Les Carpenter / Times staff columnist
Difficult schedule might be Hawks' toughest opponent

DAVID J. PHILLIP / AP The Seahawks play at defending Super Bowl champion New England in October. Bill Belichick's Patriots should be good again.

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The whole thing seems unfair. Football seasons are supposed to be decided on frosty Sundays with grunts and shoves and the crackle of helmets hitting shoulder pads.

More than ever, they've come to be decided in a New York office, by men with computers and mounds of printouts. In this era of salary-cap football, where nearly every team is created equal, a single document published each spring is coming to have a greater bearing on the year than any free-agent signing or draft-day bonanza.

Get a tough schedule and your Super Bowl dreams might blow up by mid-October. Draw an easy one and you might sail from last place to a division title.

Last fall, the Seahawks flew into the playoffs by beating just one team with a winning record — a feat that can be accomplished when your non-division home games are against the likes of Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit.

But with the playoffs come expectations. People are talking Jacksonville in February. Only this time the schedule hands out few free passes. Instead of Cleveland, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Detroit, the Seahawks have home games against Carolina, Dallas, Atlanta and Miami. Each is probably a playoff team, and the chances of going 8-0 at Qwest Field again are very slim.

That could be a problem because, in the NFL, teams need to win as many home games as possible because winning on the road is becoming harder and harder to do. Last year, the Seahawks were 2-6 away from home.

Seattle did not draw a beneficial road schedule this season, having to fly across the country and open at New Orleans and Tampa Bay, both challenging tasks. Add an October trip to New England and December games at Minnesota and the New York Jets, and the Seahawks will have few breaks this year.

How much does this matter?

Often, it matters a lot. So much in the NFL is about balance these days, and a fortuitous schedule loaded with the worst teams in the league can be the difference between making the playoffs and a long, cold autumn. The Seahawks might never see a schedule as easy as last year's.

None of this means Seattle can't fulfill the many predictions and go 12-4, but you have to wonder how a team that struggled to go 10-6 against easy opponents is going to do that against opponents who are markedly better.
 
The only good news for the Seahawks is that their division rivals wound up with schedules that are equally difficult.

In the old days, the league punished teams who had done well the year before by sticking them with harder opponents. Those who finished at the bottom were rewarded with easier opposition. The idea was to make everybody just good enough to be competitive and keep interest alive all around the league, even in cities with dreadful teams. For the most part, the plan was a success.

But a few years ago, when the latest round of expansion came and three divisions turned into four, the league changed its scheduling process. No longer could it come up with a formula to make sure a division champion played several other division champions and a last-place team played other last-place teams. The league was too big.

So, it invented a scheduling formula that takes half a page of small type in the official record book to explain. Rather than relying heavily on records, the league instead matches divisions against each other on a rotating basis. For instance, this year the NFC West plays teams in the NFC South and AFC East. Next year, it will play the NFC East and AFC South. And so on.

This has allowed the league to determine nearly all of a team's schedules years in advance. Because of this, we know the Seahawks will play a road game at Houston sometime in the 2009 season.

This makes the schedule more of a crapshoot than ever. A team can have a terrible season and still draw the toughest run of opponents the next year.

Given the makeup of the NFC West, the Seahawks should win the division simply by showing up in the right parking lot each week.

But winning the division matters little if the playoffs only last a game. Teams that take their division at 9-7 and 8-8 usually don't last long in the postseason.

So, for all the worries about defensive tackles and middle linebackers and whether receivers will hold onto passes, the real concern for Seattle might have nothing to do with the field.

A little document spit from a computer in the league office might be the most formidable opponent of all.

Les Carpenter: 206-464-2280 or lcarpenter@seattletimes.com.