Seahawks sleepless en route to the repeat

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A few weeks after the Seattle Seahawks won their first Super Bowl last winter, smothering the Denver Broncos, defensive end Michael Bennett was back home in Houston.

One morning he worked out at his old high school. Bennett had scraped his way undrafted into the NFL, and he bumped into a former coach, Jody Jordan, who asked the lineman to speak some students. Bennett talked about the primacy of team.

"Nobody cares about stats," he told his rapt audience. "It's team. You're not going to win anything as an individual."

Nearly a year later, it is a defining theme of the team that readies to host its second straight NFC championship game – and has a shot to become the first repeat Super Bowl champion in a decade. In late December, with the defence on a run of dominance, Bennett declared of the Seahawks collective: "We're the best defence to ever play football."

This season, they've done it without a pile of sacks and interceptions – the accolades of the individual. On Wednesday, before an afternoon practice, Bennett held court. Bushy-bearded, and shirtless, he was asked about the Seahawks so-so sacks total. He had led the team with seven, which ranked 36th in the league. Bennett reeled off the top names in the league.

"They're all sitting at home right now," he said. "It's about winning. That's all that matters, is how you win the game. Yeah, all those guys are playing in the Pro Bowl. Playing in the Super Bowl, it's way better than the Pro Bowl – I can guarantee."

Indescribable electricity

The Seahawks, in mid-October, looked mortal. The team was 3-3, beset by some strife in the locker room and a lack of cohesion on the field.

The reclaiming of what they had captured last season was swift, and it has the citizens of Seattle dizzy with excitement. A year ago, for all the clamour, the underlying psyche of fans was still fragile. The Seahawks had never won it all, in a city with little history of sports success, and the San Francisco 49ers were a formidable opponent in the NFC championship game, defeated only on the last play.

This time, confidence is outward. Sports radio hosts predict a trouncing of the Green Bay Packers on Sunday, and bookies have the spread at more than a touchdown. Broadcaster and Hall of Fame quarterback Troy Aikman had a tone of almost disbelief on Seattle radio this week when speaking about the team's raucous fans, the ballyhooed 12th Man. "They really believe," said Aikman, "they're active participants."

"The mood of the whole city is fantastic," says Jennifer Cue, CEO of Jones Soda Co., whose office is on the ground floor of a brick building across from the downtown stadium. Jones Soda will host a tailgate party on Sunday. Eric Chastain, chief operating officer, grew up in Seattle and isn't even a big sports fan, but the pulse and pull of a winner unlike the city has ever seen is a tractor beam. "There's an electricity in the air," says Chastain, "that's indescribable."

'Their aura is scary'

Debates of best-ever are a staple of sports-parlour talk, often a sinkhole because a definitive answer is elusive, if one exists at all. Such chatter jibes well with the venues of bar stools, AM talk radio and Twitter. But Bennett did not make declarations with undue hubris. This young Seahawks defence has, over the past three seasons, ratcheted toward the best ever: the Pittsburgh Steelers of the 1970s and the Chicago Bears of the 1980s.

The best take notice: "The Seahawks have definitely asserted themselves as one of the great defences of all time," says Mike Wagner, a Steelers safety through the 1970s. Dan Hampton, the Hall of Fame defensive lineman on the Bears through the '80s, grew up watching the Steelers with "reverence," but leans to his own team as the best ever. "There was a five-year span of just brilliance," says Hampton. He admires what the Seahawks have accomplished so far: "They get after it. They're fun to watch. And they're not done yet. We'll find out where they rank."

The Seahawks remain in ascent. The average age of the starting defenders is 27, and the majority has played five seasons or fewer. Keeping the group together will be tough, but most are signed at least through next year. The numbers are without question impressive: Seattle has ceded the fewest points for three consecutive seasons, and the fewest yards the past two – and in those two years, the gap between Seattle and the No. 2 defence is as wide as the gap between No. 2 and No. 8.

Like the Steelers and Bears, the Seahawks are ferocious. "You see the hunger: 'Who's going to make the next big play?'" says Wagner. Picture safety Kam Chancellor last weekend twice hurdling the offensive line to block a field goal, or his 90-yard interception return for a touchdown. "Their aura is scary," says Wally Buono, the B.C. Lions executive and CFL Hall of Fame coach. Buono sees something else, too. On the sidelines, Buono points to what Bennett means about when Bennett talks about team. "The way they embrace each other, the way they congratulate each other."

It begins with Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll, a fount of positive energy whose grounding in the game is on the defensive side of the ball. "He's the architect," says Hampton. Carroll, often, is unorthodox in his thinking. Like all teams, there's an emphasis on turnovers, but when players sit to watch film, it's not only football. Coaches talk about the six-inch punch to dislodge the football. They show players films of Bruce Lee, of swarms of piranhas, of punching kangaroos, of rams head-butting each other. Safety Earl Thomas demonstrated it several weeks ago, a diving karate chip to prevent a touchdown at the goal line.

Weighing best-ever is difficult, because the game has changed. In the '70s, and '80s, defenders had great leeway to violently assault offences. Today, rules favour – and protect – the offence. And modern defences have to parse more complicated offence schemes.

"They could rough a quarterback up pretty good," says cornerback Richard Sherman of the Steelers and Bears. "That intimation factor, hitting the quarterback, clotheslining him, picking him up and dropping him. They're human. That wears on a quarterback."

'Big time'

In late November, a few minutes before Grey Cup kicked off in Vancouver, Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson and left tackle Russell Okung waited for an elevator at BC Place with Premier Christy Clark. The Seahawks had the weekend off, after a win several days earlier. Clark asked Wilson if he had ever played three-down football. "No, ma'am," Wilson said, "I haven't." Somebody suggested Wilson's mobile style would be well-suited to the CFL. Okung, quietly, forcefully, joked: "No. We're keeping him."

Amid the marvelling over Seattle's defence, the rise of Wilson, in his third season, has received less notice. Last weekend, he put on one of the most efficient performances by a quarterback in the playoffs – ever – after a regular season of fairly ordinary individual stats. In the playoffs, his performance escalates. Carroll says Wilson is "as creative a football player you'll find."

A second Super Bowl victory at only 26 would edge Wilson, like the defence, like this team, onto historic lists. The past decade has not been kind to Super Bowl winners – which, until Seattle, had not won a playoff game in the season following their title since 2006.

On Wednesday as practice began in the Seattle suburbs, music played, as it always does. "There's no stopping us right now/ There's no stopping us right now," rang the chorus of the Calvin Harris song, Feel So Close.

Bennett engages the question of best-ever, but his teammates parry. "I wasn't born," said fellow lineman Cliff Avril of the '70s Steelers and '80s Bears. "I don't know how you compare." But is this team building something that ranks with history? "If we can continue to win," Avril allowed, "sure."

Sherman, often so boisterous, is similarly reserved on the question – though when he's told Joe Greene of the Steelers had complimentary things to say about these Seahawks, he beamed: "That's big-time. I appreciate you, Mean Joe Greene. That's a big-time compliment. We try to play the old-school way. We appreciate him noticing what we're doing."