4. Seattle Seahawks, Super Bowl XL
This was doomed from the start. Once again, a Seattle team was — on paper — the better team. They were the #1 seed from the NFC playing the #6 seed from the AFC. However, that #6 seed was an established franchise with a winning history, and their running back was playing his final NFL game in his hometown (if you didn’t know Jerome Bettis was from Detroit, you definitely knew it by the end of that game). The Seahawks were from Seattle, and in keeping with the grand tradition of teams before them, promptly shit the bed to the lower seed. The good news is nobody remembers this game for anything other than the officiating. It was an awful, boring Super Bowl, full of laughably terrible flags (like Matt Hasselbeck’s bizarre “illegal block” that was actually him tackling a guy returning an interception). The bad news: it’s a game that still happened, and the Seahawks failed to show.
