By Julie Buehler
More people watched Super Bowl 49 than any other television broadcast in the history of mankind.
But NO ONE could believe what they saw when the Seattle quarterback, in his 3rd year of professional football, threw a slant to Ricardo Lockette with 26 seconds left in the game.
If we freeze time at that moment, here’s what it looked like: The Seahawks trailed by 4 points, they had just seen a massively impressive pass from Russell Wilson to Jermaine Kearse for 33 yards to drop them on the Patriots’ 5-yard line and followed that up with a 4-yard run by Marshawn Lynch to get to the 1-yard line.
They needed a touchdown in the final minute of action, they needed to take time off the clock, they needed to gain 1 yard and had 3 chances to do it.
Sounds pretty basic for the league’s best running offense. They had accumulated more than 400 more yards on the ground than any other team in the NFL, had scored the most rushing touchdowns, were the only team to gain more than 5 yards per carry and were known for bullying defenses all year with their ground game.
So as the now infamous play unfolded, and we saw Wilson in shotgun formation and watched him throw the football as Marshawn Lynch ran to his left, sans the pigskin, and we watched undrafted rookie Malcolm Butler jump Lockette’s route, we wondered why the Seahawks didn’t just hand the ball off and keep it simple.
Here’s why: the coaches got too smart, the player forced a throw and Butler made the play of his lifetime. If any one of those 3 things don’t happen, we have a different outcome, but they colluded into a perfect storm and a fantastic ending to a football game (for anyone not rooting for Seattle).
Let’s not diminish the Pats’ defense: only the Chiefs allowed fewer rushing touchdowns and no team allowed fewer big plays. This Pats run defense was underrated all year, the secondary and pass defense was as well.
But it doesn’t matter from one year to the next, it’s stunning how simple it is to see championship teams, it’s not easy to execute at that level, but easy to explain: Champions force their competition out of their game plan and into guessing.
That’s exactly what the Patriots did to the Seahawks.
They forced Seattle to enter into a higher-risk for same reward thinking. Now, granted Russell Wilson is pretty good in the red zone. He threw 20 touchdowns and only 2 interceptions all year, but the Seahawks aren’t a quick-timing-route kind of team. In fact, no quarterback held onto the ball longer this year than Wilson.
By now, many people think that was the worst play call in the history of the NFL, but I disagree. It wasn’t good. It was over-thinking, but that happens a lot. More than we realize. It’s just that the results aren’t usually as dramatic.
The game ended in spectacular fashion because we had over-thinking coaches with a young player who threw the ball into a tight spot and a defender who made a 1-in-million play.
The fact the Seahawks tried to be creative during the final drive of the Super Bowl is very peculiar timing, but this is a team that scored 23 rushing touchdowns this season and only 10 within 5 yards. Most of their rushing TDs came further out where they weren’t facing goal-line run defense and a really good one at that.
And the Patriots, a championship level team, that was playing their style of football, convinced the Seahawks to peel away from their game plan and start guessing.
That’s going to lose a strategic battle every time.
Julie Buehler hosts the Coachella Valley’s most popular sports talk radio show, “Buehler’s Day Off” every day from 3-6 on 1010 KXPS, the valley’s all sports station. She can also be seen every morning between 6-7am on KMIR sharing the coolest stories in sports. She’s an avid gym rat, slightly sarcastic and more likely to recite Steve Young’s career passing stats than American Idol winners. Tune in M-F 3-6 pst at www.team1010.com or watch “Buehler’s Day Off” on Ustream and KMIR.com for her sports reports.
