No Marshawn Lynch, no Super Bowl
It’s only sports, yes, but most of humankind takes their sport seriously. It’s fun, it’s life-affirming somehow. But rooting for your team can be crushing. It was there, the win, in the hands and the legs and the unparallelled strength and determination of Marshawn Lynch.
But he wasn’t given the ball.
It was one yard away, the franchise was but a single yard from a second straight Super Bowl title, something that had not been done for a decade, the last time accomplished by the very team that stared back at them in the line-up over the properly inflated football, the New England Patriots.
As every NFL fan knows, instead of giving the ball to Beast Mode, coach Pete Carroll and offensive coordinator Darell Bevell called for Russell Wilson to throw a slant play to Richardo Lockette. The result was that stunning interception courtesy of unheralded rookie Malcolm Butler.
Seahawk loss beats Buckner, Bartman
This is worse than Bill Buckner fumbling a routine grounder for the Boston Red Sox in game six of the 1986 World Series, allowing the New York Mets to win that game and take the series in game seven. Worse than the Steve Bartman foul-ball that helped the Chicago Cubs fail to get to their first World Series in 58 years in 2003.
How about a hockey example? Worse than Don Cherry and the Boston Bruins’ late too-many-men on the ice penalty that helped them lose game seven of the 1979 Stanley Cup finals against the Montreal Canadians.
This franchise was becoming known as an exciting, hard-working, lunch-bucket toting successful group. But now this hangs over them. How will they make it go away? Can they? The players will always know they could have been part of a repeat were it not for one horrifically bad decision.
Run the ball in! Don’t worry about giving it back to Tom Terrific! Run it in and take the lead and let your defense, the guys who got you there, let them finish it off. If they can’t, fine, you lose, but they are one of the most capable defenses in the NFL.
The Seahawk players, and their fans, were, and still very much are, stunned. Pete Carroll had responded with lots of talk but nothing that makes sense. He blew it but he’s talking like it was a logical football call.
“There’s no reservation, and don’t make it out like there is,” he said. “We don’t ever call a play thinking we might throw an interception. I don’t ever think that…we go with what we know. There was not a thought in my mind that we would make a mistake. It was a tremendous play by the guy on the other side.”
Nonsense. Butler got a gift. Wilson lead Lockette too much, they were only yards from one another, he should have thrown into Lockette’s mid-section; he throws it into his mid-section then Lockette catches it for a touchdown or it hits him and falls incomplete, no where near Butler.
Seahawks: getting past Super Bowl XLIX
It will be in the minds of the owner, the coaching staff, players and the entire Pacific Northwest. “We were one-yard and seconds away from doing something special and instead we gave Malcolm Butler, Tom Brady, Bill Belichick and all of New England the title,” they’ll think. “After working so hard all season, we threw away the Super Bowl.”
Without that play call the Pats end up with three wins out of six in Super Bowl games and without a title in a decade. Without that play call the ‘Hawks and their fans are on top of the football world for a second straight season.
It will now forever come up in sport conversations about the worst plays in sporting history. Pete Carroll, a brilliant coach, is marred by the play, and so is Bevell. Wilson, an unblemished hero before, must now overcome that one play.
Seattle linebacker Bruce Irvin already criticized it publicly and more players likely have privately, and will down the road publicly. Marshawn Lynch has to wonder about signing the contract extension offered, thinking he should find a team that will give him the ball when the biggest game of the year is on the line.
Maybe it’ll be water under Seattle’s Evergreen Point Floating Bridge by the time training camp comes around in July but I have my doubts. Only surely they must eventually get over it.
But how?
