SEATTLE -- Perhaps it shouldn't have been all that surprising that the Seattle Seahawks, underdogs by as many as six points heading into Sunday night's game, turned in their most impressive performance of the season in a 24-10 win over the previously 10-1 Philadelphia Eagles.

After all, the calendar just turned to December.

"It's our time of the year," Seahawks general manager John Schneider said in his pregame radio interview with 710 ESPN Seattle.

Indeed, the Seahawks' knack for strong finishes under Pete Carroll has applied to the ends of seasons and not just the ends of games.

After their win over Philadelphia, the Seahawks are 20-5 since 2012 in regular-season games during the months of December and January. That's good for an .800 winning percentage that ranks first in the NFL in that span, according to ESPN charting. By comparison, Seattle's winning percentage in September, October and November games since 2012 is .664, third-best in the league.

The Seahawks went 7-9 in each of their first two seasons under Carroll, including a combined 5-5 in December/January regular-season games. The Seahawks had several players that make up the core of the roster during those first two seasons, but it wasn't until 2012, the year they drafted quarterback Russell Wilson -- and linebacker Bobby Wagner, among others -- that they took off.

The Seahawks had lost three of five before going 5-0 in December of 2012. That included a three-game stretch in which they scored 150 points in blowout wins over the Arizona Cardinals, Buffalo Bills and the eventual NFC Champion San Francisco 49ers. In 2014, the second of the Seahawks' back-to-back Super Bowl seasons, they won nine of their last 10 games, including a 4-0 December. The next year, Seattle won six of its final seven games to cap off a second half in which Wilson played the best football of his career.

"I do think it has a lot to do with how you prepare your guys to finish and getting them ready to do it, and with a real discipline and mentality," Carroll said last week. "I think that's part of it, and then good fortune is another part of it. A good quarterback is another part of it, but I think it's a commitment to the discipline that it takes to do stuff right when it comes to crunch time. It shows up in games and it shows up in seasons if you're fortunate and hopefully we're almost at the fourth-quarter turn here."

That the Seahawks were heavy underdogs at home to Philadelphia reflected what seemed to be an increasing sense of doubt about their place among the NFL's top contenders. They were coming off a win but had lost two of their last four, both at CenturyLink Field. And they were without cornerback Richard Sherman and strong safety Kam Chancellor, who have both suffered season-ending injuries.

Things are looking up now, though.

The Seahawks' defense has held up remarkably well in three games without Sherman and Chancellor, keeping its first two opponents under 200 passing yards then allowing only 10 points to the NFL's highest-scoring offense Sunday night.

Mike Davis looks like the one to finally stabilize what's been an ever-changing and ineffective backfield. He returned from a one-game absence and gave the Seahawks 101 yards on 20 touches against Philadelphia, production they haven't had from a running back since Chris Carson went down in Week 4. Carson could return in a couple weeks, Carroll said Monday.

Another encouraging sign: the Seahawks have started to cut down on the record rate at which they were committing penalties.

And it's December.

"It's just our mentality," free safety Earl Thomas said of Seattle's history of strong finishes. "The closer you get, the harder you run. We always talk about that. We understand what's at stake, we understand what time it is."

The Seahawks currently hold the NFC's No. 5 seed with four games left. They'll need another one of their strong finishes if they're going to navigate a tough closing stretch. It began with Philadelphia, which had the NFL's best record before losing to Seattle, and it continues over the next two weeks as the Seahawks play at the Jacksonville Jaguars (8-4) then return home to host the Los Angeles Rams (9-3) in a game that will go a long way in deciding the NFC West.

After most of his teammates had cleared out of a victorious Seahawks locker room Sunday night, wide receiver Doug Baldwin was quick to answer in the affirmative when asked if he thinks this will be the start of another December run.

"I contemplated in my head whether I wanted to say that out loud, whether I wanted to jinx it, but I do," Baldwin said. "I believe this is the start of something that we've seen in the past. Again, like I said I told Russell, whatever this is, we need to capture it, we need to hold onto it and continue to push forward to get better.

"Because the truth of the matter is we still have so much left in the tank with our defense, we're establishing our run game again, we've got some guys who have been banged up for the past few weeks, past few months who are going to come back soon. So we're looking forward to capturing what we had tonight and using this make a run and a push for it."