Count on Seahawks to keep it interesting
Where to begin? Eli Manning’s two-time-Super-Bowl-winning goofup? Tony Romo’s latest no-Super-Bowl-winning heroics? Jason Pierre-Paul’s sad fireworks accident and its revelations, which feel like one of those movie plots where the hostage keeps losing fingers? Ndamukong Suh and Pacman Jones getting away with the early precursors to on-field chaos?
Seriously, after the Brady decision it suddenly feels like the NFL is the crooked prison warden who refuses to leave his office as the mattresses burn outside.
No, let’s begin with the Seattle Seahawks, and one yard. Seattle fell apart against the St. Louis Rams in Week 1, and in overtime faced a fourth-and-one from the Rams’ 43 to extend the game. The Super Bowl wasn’t on the line this time, and they weren’t on the verge of a touchdown, but I wonder if a small part of every man in blue had a tiny acid flashback, a vertiginous spin back into Arizona and February and dry air and Malcolm Butler. Fourth And One. Seattle.
Well, this time they gave it to Marshawn Lynch, and he was met by Rams helmets and shoulder pads in the Seattle backfield, and the game was over. On Facebook, Lynch’s mom ranted in a lovingly unhinged motherly way about her son, and the lack of blocking against St. Louis, and the Super Bowl play call, and Seahawks offensive co-ordinator Darrell Bevell. She called for him to be fired.
That play. As I walked out of the stadium in Glendale after the Super Bowl my head was still spinning, and felt light. That final drive — the wheel route to Lynch, the juggling impossible catch by Jermaine Kearse, the last yard — it was so damned vivid, at the end of the best NFL game I have ever seen, and when Butler jumped Russell Wilson’s throw, that no-parachute-no-backup-plan throw that he pushed a little too far . . . it was incomprehensible.
I replayed that drive, and that game, in my mind for weeks. Why didn’t Bill Belichick call a timeout with Seattle at the five and over a minute left? Why didn’t the Seahawks run anything else, anything? I imagine for the Seahawks, they replayed it for months. In the immediate aftermath, they stalked around their locker room, furious and not quite speechless; people said there were confrontations, and the angry words were still being spilled when the media was allowed in.
Sports Illustrated’s Greg Bishop wrote a great story about Wilson taking most of the team to Hawaii to bond and leave that play in the past, in a ceremony on the beach. They were over it. They said they were over it. And then they ran Marshawn Lynch on fourth-and-one and got stuffed like a baked potato in Week 1, and it all must have come flooding back. Without holdout super-linebacker Kam Chancellor, they gave up 34 points to the Rams, 31 in regulation.
It felt like . . . literature. The Seahawks believed in the blue and green light, the orgastic future fourth-and-one that week by week recedes before us. It eluded them then, but that’s no matter — tomorrow they will run faster, stretch their arms out further — especially on short rub slants . . . and one fine morning.
So they beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Last week, this space finished 7-8-1, which is an appropriately mediocre start. Props to The Great Gatsby, by the way, which I just shamelessly appropriated. I hope they still teach it in school.
Like the Super Bowl, you can pore over the ending forever.