 |
| Seahawks expected win percentage last Sunday |
Stuff like this:
Yes, that happened. And so did this:
That right there is the single weirdest 2-point conversion in the history of the NFL.
The Seahawks scored a pair of TD’s in 44 seconds to grab a 22-19 lead. If anything, they scored too quickly, since the Packers had time to mount a final drive and tie the game with a FG, sending it to OT. The turn of events in this game was confounding. And we like to do confounding here at In Play Lose, where one team’s miraculous comeback is another team’s epic choke. And my love for Seattle’s Blue Man Group aside, watching the Packers squander this game was astonishing.
The math wasn’t in Seattle’s favour, but you didn’t need to do the math to realize what the Seahawks were up against, when the simple eye test would do the trick, since your own two eyes would tell you that the Seahawks were terrible. Absolutely terrible. They had committed three turnovers and six penalties before they had even gained a first down. They had about 50 yards of offense in the first half. By all rights, it probably should’ve been 28-0 or even 35-0 at the half.
Yet given every possibility to put the defending champions to the sword early in this game, the Packers refused to seize it. They had the ball six times in Seattle’s territory in the first half, yet only managed a single TD. They converted five Seahawk turnovers in the game into only nine points. Packer fans had to feel a bit uneasy with each missed opportunity, as the Seahawks are known for strong finishes, whereas a talented yet less deep Green Bay team often tired late in close games this season. The last thing Green Bay wanted to do was let the Seahawks hang around and have more chances.
Then again, given Seattle’s ineptitude on offense, maybe letting them have the ball was a good idea. Russell Wilson pitched a 0.0 QBR in the first 30 minutes, and by the time of the aforementioned 4th interception, his QBR had eked all the way up to 7.2. The Hawks were so desperate for offense that they dusted off this bit of nuttiness when down 16-0 well into the 2nd half:
Doing something like this with the season on the line takes a certain amount of chutzpah. But much like the offensive line shenanigans the Patriots pulled a week ago, it was the right call, an idea which was born from extensive film study of the opposition. The Seahawks had apparently noticed a tendency of the outside rushers on the Packers FG defense to crash hard to the inside. If it hadn’t worked, Pete Carroll & Co. would’ve been 2nd-guessed interminably, of course, because it’s always a bad play if it doesn’t work, but then again, nothing else was working up to that point. And missing on this play wouldn’t have changed the situation much. Taking a FG to go down 16-3 wasn’t that much different than being down 16-0. Two more TD’s would be required in either of those cases, and the Seahawks were having trouble simply holding onto the football, much less sustaining a scoring drive. If anything, it was the perfect time to run this play – a time when conventional football wisdom would suggest that just getting something on the scoreboard was somehow better than coming away with nothing.
But see, that’s the sort of thing which, in a desperate situation, the really good teams aren’t afraid to try. The Seahawk rally was built upon a mix of unpredictability and an inherent trust in their best players to make plays. The Seahawks often opted to run the football in passing situations, since Marshon Lynch clearly had a hot hand and wound up running for 159 yards. When skill players get hot, you give them the ball. Also, most everything the Seahawks did at the end of the game was based on zone reads, whereby Russell Wilson makes determinations on the spot in both the running and passing games. He may have been having an awful game, but Wilson’s still their best player. The zone reads are Wilson’s forte and a devastating part of his arsenal. Were it not imperative to keep him standing upright, the Seahawks would run the zone read all the time, but you don’t want to subject your QB to so many hits over the course of the season. But there wasn’t any point in doing that any more, because there wasn’t going to be any season left. In the 4th Quarter of this game, the Seahawks trusted their best player to make plays. Meanwhile, Aaron Rogers, who is the best QB in the NFL, was entrusted by the Green Bay Packers to … hand the ball off a lot.
“The one statistic I had as far as a target to hit was 20 rushing attempts in the second half. I felt that would be a very important target to hit for our offense.” – Mike McCarthy
Uh … huh? How about an important target being to get a first down? Or maybe score? Or maybe win the game?
Packers coach Mike McCarthy has now been cast as one of the primary villains in this Greek tragedy of a season’s end for Team Cheese. The Packers had an cautious game plan, and McCarthy played it conservative, kicking four times on 4th & 1, and opting for FGs twice when they had 4th down near the Seattle goal line. Now, to be fair here, a lot of the critique of McCarthy doesn’t seem to be based on the eye test. He may not have shown much confidence in his offense to get a single yard, but the Packers offense wasn’t exactly doing much to justify that faith. Quite honestly, they weren’t very good, either. Rogers threw two bad interceptions and missed an open receiver in the end zone. Everything they did in this game was essentially gifted to them through Seahawk errors. So it’s somewhat understandable, in a game where you think points are going to come at a premium, think your defense is playing great, and think your offense is playing lousy, to take whatever points that you can get.
But … you’re not playing in Cleveland or Tampa Bay here. You’re playing the defending Super Bowl champs on their home field in the NFC Championship Game, which means they probably have a few guys capable of making plays over there on the other sideline. They have the home field advantage, in this game, because they’re probably better than you. You’re the underdog here, Packers. Take some risks! As hesitant as McCarthy was to let the momentum swing through a defensive stop on the goal line – a legit worry in a place as nuts as the Clink in Seattle – taking the easy way out time and again, taking threes instead of going for sevens, essentially left the Seahawks in the game. And I see no harm whatsoever, even when milking the clock in the 4th Quarter, to let your all-universe QB throw a pass, even if he’s having a terrible game. What set the stage for the Seahawks comeback, after that interception I mentioned ages ago, was three Packers runs for negative yards, followed by a shanked punt – the first of many Packer mistakes down the stretch.
The Seahawks started making plays, and the Packers started making mistakes. Go back and look at those two nutso gifs at the top of the page – both of them are unlikely results, but both are also Packer goofs. The onside kick itself is, in fact, almost perfectly placed by the Seahawks. (Good teams tend to have good kickers.) The usual tactic for defending the onside kick is having the front line move forward, block the oncoming kicking team, and let a designated guy behind them field the ball, but the kick is right in a place where a guy on the front line has to make a choice on whether or not to go for the ball. It’s a judgment call the kicking team wants to force the opponent to have to make. And never mind whether or not he should or shouldn’t have gone for it. Catch the football! You’re on the Hands team for a reason!
And I have no earthly idea what the safety is doing on that 2-point conversion – 2 points for Seattle which turned out to be absolutely critical. He takes about the worst route to the ball imaginable. It’s almost like he lost it in the sun or something, except it’s Seattle and there is no sun there.
And once the Seahawks had to chance to go for the kill shot in OT, they went for it. The Packers crept their entire defense up to the line on the last two plays, playing the run after having been beaten on by Lynch the entire second half. The safeties were caught cheating, and the Seahawks simply threw over the top:
It’s hard to believe this happened. I’ve watched the NFL replay twice, knowing the end result, and still can’t believe it. While I think most clichés in sports about heart and effort and working harder are bullshit, there is something to be said for the notion of finding a way to win. Good teams figure it out and have the players to make it happen. No, actually, great teams figure it out. And good teams often lose to great ones who do it.
And make no mistake, the Packers are a very, very good team. But you just can’t lose this game. You just can’t. They’ve got to be sick over this one. They really were the better team on Sunday, but the Packers wound up giving it away after having been five minutes away from going to the Super Bowl. It’s the most inexplicable sort of defeat, one which they’re never really going to get over.
