the run and pass game. Left tackle will take center stage, where rookie Will Campbell struggled mightily in the playoffs and gave up 14 pressures against Seattle, per Next Gen Stats. Campbell had a solid rookie season but much like the rest of the offense, his weaknesses were magnified in the biggest games. He was a historic outlier in terms of his overall frame and wingspan when it came to successful NFL tackles.
Much of the pushback to this discourse today has been centered around Campbell’s technique-based flaws letting him down in the Super Bowl, not his length. However, that’s missing the forest for the trees. When you’re not even an average physical specimen at this or any position in the NFL, you need to be absolutely perfect from a technique standpoint to thrive. That’s a lot to ask of any player, much less a rookie. Perhaps Campbell takes a big leap forward next year, or maybe you can make three positions better at one time by sliding fellow rookie Jared Wilson back to his collegiate position of center, Campbell to Wilson’s vacated left guard spot and acquiring an average starting left tackle with superior measurables and comparable technique.
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It’s probably time for Josh McDaniels, offensive line coach Doug Marrone and the overall archaic protection plan in the Patriots offense to modernize what they’re doing against some of these modern defenses. However, that should also come with an infusion of talent to increase the margin for error.
The same can be said in the pass-catching corps. A group led by this version of Stefon Diggs, Kayshon Boutte and Mack Hollins is fine for the regular season but can be better. Diggs will turn 33 this year and is facing legal issues, while Hollins is a free agent who is a plus blocker and occasional splash player only. Boutte will always be a low-volume option as an almost exclusive X-receiver. The Patriots are in desperate need of a real solution on the perimeter. They have over $42 million in cap space to address this and their other issues, but may even look to the trade market to find a creative solution at X-receiver. Teams will at least be calling about names like A.J. Brown, Brian Thomas Jr. and Brandon Aiyuk. The Patriots should at least kick the tires on those options.
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Lastly, this brings us to Maye, who narrowly missed out on an MVP award this season to Matthew Stafford, mostly on the back of his efficiency metrics, only to turn in one of the least efficient playoff runs in the same metrics.
EPA is a team stat when he’s succeeding in the regular season as it’s a team stat when he’s struggling in the playoffs. With any metric like this, you have to use your eyeballs to tell how much belongs to the player and what doesn’t. However, it generally gets you in the ballpark of describing how a player performed from a black-and-white standpoint, and there’s no denying Maye contributed to the fall-off in the postseason. He made bad situations created by his surroundings worse with turnovers, held the ball too long and wasn’t as decisive against premier competition.
He’s 23 years old and not fully formed just yet. It’s funny; had his season just ended in Round 1 of the playoffs in a close loss to the Chargers, no one would be questioning Maye’s placement among the ascending young passers in the game. He’s almost being punished for playing longer.
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For me, my opinion doesn’t really shift based on the last month of play. Maye is clearly still a good quarterback but like any player at the position, he needs the ecosystem to be better around him. That will be the task of New England this offseason as they lean on stability with the coaching staff.
