Sunday’s loss dropped Seattle’s record to 8-6 and second place in the NFC West behind the 8-6 Rams based on tiebreakers. And while the Seahawks obviously wanted to play better and get a win on Sunday, nothing has changed: Seattle still has its destiny in its own hands with three games remaining, including a regular-season finale in Los Angeles that may very well be over Fate could decide winner of the NFC West.

“I just told the team, ‘Hey, the good news is that everything, all of our goals, are still ahead of us and we’ll get back to work tomorrow,'” Macdonald said. “So let’s watch the tape and attack with all our might, like we do the rest of the season, and move forward and prepare for a good Vikings team to get here. Let’s go. There’s still a lot of football ahead of us.” All of our goals are right there. We have to learn from it, and we will.”

The loss combined with the Rams’ recent winning streak means there’s little margin for error for the Seahawks as the game progresses, but that doesn’t change much for a team that has felt like it’s been in playoff mode since its inception came out of the bye week with a 4-5 record after losing five of the last six games. The Seahawks responded well to adversity then, winning four straight, and they expect to do so now.

“I just think we have to go back to the drawing board,” said linebacker Ernest Jones IV, who had a team-high nine tackles and a forced fumble. “Our mindset was playoff mode, so now it’s legitimate. We have to go.”

“We know what kind of team we are, we know what the goal is, what we want to achieve. When we say it’s playoff ball, we’re just emphasizing what we said at the beginning of the year about what we want to accomplish. That’s “Win the division, go to the playoffs, get a home game or two, whatever the case may be.” But we just have to go out there and execute better and execute better.”

Sophomore receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba, who led the team in receiving with 83 yards on 10 catches, expressed a similar sentiment in the locker room after the game.

“Everything is in front of us, all our goals, so we just have to prepare for next week, prepare for Minnesota and get a win,” he said.

The Seahawks will go back to work on Monday to begin preparations for next weekend’s home game against the Vikings, and will do so knowing that two things can apply to Sunday’s game: First, it was a poor performance on many levels that resulted in a 17-point loss at home, and secondly, finishing strong doesn’t change what the Seahawks can achieve this season.

“I think it’s good that we treat every win the same way we treat the losses,” said safety Julian Love. “Obviously they hurt a little more when you lose, all that stuff. But on Monday we’ll go in and go over things carefully again. We call things what they are, win or lose and so on.” The mentality is the same. So you don’t have to panic just because we still have three games left. And that’s what we’re going to do, thankfully. Just like we treat it every week, it’s Monday, come back on Wednesday and just be ready for the Vikings on Sunday.