Seahawks Conventional Wisdom: Bad when Playing in the Morning

I recently published a post showing that the Seahawks are still a very dominate home team. They routinely win 60%+ of their home games and do so by an average of at least a TD. The conventional and common media narrative about the Seahawks home field prowess is accurate. So, if the first bit of conventional wisdom about the Seahawks being a dominate home team is still true what about the next most commonly held belief that they cannot win a morning game?

Evaluating this data is a lot harder to do because there is not a consistent sample size across each season. The number of morning games changes every year based on their opponents and the location of the games. Being located in Seattle the Seahawks only play morning games when they are on the east coast. Even than not all of their east coast games are in the morning. Due to their run of good season the Seahawks are frequently featured on nationally broadcast primetime games that kickoff in the evening. All of these factors mean the Seahawks have had as few as two morning games (2010) and as many as five (2013). However, even with the smaller sample sizes we can take a look at the trends under Pete Carroll.

Let's start our analysis by looking at the away game winning percentages in each of the three potential time slots: morning, afternoon, and evening. See Figure 1 for away game winning percentages plotted by season. The only clear trend that jumps out to me is that the season total away game winning percentage has a clear upward slope under Pete Carroll. The Seahawks have won over half of their road games each of the last three seasons. In the first three seasons of Pete Carroll's career with the Seahawks the team won less than half of their away games.  Obviously as the team has improved overall they have also improved on the road.

Figure 1

When it comes to looking for win percentage trends in each of the different time slots the data doesn't paint a clear picture. There is a lot of variance from season to season. For instance after winning 80% of their morning games in 2013 the Seahawks only managed to win 33% in 2014. The trend appears to be them hanging round the 40% mark, but it varies drastically. The afternoon and evening time slots have just as much variance although the afternoon appears to average lower and the evening average a bit higher.

I decided to calculate a four game rolling win percent and a cumulative win percent for the morning games. I started the data after the first for morning games has been played, but included those games in the data, to give us a less drastic swing from game to game. This was to try and clarify the data from the morning games and help us answer the question of are the Seahawks bad in morning games. The cumulative win percent trend line paints a clear picture that shows the Seahawks have been steadily improving since 2011. See Figure 2 for a look at the plot. The Seahawks have brought their morning game win percentage up to about 48% from around the mid 30's. They are definitely trending in the right direction.

Figure 2

In addition to win percentage the point differential in the morning games gives us a another valuable look at whether or not the Seahawks are terrible at 10am PST. If the Seahawks are losing close games it might be more about luck than some sort a core truth about the franchise. While on the other hand if the Seahawks are constantly getting blown out it is much more likely that they have some sort impediment stopping them from winning in the AM.

The point differential per game data for morning games surprised me. I was expecting to see something close to zero. The Seahawks are only winning about half of their morning games under Pete Carroll, yet the average score differential has been positive in all but one season, 2010. Plotting out these average score differentials shows us another positive trend. See Figure 3 for the plot. The Seahawks have been improving every year since 2010 with one outlier in 2014, when they dropped down to an average victory of 5 points per game. (Interestingly the Seahawks average point differential has been improving for all road games, not just the morning ones.) In 2013 and 2015 the Seahawks averaged over 20 points per game more than their opponents in the morning on the road. Clearly the Seahawks are not just squeaking by when they play morning games.

Figure 3

Although the data has a much smaller sample set and doesn't offer any obvious conclusions I am confident in saying that the Seattle Seahawks morning game troubles have come to an end. Throughout Pete Carroll's reign the team has been consistently improving their morning game win percent. Additionally the team has put up impressive per game point differentials, consistently outscoring opponents by 5 or more points. It is time for sports media commentators to update their tired commentary about the Seahawks and stop talking about their struggles in morning games.

Sources: Pro Football Reference