The Seattle Seahawks — who two years ago fielded the single worst rush defense in the NFL by EPA/play — owned the best one in 2025. And the schedule didn't do it for them.

The headline: from 32nd to 1st

In 2023, Seattle finished dead last in defensive EPA per rush at +0.050, allowing offenses to gain more expected points per carry than any other defense in football. In 2025, that number is -0.136 — first in the NFL, and by a comfortable margin over 2nd-place Houston (-0.077) and 3rd-place New Orleans (-0.073).

That's a 31-rank jump in two seasons. The next-closest improvement in that window belongs to Philadelphia, which climbed 16 spots (30th → 14th). Los Angeles (Chargers) and the Rams tied for third at +14 and +13. Nobody else is in Seattle's zip code.

It's not just this cycle, either. Looking at every team-season pair since 1999, Seattle's 31-rank two-year improvement is the largest in the play-by-play era. The 2004–06 Vikings and 2014–16 Giants each jumped 30 spots to get to #1; SEA edges both by a notch.

For context on where they came from, the 2024 Seahawks were already a middle-of-the-pack rush defense at -0.021 EPA/rush (16th). So the arc is 32nd → 16th → 1st: an incremental fix in Year 1, and a leap in Year 2.

The underlying rate stats agree

The EPA number isn't a fluke of one or two garbage-time drives. Every input under it moved in the same direction between 2023 and 2025:

Explosive runs allowed have been nearly halved. Success rate has dropped by 6.6 percentage points to a figure roughly six points better than league average. Yards per carry is down almost a full yard. These are consistent, mutually reinforcing signals — not a single-metric artifact.

Opponent quality doesn't explain it

The obvious skeptic's question: did Seattle just draw a soft slate of rushing offenses? No.

Averaging the 2025 run-offense EPA/play of the 14 distinct offenses Seattle faced, the mean sits at -0.015 — essentially indistinguishable from the league-wide simple average of -0.011. Weighting by carries against Seattle (411 rushes total) tightens it further to -0.011 opponent EPA vs. a league-wide -0.010 weighted average.

The opponent list itself is a mix, not a cakewalk: Indianapolis (+0.094 run-offense EPA, one of the league's best) and the Rams (+0.035) are on it, along with Washington, Tampa Bay, and Pittsburgh above zero. New Orleans (-0.101) and Houston (-0.071) drag the average down, but there's no evidence of a systematically weak rushing schedule.

In other words: this looks like a real, personnel- and scheme-driven improvement, not a schedule mirage.

Why it matters beyond the rush numbers

Seattle's overall defense vaulted along with the rush unit. The Seahawks ranked 2nd in overall defensive EPA/play (-0.124) and 5th in defensive pass EPA/play (-0.117) in 2025. The run defense is the leading edge, but the whole side of the ball has followed. Seattle sits at 14-3 through the regular season slate captured in the data.

On the regular-season evidence, the transformation is defensible on the merits. A worst-to-first two-year swing in a phase of football that's usually stable is genuinely rare, and Seattle posted the largest since 1999.