One of the biggest surprises of the NFL’s 2014 schedule unveiling was the lack of primetime home games for the reigning Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks. Other than the customary Thursday night opener, in which Seattle plays host to the Green Bay Packers, the 2014 Seahawks will play no other night games at CenturyLink Field.

One primetime home game is the same number as the Jaguars and Raiders. It’s one fewer than the Rams, Jets and Redskins. The reigning Ravens had two last season. The Giants had two the year before that. Green Bay had three in its 2011 title defense. Why did this year’s Super Bowl champions get the primetime snub?

Pro Football Talk has a theory.

According to a league source, the NFL was wary of putting Seahawks home games on in primetime due to their track record of blowouts in nationally televised games played in Seattle the last several seasons.

In the past three primetime games at CenturyLink Field (two against San Francisco, one against New Orleans), the Seahawks have outscored its opponents 105-23. That supports the suggestion by the PFT source that Seattle is too good at home.

Of course, the last primetime kickoff in Seattle before that three-game stretch was the famous “Fail Mary” game, which Seattle should have lost. The primetime stat also ignores January’s NFC championship game, which started a few minutes short of TV’s magic hour, at 6:30 p.m. ET. That game was a classic that came down to the final play. Is Seattle magically better in games that kickoff 30 minutes later?

Given the cyclical nature of the NFL and the small sample size of those three games, no one should believe the Seahawks are too good for stand-alone games. If Tom Brady and Peyton Manning haven’t received similar treatment over the past 12 years, why would the NFL afford the same to Russell Wilson and the Seahawks?

There’s a far simpler explanation: The schedule happened to award Seattle just one primetime game at home. Given that the Seahawks-49ers game in San Francisco is on Thanksgiving night, their other kickoff at CenturyLink was almost certain to be in the afternoon. (The best divisional home-and-homes tend to be split between day and night.) That leaves just three more home opponents on Seattle’s schedule that would warrant a primetime kickoff: Denver, Dallas and the New York Giants. Those first two games are mega-matchups slated for CBS and Fox, respectively. The NFL needs to spread the television wealth and splitting the three biggest Seahawks home games to NBC, CBS and Fox is a fine way to accomplish that. The Giants game could have been a Monday Night Football kick, I suppose, possibly to replace Seattle’s Monday night trip to Washington on Oct. 6, but that’s a minor quibble that can be easily explained.

Peter King’s article on the making of the 2014 schedule doesn’t specifically address Seattle’s dearth of home primetime games, but it goes into length about the difficulties involved in satisfying dozens of requirements for the master schedule. A schedule that King says was the “second place” finisher had Seattle on a brutal three-game road trip that included 11,000 travel miles in 15 days. It was eventually shelved.

The Seahawks were handed the better of two bad situations. One home primetime game may seem like a slap in the face, but it’s far better than a midseason road trip across the country. Maybe there’s some sort of conspiracy brewing, but come on — there will be plenty of other nationally televised games at CenturyLink Field that have the potential to be blowout duds. What time those games kick off will have no bearing on the outcome.