Rams at Seahawks
4:25 p.m. Sunday, Fox
Line: Seahawks by 11 ½
Early in the season, the Seahawks were a very good fourth-quarter team. They caught a break with a blown call against the Packers, of course, but impressive fourth quarters resulted in wins against the Bears and Patriots even though the Seahawks looked very ordinary (particularly on offense) for the first 45 minutes of those games.
In the last three weeks of Hulk-smash, the Seahawks have become a great first-quarter team. They took double-digit leads against the 49ers, Bills and Cardinals by midway through the second quarter, then stuck each game under a heat lamp until serving time.
Great fourth-quarter teams inspire sportswriter poetry: the epic comebacks, the final drives, the clutch, swaggering swagger-clutching. The problems: A team that is only so-so for three quarters often does not get the chance to be heroic in that fourth quarter, and final-drive tightrope walks can fail if everything does not work perfectly (see the Seahawks’ early losses to the Cardinals and Rams).
A great first-quarter team has a built-in margin for error: It can play for field goals or punt-and-pin while its opponent grows increasingly desperate, its playbook remains balanced and so on. Of course, great first-quarter teams don’t create much drama and only inspire purple prose when they bust out three straight blowouts in the heat of the playoff chase.
Once a team is great in the first quarter and very good in the fourth quarter, we stop parsing things out and start calling them a great team. The middle quarters tend to take care of themselves.
Prediction: Seahawks 52 (why not?), Rams 16