Patriots may have hands full with Wilson
It speaks volumes about the events of the National Football League’s Championship Sunday that the dynastic Bill Belichick and Tom Brady-led New England Patriots advancing to their sixth Super Bowl in 14 years finished a distant second on the Excite-O-Meter.
Their AFC final, a clinical 45-7 dissection of the submissive Indianapolis Colts, was a walk in the park, essentially over by the first drive of the third quarter.
The NFC title game? A circus, full of chills and spills and awful decisions, plus a game-changing faux pas, by coaches and players, in which the Seattle Seahawks and Green Bay Packers took turns trying to give the game away. The Packers finally succeeded.
And despite all the errors, they produced a playoff classic, a 28-22 comeback from nowhere by the home side, a rally for the ages by the Seahawks, a collapse — from 197 ahead with four minutes left — that Packers fans may be weeping over for years to come.
Entertainment value aside, though, the day did yield a fascinating Super Bowl XLIX matchup for the University of Phoenix Stadium, 13 days from now.
It will feature the evil genius, Belichick, against the touchy-feely fellow who preceded him as Patriots’ head coach, Seahawk boss man Pete Carroll.
Both coaches called trick plays en route to their Sunday wins: Seattle holder/ punter Jon Ryan, of Regina, throwing a touchdown pass off a fake field goal; New England left tackle Nate Solder sneaking off to catch a Brady touchdown pass and start the Pats’ second-half explosion.
It will feature a three-time champion quarterback, Brady, against the considerably less-fancied Russell Wilson of Seattle, whose victory over Aaron Rodgers and the Packers meant he is now 10-0 lifetime against Super Bowlwinning quarterbacks.
It pits last year’s resounding 43-8 conquerors of Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos against another explosive offensive team, one that is certain to challenge the Seahawks’ splendid defence, especially with questions surrounding the health of their best cornerback, Richard Sherman.
Each team has a big, bruising running back: Seattle’s Marshawn Lynch, who ran for 157 yards and a touchdown Sunday, and Pats’ LaGarrette Blount (148, 3 TDS).
The Seahawks will be attempting to be the first backto-back Super Bowl champions since the Patriots in 2003-04.
Oddsmakers have the Seahawks as early 2.5-point favourites, with an over-under total score of 48.5 points. Those will change as the Super Bowl approaches, but they are close on both counts to how the teams’ regularseason meeting ended: A 24-23 Seattle win in which Wilson threw for 293 yards and three touchdowns, to Brady’s 395 yards with two TDs and two interceptions.
Brady was sparkling in Sunday’s lopsided win over Indy and the Patriots gave ample evidence they are the class of the AFC.
But the Seattle-Green Bay game set the bar impossibly high for late game dramatics.
The easy target, for mourners in Wisconsin, may be tight end Brandon Bostick, who botched a simple catch of a short kickoff after Wilson’s one-yard TD run closed the gap to 19-14 with just more than two minutes remaining.
If he makes the catch, the Packers probably run out the clock.
Instead, they just kept compounding the problem, letting Lynch loose for a 24-yard touchdown run with 1:25 left, then making a weak attempt at covering Canadian tight end Luke Willson for the two-point convert, a desperate lob that ought to have been knocked down, if not intercepted, by Ha Ha Clinton-Dix.
Green Bay came back to force overtime with Mason Crosby’s fifth field goal of the day, from 48 yards, but the fact they had settled for the first two of those early in the first quarter, when they got just six points out of three touchdown opportunities, came back to haunt them.
There must have been at least a dozen moments when even the most ardent Seattle Seahawks fan muttered, “That’s it. It’s over.”
Wilson had thrown three first-half interceptions and walked off for halftime with a passer rating of 0.0. At one point, he had completed zero passes to his own receivers, but two to the Packers.
The fourth pass he had aimed at Jermaine Kearse ended up just like the first three: Picked off by the visitors.
He had thrown more interceptions in a conference final game than any quarterback in 42 years, since Dallas’s Roger Staubach in 1973.
Wilson’s few good passes were dropped. The Seahawks were taking penalty after penalty — offsides and false starts, as though they, not the Packers, were the ones being disoriented by the crowd noise.
When Kearse tipped another ball into the hands of Morgan Burnett for the fourth Green Bay pick, and the Packers safety took a knee instead of trying a runback, it was only the tiniest, niggling suggestion that something might have changed in the atmosphere.
The Packers seemed to be saying, with that kneeldown by Burnett: “We don’t need any more.”
And then everything changed. The first-half heroes became second-half goats, and vice versa.
A game the Seahawks had no business winning, they won.
Wilson, who had entered the game with the highest career QB passer rating in NFL playoff history, barely got off the goose-egg — in Sunday’s game, his passer rating of 13.6 was the worst by any QB in the 98 NFL playoff games since 2006.
But what isn’t measurable by numbers is the magic the undersized 26 year old seems able to produce in the big moments. In the fourth quarter, he finally began to use his legs.
In overtime, he threw two perfect passes, to Doug Baldwin and the winning TD throw to Kearse.
Rodgers wasn’t great this day, either, but when it was all on the line, in the clutch, he was the second-best quarterback on the field.
The great ones have a habit of ending up that way, when they face Russell Wilson and friends.