SEAHAWK WIN
Lynch, ‘12th Man’ drown out Saints
SEATTLE — The jawing began long before the game even started, long before Seattle’s fabled 12th Man could drown it out.
That’s when Saints tight end Jimmy Graham dared to wander into the Seahawks’ warmup area on Saturday, announcing himself to Seattle linebacker Bruce Irvin by saying: “I’m Jimmy.” Irvin retaliated by knocking the football from the Saints’ playmaker’s hands and punting it away.
“I was like, ’Who the (heck) is Jimmy?’ ” Irvin said.
By the end of Saturday’s 2315 Seahawks win in the NFC divisional playoffs, it hardly even mattered. Behind on-again, off-again rains and raucous cheers from the crowd known as the “12th Man,” Seattle spent the afternoon taking the Saints completely out of their game as they punched their ticket to the NFC Championship Game.
Next weekend, the Seahawks will play host to the winner of Sunday’s Panthers-49ers tilt, inviting yet another opponent to face the best home-field advantage in football. “It was a perfect storm,” said Seattle cornerback Richard Sherman with a smile. “No pun intended.”
Marshawn Lynch provided the driving force for Seattle’s victory, shredding the Saints for 140 yards and two TDs, including a 31-yard jaunt that Seattle coach Pete Carroll called “Beast Mode II” with 2:40 to play, on an afternoon when Russell Wilson passed for just 103 yards. Meanwhile, the Seattle defense erased Graham, holding the record-setting tight end to one catch, and leaving QB Drew Brees (309 yards, one TD) off balance.
The game ended on a bizarre play that was emblematic of the Saints’ struggles. There were still two seconds left when Saints receiver Marques Colston caught a nine-yard pass at the Seattle 38, with a chance to step out of bounds and give Brees one more chance to score. Instead, Colston tried to lateral it to Travaris Cadet, but the ball went forward, resulting in a penalty and a 10-second run-off that ended the game. “We’ll look at the film,” said New Orleans coach Sean Payton, when asked about the play. “Next question.”
That one play erased a valiant Saints comeback. Lynch’s second TD had put Seattle up 23-8, very nearly sealing the game, but that’s when Brees finally awakened, finding cracks in a Seattle “D” that had been nearly impenetrable. He’d cap a nine-play, 80-yard drive with a 9-yard TD pass to Colston, closing the deficit to 23-15. Moments later, Colston recovered an onside kick to set up that last-ditch Saints drive. Before all that, though, the Seahawks had owned this game. They had expected another uncharacteristically run-heavy attack from the pass-happy Saints, Sherman said, so they weren’t surprised at all when Brees spent the first half handing off to Khiry Robinson and Mark Ingram. “They had to change it from the last game that we played against them,” Sherman said, recalling Seattle’s 34-7 win over the Saints here on Dec. 2. “I think they wanted to continue that mind-set (of running). And they did that.”
On the first play of the second quarter, Ingram took a handoff from his own 24 and was stood up at the line by Michael Bennett, who popped the ball loose and recovered it. Two plays later, Lynch rumbled in from 15 yards out for a 13-0 lead.
The Saints, meanwhile, never capitalized on anything. There was a golden opportunity to get back in the game with 5:03 to play, when a long Brees pass somehow bounced off Seattle defenders Kam Chancellor and Byron Maxwell and into the waiting hands of Robert Meachem for a 52-yard gain to the Seattle 25, but that possession ended in a missed field goal. Shayne Graham would whiff on another field-goal try, both of which were wide left.
Sherman said he doesn’t care which team he sees in the NFC title game, excited to i ntroduce another opponent to the 12th Man. “I think it flusters you,” he said of the Seattle home-field advantage. “We feed off (the crowd) energy. They feed off us.”