No run for glory
Late play call likely to follow Seahawks OC
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Darrell Bevell was 20 miles from home, but he really just wanted to go 1 yard. That was how far the Seattle Seahawks were from the winning touchdown in the final seconds of Sunday’s Super Bowl. How they got there was Bevell’s decision.
As a teenager, Bevell and his father, Jim, would watch film of games together, pushing the button to make it go forward and back and forward again, analyzing what worked and what did not. Jim Bevell was the coach at Chaparral High School in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Darrell Bevell was his star quarterback.
“To be able to play in a Super Bowl here, you couldn’t even dream it up
this good,” Darrell Bevell, 45, said last week.
And now here he was, with the game’s key calculation, the ball a yard from the end zone, the fourth-quarter clock ticking into the final half-minute, the NFL’s toughest running back on the field.
But Bevell did not call for a handoff to Marshawn Lynch. Through the headset he called a pass play, as Coach Pete Carroll wanted. Quarterback Russell Wilson was intercepted, and the Seahawks lost 28-24 to the New England Patriots.
Bevell became the goat, not the hometown hero.
“That was the worst play call I’ve seen in the history of football,” Emmitt Smith, the former Dallas Cowboys running back, wrote on Twitter.
Countless critics were equally exasperated by Bevell’s decision not to give the ball to Lynch, nicknamed Beast Mode, who had rushed for 4 yards on the previous play and 102 in the game. Former NFL running backs now in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, like Smith, were most indignant.
“WCE!!!” former Rams back Eric Dickerson tweeted. “Worst Call Ever. Beast Mode in the backfield and you throw it?”
Carroll took responsibility (“There’s really nobody to blame but me,” he said), and Wilson admitted he did not make his best throw.
But second-guessing flooded past them and washed over Bevell, in charge of Seattle’s offense for four years, including during last year’s 43-8 Super Bowl victory over Denver. History appears determined to cement the interception as a play-calling blunder as head-shaking as any.
“I mean, shoot, it didn’t turn out the way I hoped it would, so of course I am sitting here saying, ‘Could I do something different?’ ” Bevell said after the game.
His father, now retired and still living in Scottsdale, was among the family and friends in attendance at University of Phoenix Stadium. Days before, Darrell Bevell, married with three daughters, had allowed himself to dream of a winning ending.
“That would be extra special,” he said. “You get to share it with your friends and your family a little bit. It is right here in your backyard. Everyone gets to say, ‘Yeah, I remember when he went to Chaparral.’ It is really cool and exciting to be back.”
Bevell has built a dynamic offense around Wilson, a thirdyear quarterback, and Lynch, the bruising running back, and is a frequent candidate for head-coaching jobs in the NFL. His play call in the final moments of the Super Bowl will probably be a question he will be forced to answer repeatedly.
Seattle had a 10-point lead before New England quarterback Tom Brady led the Patriots on two fourth-quarter touchdown drives. The Seahawks, suddenly losing 28-24, got the ball with 2:02 remaining.
Wilson lobbed a pass down the sideline to Lynch for a 31-yard gain, and the clock stopped for the two-minute warning with 1:55 left. After an incompletion, Seattle used its first timeout. There was 1:50 left, and the Seahawks were at New England’s 49.
Wilson threw incomplete on second down, but his 11-yard pass to Ricardo Lockette gave Seattle a new set of downs. From the 38, Wilson lobbed a ball down the right side for Jermaine Kearse, who made one of the more memorable catches in Super Bowl history.
In tandem, Kearse and New England cornerback Malcolm Butler leaped for the ball. It bounced off Kearse’s hand as both men fell backward to the grass, then ricocheted off one of his knees, then another, then off his hands and into his arms.
The Seahawks had a first down at the 5-yard line and called a timeout with 1:06 left.
Bevell called to hand the ball to Lynch, who ran to the left for 4 yards. The clock ticked. The Patriots could have called a timeout, to give themselves more time on offense if Seattle scored. They could have let the Seahawks score immediately for the same reason.
“We would have used our timeouts if that had been a running play,” New England Coach Bill Belichick said, though that still would have left the Patriots with just about 20 seconds to play.
The championship would rest on whether the Seahawks would score a touchdown.
“We wanted to be really conscious about how much time was on the clock,” Bevell said. “We wanted to use as much of it as we could. We had one timeout left, so we ran it on first down and changed the personnel up quick from it.”
The clock ticked toward 30 seconds. The Patriots inserted their goal line defense, front-loaded with stout linemen. The Seahawks had Lynch in the backfield and three receivers.
Bevell, speaking into a headset connected to Carroll and Wilson, called for a pass. It was what Carroll wanted, too.
“I told him to throw it, because of the matchup,” Carroll told ESPN in the locker room.
Kearse and Lockette were lined up to the right, covered by two Patriots. The ball was snapped to Wilson, in the shotgun formation, with 26 seconds left. Kearse was jammed by one defender. Lockette cut inside along the goal line and appeared to be open. Wilson threw. He did not anticipate how quickly Butler would surge forward from a few yards deep in the end zone.
“I thought it was a touchdown, honestly,” Wilson said.
Lockette never saw Butler, either. Just as the ball arrived to Lockette’s hands, Butler snared it from the air.
“In retrospect, we could have easily run it and we wouldn’t be talking about this,” Carroll said. “We might have got stuffed on third and fourth down. I don’t know. This is what happened.”