SEATTLE -- The auditorium at Seattle Seahawks headquarters underwent a mini makeover this past offseason. Each wall on either side of the seats is now covered in a blown-up photo of the stands at Lumen Field, giving players the feel during team meetings that they're in the middle of the stadium.
It was a fitting change of decor for an organization that is trying to change its recent fortunes at home, and as legendary cornerback Richard Sherman stood at the front of the remodeled room during training camp, he spoke to his former team with that goal in mind.
Sherman was there to provide perspective from his time in Seattle (2011-17) during the most successful stretch in franchise history, when the Seahawks still owned one of the NFL's best home-field advantages. It has waned drastically in recent years, and the visit from one of their all-time great players was part of an organization-wide effort to get it back.
The Sherman-era Seahawks, particularly their Legion of Boom defense, would feed off the energy from the raucous home crowd at the team's 69,000-seat stadium -- and the 12s would feed off them.
But Sherman's message on this mid-August day was that the players had to get the fans going, not the other way around.
"Make some big plays, get the crowd involved," said defensive tackle Jarran Reed, a former teammate of Sherman's during the later years of the Seahawks' defensive heyday of the early- and mid-2010s. "Use our home-field advantage to our advantage."
"They're not just going to come here and be cheering their butts off. You've got to earn it," general manager John Schneider said on his Seattle Sports 710-AM radio show, relaying Sherman's words before the Seahawks' season opener against the visiting San Francisco 49ers on Sept. 7.
Schneider then mentioned how, during the weekly highlight video shown to players the night before each game, coach Mike Macdonald chose clips for that Saturday's meeting from some of the more memorable Seahawks wins at Lumen Field. It was meant to drive home the point about how important it is to make their stadium a nightmare for opposing teams.
As Schneider was talking, he noticed a horde of 49ers fans filing into the stands an hour before kickoff.
"We're hoping -- as we look over here and see these San Fran red jerseys, we've got to keep them out of here," Schneider lamented. "We're tired of it."
Those 49ers fans -- roughly 7,000 were in attendance, by the Seahawks' estimate -- left the stadium celebrating their team's 17-13 win.
And so continued a confounding trend.
The Seahawks (4-2) head into their Monday night game against the Houston Texans (2-3) at Lumen Field (10:15 p.m. ET, ESPN) with a 4-8 record at home since they hired Macdonald last season, which includes a blowout win over the New Orleans Saints on Sept. 21 and a narrow loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Oct. 5.
An issue that began during Pete Carroll's final three seasons as coach has worsened under his successor, a hard reality to square with the fact that Macdonald's Seahawks have been almost unbeatable away from home. Their win last week over the Jaguars in Jacksonville pushed their road record to an NFL-best 10-1 since the start of the 2024 season.
The disparity raises questions: Have opposing fans played a role in Seattle's diminishing home-field advantage, or vice versa? Could the importance of pre-snap communication to the Seahawks' defense be a factor? How much of a role has their schedule played?
The only aspect of the situation that is clear is how intent the organization is to fix it.
"It's really important that we play better at home," Macdonald said. "It's been an important emphasis since I was hired. Hasn't come to life yet. We're determined to make it come to life."
IN A NOVEMBER 2005 Seahawks home win, the New York Giants committed 11 false start penalties, an NFL record that still stands.
The next day, then-coach Mike Holmgren dedicated a game ball to Seahawks fans, whose deafening noise had made it difficult for the visiting team to hear its own snap count.
In the NFC Championship Game later that season, the din overwhelmed quarterback Jake Delhomme and the Carolina Panthers as Seattle advanced to Super Bowl XL with a 34-14 win.
"We could not call a play in the huddle," Delhomme said years later. "It was the most insane place I've ever been in my life."
The Seahawks retired the No. 12 jersey in 1984 in recognition of the impact their fans -- then known as the 12th Man, now as the 12s -- had on games during the team's days in the Kingdome. That impact carried over into their new home, which opened in 2002 as Seahawks Stadium before name changes to Qwest Field, CenturyLink Field and Lumen Field.
The venue set a since-broken record for loudest outdoor sports stadium when Seahawks fans reached 137.6 decibels in a December 2013 win against the Saints. Kansas City Chiefs fans at Arrowhead Stadium reclaimed the record the following year.
Record holders or not, Seahawks fans still boast about how their celebration of Marshawn Lynch's 67-yard touchdown run in a 2011 playoff game was raucous enough to register on a nearby seismometer. That play -- which helped Seattle upset the reigning Super Bowl champion Saints in the wild-card round -- entered Seahawks lore as "The Beastquake."
Seahawks brass has made several comments over the past year about the organization's desire for a return to that type of environment.
"We've got to get Lumen rocking again," Schneider said in February.
WHEN ESPN ASKED 111 NFL players last season to rank the toughest places to play, Lumen Field came in second behind Arrowhead Stadium. But the Seahawks' recent home record indicates it isn't as tough as it used to be.
From 2003 to 2019 -- which included parts of Holmgren's and Carroll's tenures as well as Jim L. Mora's one-and-done season in between -- the Seahawks had the NFL's fourth-best home winning percentage at .706. Seattle was .474 on the road in that span (ranking 12th best in the league).
The Seahawks went 7-1 at home in 2020, when they had no fans at Lumen Field because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and 5-3 on the road.
Over Carroll's final three seasons, from 2021 to 2023, their winning percentage at home fell to .520, which tied for 18th. That sizable drop-off coincided with only a marginal decrease on the road, where Seattle won at a .462 clip (tied for 17th) that was roughly the same as before.
Since the start of last season, Seattle's .333 home winning percentage ranks tied for 25th.
Meanwhile, with its victory in Jacksonville on Sunday, Macdonald became only the fourth coach in NFL history to win 10 of his first 11 road games, joining George Seifert, Sean McVay and Paul Brown, according to ESPN Research.
NFL teams have won less frequently at home in recent decades, but the Seahawks' decline has outpaced the leaguewide trend.
Lumen Field still gets ear-splittingly loud, though less so when opposing teams' fans show up in droves like in Week 1 against San Francisco. Opponents have averaged roughly 1.5 false starts per game in Seattle since 2021 (third most in the NFL), just a hair under the average from 2003 to 2019 (also third).
But there has often been a direct correlation between the noise level and how well the Seahawks' defense is playing. As that group's performance has fluctuated since the Legion of Boom days, so have the decibels.
"You know when you were coming here that they were bringing it," said veteran receiver Cooper Kupp, who signed with the Seahawks in March after eight seasons with the division-rival Los Angeles Rams.
"It changes the game. It really does. It's something that other teams have to worry about. When it's at its best, it's constant, too. Coming in as an opposing offense, there's no let-up. It's just every time you're trying to communicate. It's not just at the line of scrimmage. It's in the huddle. ... The stress that causes offenses is a big deal."
LAST DECEMBER, THE Seahawks were in position to upset the 12-2 Minnesota Vikings at home, up 24-20 with four minutes to go.
Early in Minnesota's decisive drive, with the stadium in full throat, then-Vikings quarterback Sam Darnold had to cover the earholes on his helmet while looking toward his sideline.
After a scramble run took him in that direction, he went to coach Kevin O'Connell to get the next playcall straight from the head coach, lest he have to strain to make it out in his headset amid the chaos.
"I was under center, and my O-line had a hard time hearing me, even under center," Darnold recalled of how difficult it was to function as an offense on that drive. "For some reason, that place just echoes. That's a huge shoutout to our fans. The 12s do a great job of being able to make that place shake, and it's a really, really tough place to come and play."
But what happened at the end of that drive might also illustrate how the noise -- as much as Macdonald and his defense love it -- can occasionally work against them.
As Minnesota lined up for a first-and-10 play from Seattle's 39, Seahawks safety Julian Love appeared to adjust the coverage with corner Riq Woolen from their respective posts about 15 yards apart.
Whatever happened with that communication breakdown led to Woolen allowing Vikings receiver Justin Jefferson to run by him, expecting help over the top that wasn't actually supposed to be there.
Darnold hit Jefferson for the winning touchdown, another loss at Lumen.
Macdonald runs a complex defensive scheme that requires extensive verbal communication before every play, with players at all three levels trying to make adjustments and ensure they're on the same page up until the snap.
The defenses the Seahawks ran under Carroll were much simpler by comparison. As such, their pre-snap communication could mostly be limited to hand signals, theoretically allowing them to handle the noise better than Seattle's current defense does.
"We've got great fans, and we love when it's loud, but we've got to be able to adjust to that on our side," said Reed, a holdover from the Carroll era. "We know that during the week, before the crowd gets loud, we've got to make sure we overcommunicate then so we can already be a step ahead while we're talking to each other. ... If we can't hear, we have to get closer to relay the message."
Macdonald said there isn't a significant difference between the number of missed assignments and mental errors at home compared to on the road. The first touchdown the Seahawks allowed Sunday in Jacksonville was the result of a communication breakdown in their secondary, so it happens away from Lumen Field, too.
But the noise at home, as much as it helps Seattle's defense, is a factor that they have to deal with themselves. Macdonald has had to alter his game plans and playcalling for home games to account for it, though he declined to elaborate for competitive reasons.
"Sometimes things have gotten lost in communication between me and EJ at home," he said, referring to middle linebacker Ernest Jones IV, Seattle's defensive signal-caller. "But that's not a reason that we're not playing as well. It just happens because it's so dang loud. Those are good problems to have, but we are learning from it on how fast we can play with the communication that's going to be required. That's definitely taken into consideration."
Of the Seahawks' six home losses during their 10-7 season in 2024, four were to teams that won at least 10 games, including Minnesota (14-3).
Therein, perhaps, lies one factor in their home and road disparity. The opponents Seattle faced at Lumen Field last season had a combined winning percentage of .542, compared to .449 for their road opponents. When including opponents and their records this season, those combined winning percentages are .543 and .455.
What happened there a week before that 2024 Vikings game is also part of the story of the Seahawks' struggles at home, whether it's a cause and/or a symptom.
"GO PACK GO" chants were audible from the press box and the television broadcast when the Seahawks hosted the Green Bay Packers for a Sunday night game in Week 15 last December. Players heard them on the field, too.
"I know the first quarter, second or third play of the game, it got crazy loud in there, and I looked around and it was a lot of Green Bay fans," then-Seattle receiver DK Metcalf said. "So they did a great job traveling. But just wishing the 12s didn't sell as many tickets as they did to make sure we kept the home-field advantage."
A similar scene played out two months earlier when the Seahawks hosted the Buffalo Bills, who had enough of their fans at Lumen Field that then-Seattle quarterback Geno Smith said it seemed at times like Seattle was playing on the road.
This has cut both ways for the Seahawks, whose fans travel well despite Seattle being the NFL's most geographically isolated city. When the Seahawks played last season at State Farm Stadium -- 1,400 miles from Seattle -- they had enough fans in attendance to force the Arizona Cardinals to operate on a silent count at home. After the Seahawks won there again last month, chants of "SEA-HAWKS" near the Amazon Prime set drowned out Darnold's postgame interview.
Nevertheless, the Seahawks have attempted to curb the trend in their own building, which they believe has become a destination for opposing fans for its reputation as one of the NFL's most raucous venues.
Over the offseason, they sent a letter to season-ticket holders warning "renewal eligibility may be impacted if it is determined that your tickets were primarily used for resale purposes." Other teams, such as the Packers, Indianapolis Colts and Buccaneers, have also tried to crack down on the practice in recent years.
The Seahawks are also trying to reward season-ticket holders who attend every game, now giving them priority for seat upgrades. But the Seahawks acknowledge the simple economics that are at play for those who do sell, with tickets for the most desirable games sometimes fetching a high enough price on the secondary market to cover most or all of a seasonlong balance -- and how opposing teams' fans are often willing to splurge for a novel experience.
Has the trend cut into the Seahawks' home-field advantage? Is it instead more effect than cause, with the team's waning success at Lumen Field now giving season-ticket holders another reason -- along with the obvious financial incentive -- to watch from their living room?
Perhaps it's both.
Macdonald has emphasized the need for the team to do its part to make sure Lumen Field is packed with its own fans, saying the Seahawks have to do a better job of delivering a product that they want to root hard for.
"We've got to win, period," he said. "Opposing fans don't want to show up if we're consistently kicking butt and doing what we're supposed to do."
But recent history has shown that's easier said than done.
"If we knew exactly how we could win games every time at home, trust me, we would be mashing that button, as many times as we possibly could," Macdonald said. "But what I can tell you is, we're chasing it, we're determined to do it, and our guys are determined to do it."