You’re probably aware of the national holiday known as the Superbowl. We sit down to try and understand all that happened on Sunday, especially why you wouldn’t just throw a pass to someone who’s nickname is Beast Mode.
Team Blackness discussed all the fun that is America’s Christmas, a snowball fight in New Rochelle that went horribly awry, and D’Angelo’s revolutionary performance on Saturday Night Live.
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C.S.
“
Um . . . because he’s a running back?
CONGRATULATIONS!
Handoff not pass. Although throwing to a running back worked pretty well for them at one point in the game.
Carroll blew it, not that he cares. He’ll get in every Football Hall of Fame that exists based on his record anyway.
But damn, that was a bad fucking call, plain and simple. I understand his stated reasoning for it, but he was wrong.
Tree With Water
@C.S.: No, because he is Marshawn Lynch, his nickname is spot on, and the football was close enough to the goal line to cast a shadow on it.. It’s certainly not for lack of good pair of hands, as Lynch’s catch during the Seahawks final drive proved.
opiejeanne
Or he could have faked the handoff to Lynch and jumped across the goal line himself.
Believe me, the alternative endings have been thoroughly discussed here in Seattle. One thing, though: that guy who intercepted that ball, he made an amazing catch. His is a bit of a Cinderella story, but the Seahawks have a guy with an almost identical story, undrafted, not making the team at the beginning of the season, delivering pizzas, etc.
Doug r
Because the Patriots were expecting it? A foot and a half to the right and that pass would have been a touchdown.
Mike J
538 says of course they were going to run, they were just trying to burn a bit of clock first.
raven
Dawgs, 4 yard line against South Carolina. Todd Gurley, best RB in college football. Throw a pass, intentional grounding, settle for a field goal and lose by three blowing a shot at the final four.
Quaker in a Basement
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Indeed. Tuck the ball firmly into Mr. Mode’s mighty mitts and let nature take its course.
Anyway, given the pass called from the sidelines, it’s beyond me why Wilson didn’t chuck the ball halfway to Mars instead of throwing it anywhere near a Patriots defender.
Poopyman
@Tree With Water:
(From)
Tree With Water
@Poopyman: Yeah, but you know what? Not one of those games was the Super Bowl, with the ball on the goal line, with time running out and adrenalin rushing in and immortality beckoning. That said, I well and fondly recall the heroics of Dan Bunz in Super Bowl (?), and fully realize this idiot back-and-forth discussion will never cease.
SatanicPanic
@Poopyman: OK I suck at calculating probabilities, but, all things being equal, if you’ve got three times to run an experiment with 1/5 chance of success, aren’t your odds pretty good?
Kylroy
@SatanicPanic: 48.8% chance of success, based on three tries each with a 20% chance of success.
And obviously remember that calling football plays is not as simple as rolling dice.
SatanicPanic
@Kylroy: What would be really useful to know would be of those times they gave Lynch the ball and he didn’t convert whether they were able to convert on subsequent plays. I don’t, however, know how to look this up. I checked Seahawks.com and they had 20 rushing TDs and 20 passing TDs.
Kylroy
@SatanicPanic: Whatever it was, throwing into traffic was a high-risk move with little reason to believe it was likelier to succeed than other options (such as playaction pass to the sidelines, for example). Best comment on this whole debacle comes from Woody Hayes, decades prior to the game: “Only three things can happen when you pass, and two of them are bad.”
eldorado
the real problem is that carroll ran out a three receiver set and belichick didn’t move anybody out of the box. now the hawks are facing 8 men in the box and no way to block all those guys for lynch.
seattle can’t call timeout because they blew two of them earlier in the drive. this is also why they can’t run three more times. belicheck doesn’t call timeout either. so now you have the hawks trying to win with wilson throwing from the pocket to his 3rd wide receiver instead of going with their strengths – lynch or wilson run/pass option.
pats were obviously prepared for that play and butler jumped the route beautifully. i can’t stand belichick, but this was a superior bit of coaching, and it paid off.
the Conster
Carroll is a cheerleading ringmaster of a bunch of talented but undisciplined immature clowns, as evidenced by the last two minutes of that game. The jumping offsides while there was still a play they could have made was the huge tell about where their heads were at. Belichick would have killed everyone of those clowns with his bare hands if they’d ever done that because they’re all coached to play the full 60 minutes. Can you imagine any of Belichick’s players getting away with what Carroll allows on the sideline? Carroll was so outcoached it isn’t even funny and the more he talks about what happened, the less sense any of what he did makes. His teams are built on emotion which works until it doesn’t, and he wasn’t prepared for anything that happened there at the end with the weird catch and burning his timeouts unnecessarily. Bill didn’t call time out – which is another controversy here – because he liked what he had to matchup and basically dared Carroll to beat him. Hate him if you must, but think of how many times Belichick loses a game because his players are out of control on the field, or the clock is mismanaged, or he gets flat out outcoached. Doesn’t happen.
Couldn't Stand the Weather
I heard a conspiracy theory this morning, over here at work. I’ll let you judge.
Mr. Lynch’s recent impromptu grabbing of himself and subsequent comments probably made him persona non grata with Pete Carroll and the rest of the Seahawks brass.
Sooo, the story goes, with the game (and a ring) on the line, Pete maybe kinda sorta didn’t want Lynch to get the credit for winning the game. And thus, had Wilson throw the ball (all this putting aside that Wilson thought he had room to get that pass in there, but did not).
Personally, I think that’s a bit of a stretch. No bigger egomaniac exists than an NFL coach. Any of them would sell family members’ gold teeth for a ring.
burnspbesq
@Couldn’t Stand the Weather:
That’s not the whole thing.
The strong version of the hypothesis is that the reason why Carroll preferred to have Wilson be the hero, rather than Lynch, is because Wilson represents a less authentic, and therefore less threatening to White America, version of the African-American Hero.
No, I am not shitting you. Check out the online version of The New Republic.
Tree With Water
A writer at Deadspin.com pinpoints the tumor in Pete Carrol’s football brain.
[Pete Carrol]: “If we score, we do. If we don’t, then we’ll run it in on third and fourth down. Really, (we called it) with no second thoughts or no hesitation at all. And unfortunately, with the play that we tried to execute, the guy (Butler) makes a great play and jumps in front of the route and makes an incredible play that nobody would ever think he could do”.
“To kind of waste a play.” This was a coach so certain that Lynch or Wilson could punch the ball into the end zone, he was willing to forfeit one of three plays left in his season because it would’ve come against a slightly unfavorable defense.
Corner Stone
@eldorado:
Woah, woah, woah. Hold up.
They are on the half yard line. There is no “in the box”. It’s all fucking box at that point.
Either run, run, timeout. Or read option, run, timeout.
It simply does not matter what Belicheck puts in as a package when you’re down to the nut cutting. Your best against their best.
Wilson threw an awful pass and he had largely signaled all game he had nothing going in the pass game. Two of his biggest completions were a blown coverage to Lynch and that freak catch by Kearse. Now, they made those plays, fine.
But Jeebus Cracker (Betty’s Uncle). You’ve got the best RB with YAC AND the team’s second best rusher RW! Fuck me!
There are three plays, and a timeout. You simply do not put the ball in the air there.
Corner Stone
@Poopyman: I hate this stupid stat.
So fucking what? Were any of them against the Pats? Were any of them do or die? Were any of them in the SB? And then what happened?
the Conster
Carroll: Has the best running back in the league on the 1/2 yard line with three downs and a timeout to win the Super Bowl and he calls for a risky pass. FAIL
Belichick: Has his 5th corner fully prepared for the world’s least likely play call. WIN
Corner Stone
@the Conster:
And, if you believe him, he said it was because Pats had their “goal line package” in. WTF else are they going to have ready to go?
It may have been a gutsy call, but I contend there was just football there at that point. No need for tricksy.
Corner Stone
@Couldn’t Stand the Weather:
The Seahawks aren’t the Browns. They’d rather Lynch run for 300 yards in the SB and then penny pinch him on the ensuing contract.
the Conster
@Corner Stone:
Belichick was in Carroll’s head killing all his d00dz before that play call because BB didn’t call timeout. If Carroll was going to go all tricksy, he probably should have had a play to run that BB hadn’t seen before because BB knows what your tendencies are, and what play you’re going to run at the same time you do.
Kylroy
@the Conster: Detestable as Belicheck is, I have to admire his monomaniacal devotion to winning. In a league full of big personalities and macho chest-beaters, he’s an ice-cold robot who doesn’t care what anybody thinks of him as long as he gets the W.