RENTON — DK Metcalf heard all the noise in the game’s first minutes.
Lumen Field was rockin’. But the home team, the Seahawks, were failing. They were getting run over.
The chants began as soon as the game in Seattle did Sunday night. They didn’t end until well after the Seahawks’ 30-13 loss that embarrassed Seattle in more ways than one.
“GO PACK GO!”
“I know in the first quarter, second or third play of the game, it got crazy loud in there. I looked around and there were a lot of Green Bay fans,” Metcalf said Wednesday.
“They did a great job traveling.
“But just wishing us 12s didn’t sell as many tickets as they did to make sure we kept the home-field advantage.”
Yes, the Seahawks’ star wide receiver said out loud what many around Seattle have been talking about this week. That’s after a Cheesehead, Packer Backer takeover of Lumen Field last weekend.
It was after a Bills fans takeover in Seattle in October. That day, Buffalo quarterback Josh Allen was laughing and high-fiving with his Buffalo fans. The only thing missing from their party was a table to smash onto, Bills Mafia style.
“It was really loud in there,” quarterback Geno Smith said after Buffalo’s blowout win over the Seahawks at Lumen Field Oct. 27. “Kind of felt like we were on the road, at times.”
That was after a 49ers fans takeover at Lumen Field two weeks before, when San Francisco won again in Seattle.
During this season’s opener in September, Broncos orange painted the lower rows of the 100 level.
That was after Steelers fans invaded last New Year’s Eve, with their gold Terrible Towels that dominated the Seahawks’ home stadium at the end of last season.
It may happen again Sunday. The widely popular, 12-2 Minnesota Vikings come to Lumen Field to play the underdog, 8-6 Seahawks in Seattle’s final home game of the regular season.
The Seahawks need to upset the Vikings to keep pace with the Los Angeles Rams (8-6) for the NFC West title. Three games remain in the regular season. A home playoff game is at stake.
The players wouldn’t mind the home crowd being home fans, for a change.
“Yeah, man,” Metcalf said, “it would mean a lot just to take this last one home and finish off the season strong, so we can play again in front of them in the playoffs.”
So what’s at play in the Seahawks’ playing road games at home?
Increased costs for Seahawks season tickets
In particular, the 100 level of seats closest to the field, from where Metcalf and his teammates can hear fans the most, have been full of visiting teams’ fans in Seattle for multiple seasons. Those are the expensive seats closest to the field, along the sidelines.
Those are Seahawks season-ticket seats; most in the stadium are. Season-ticket holders says online ticket brokers have bought some of those seats the visiting teams’ fans are roaring from at Seattle’s home games.
But many Seahawks season-ticket holders are selling their seats at a handsome profit.
Season tickets in the 100 level on the east sideline, behind the road team’s bench where many of the visiting fans have been recently, are known as the Charter A, B and C seats. The prices to renew those for 2024 ranged from $2,140 per seat nearer the goal lines to $2,530 around midfield. That was for the 10 home games during this season, according to the pricing list the team provided its renewing season-ticket holders.
It’s tough to argue with a Seahawks fan recouping much of his $2500 or so cost of each season ticket they own in a week or two selling their seats to rabid road-team fans. Especially for extra cash around the holidays.
“Knowingly sold tickets for the Rams game (Nov. 3) to a Rams fan but I’m going to get a nice 12 pack, lunch, and make a profit to watch the L at home,” Marques from the Seattle 206 area code texted The News Tribune via KJR-FM radio last month.
A text messenger to the TNT from the 206 on KJR addressed criticism that Seahawks fans aren’t re-selling their tickets to Seahawks fans: “As a season ticket holder who sells couple games a year you don’t know who is buying them (online). Also consider you get charged full price for the preseason games which you can’t even give away.”
One season-ticket holder from the 425 wrote about cost: “Two problems with season ticket holders: 1 they got old. 2 they can basically get season tickets paid for with one game. It’s been like that really since 2013.”
Seahawks not winning at home
It’s tougher to argue with a Seahawks fan not wanting to pay that kind of money to watch their team lose.
This may be the biggest reason it’s become this at Lumen Field. As the team hasn’t been nearly as good as its back-to-back Super Bowl ones in the 2013 and ‘14 seasons, what had been one of the NFL’s fiercest home-field advantages a decade ago is gone.
In its last 33 home games, Seattle is 16-17.
This season, the Seahawks are 5-1 away from Lumen Field — but just 3-5 at home.
The Seahawks last advanced past the division round of the playoffs at the end of the 2014. That’s their last Super Bowl season.
Yet despite their recently mediocre years, Lumen Field remains sold out. The Packers game last weekend was the 179th consecutive sellout for a Seahawks home game dating to 2003.
The team annually sells all its 61,000 season-ticket seats in the stadium, which has a capacity of 68,740 for NFL games. There is a three-year waiting queue, the Blue Pride list, to buy season tickets. During their Super Bowl heyday 10 years ago, the season-ticket renewal rate was 99.5%. It was 96% for 2024.
That was coming off the team’s consecutive 9-8 seasons in 2022 and ‘23 and the coaching change this past winter from Pete Carroll to rookie head man Mike Macdonald and his new staff.
But as all the road-team color in the lower deck at games shows, just because Seahawks games and season tickets remain sold out doesn’t mean the season-ticket holders are attending the games.
The team’s dip in winning has intersected with that rise in Seahawks ticket costs, creating this wave of road colors in Seattle’s home yard.
Tyler Lockett is the longest-tenured Seahawk at 10 seasons. He’s seen Lumen Field at its home-team best, and now this. Last weekend he sat in the quiet locker room at Lumen Field following the home loss. Lockett said the obvious: The Seahawks need to win more to make season-ticket holders want to attend home games.
Macdonald, the team’s direct, bottom-line coach, sees it the same way Lockett does.
“We have to win. We’ve got to win, period,” he said, after the invasion of Bills fans inside Lumen Field in October. “So, opposing fans won’t want to show up if we’re consistently kicking butt and doing what we’re supposed to do.
“Our fans, I think, are doing a great job and they’re sticking with us all the way through the end of the game. I know we’re fighting and they’re fighting with us.
“And we have to do a better job of putting a product out there that they want to root really hard for.”
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