Clearly Vegas's finest hour lol.
I'm actually surprised you don't at least slightly agree with me. You can pick at my arbitrarily chosen percentage that I picked out of thin air all you want I guess, but honestly: how often does a defense like this come around? Don't you have a tendency to look at these trends? Are they not as good as I think? Whenever a defense dominates the NFL like this, they win the Super Bowl almost always, correct? The 2002 Bucs, 2000 Ravens, 1990 Giants, 1985 Bears? The Seahawks don't necessarily compare to those defenses, but in the context of the current day NFL this Seattle D was just rolling over everyone. I don't know how anyone could consider them an underdog against anyone in today's NFL, Denver being favored was media driven imo. I'd be surprised if they don't repeat assuming their roster stays mostly intact.
I could never agree with 70%. Last season I had extremely strong reasons to back up around a 73% chance that either the Patriots would win the Super Bowl, or whoever beat them would win it. That itself only accorded the Patriots around a 40% chance to win, and 40% was already phenomenally high. Teams rarely have a 70% chance to win a single game against another elite opponent, 70% to win it against an entire field of teams is just highly improbable. Percentages are not about pulling something out of thin air, and the winner result does not make some 70% number or any particular number validated (it is not like the win result means every team who won a Super Bowl retroactively becomes obviously over 50% to have won it all)...I mean come on, what were the Ravens' chances to win last year, 3-5%?
As far as historically comparable etc, the Seahawks gave up so many points (compared to other elite defenses) that it was incredibly hard to contextualize them coming into this postseason. They allowed about 10 more points than Steelers & Niners did 2 seasons ago, and neither of those teams qualified for the Super Bowl, and one of them lost round 1 to
fucking Tim Tebow with the fucking #1 pass rank defense giving up ridiculously long passes, while the Niners had that game where the Saints carved them up & then should have beaten Giants but whatever
. You can look at the Seahawks secondary and say "well it's obviously invincible, Sherman & Thomas & etc", but that is just not objective. Tim Tebow destroyed the #1 pass defense 2 years ago, and if a good long passer faced Seahawks, then a similar sort of thing could have happened. Theoretically Eagles, Packers, and Saints basically were the biggest threats to Seahawks in that category. On top of three teams that could theoretically beat them in the air if things broke any of those teams ways, the other teams they might face in the NFC were the most similar styled defensive teams. After coming out of all that, the Super Bowl was practically easy, but my guess is that even before you account for the threat Broncos or Pats theoretically "should have" posed, just accounting for the NFC definitely kept Seahawks at 30% maximum to win it all.
For instance, to compare them with the 2000 Ravens...Ravens started 5-4 before figuring their strategy out and never lost again. Meanwhile, the Seahawks went 3-2 coming into the playoffs, despite having shifted to their least points allowed in any stretch of the season. The Cardinals loss in "despite the picks lol!11" is no reason not to believe in them, it was just a very confusing outcome for anyone to try to work with any highly fact based predictions going forward.