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February 6, 2015 at 12:35 am #18001
znModeratorShocking loss could rip Seahawks apart
By Bernie Miklasz
After watching the Seattle Seahawks squander a victory in Super Bowl 49 and monitoring the firestorm of criticism directed at coach Pete Carroll in the aftermath, the experience reminded me of something I’d seen before: the St. Louis Rams’ loss to New England in Super Bowl 36.
Obviously, it isn’t an exact match. Seattle wasn’t a huge underdog against the Patriots in Super Bowl 49. And the 2001 Rams were heavy betting favorites to beat the Patriots in Super Bowl 36.
The criticism of Carroll was based on one play: Seattle’s final snap of the game, when QB Russell Wilson had a pass picked off at the goal-line by unlikely Super Bowl hero Malcolm Butler. With the Seahawks less than a yard from the end zone and a victory, they opted for a risky pass instead of handing the ball to the tackle-breaking RB Marshawn Lynch.
“We had it,” Seattle DE Bruce Irvin told reporters after the game. “I don’t understand how you don’t give it to the best back in the league on the 1-yard line.”
Added Seattle cornerback Tharold Simon: “How do you throw the ball when you got Marshawn Lynch?”
With the 2001 Rams, it wasn’t about one play as much as the entire game plan. The 2001 Rams were supposed to win the game and take home their second Super Bowl championship in three years. But the Patriots forced three St. Louis turnovers, got physical with the Rams’ receivers, and exploited coach Mike Martz’s pass-happy attack.
Even though the Patriots set up with a nickel or dime defense (extra defensive backs) on 75 percent of the Rams’ plays, RB Marshall Faulk was given only 17 carries.
Martz was roundly criticized for his failure to take advantage of the Patriots’ nickel-dime packages by feeding the ball to Faulk, the league’s best all-around RB and the future Hall of Famer.
Martz was defiant in the wake of the criticism — saying that if he had a chance to do it all over again, he would have called for even more passes.
Martz never really recovered from the loss, or his reaction to it.
I’ll return to that in a little while.
Carroll continues to defend the decision to pass instead of putting the football and game in Lynch’s strong grip. But Carroll has clearly been shaken by the repercussions of a play call that’s been tabbed as the worst in Super Bowl history.
That became obvious during Carroll’s interview by Matt Lauer on NBC’s Today show on Wednesday.
Carroll noted the criticism of his own players.
“I don’t think at this point that everybody’s on the same page about that sequence necessarily, but that’s OK,” he told Lauer.
Carroll said he took time to explain the decision to his players during a team meeting Monday. “So they realize that whether or not — even the players (who) want to agree — know that this is the way we have practiced and prepared ourselves to execute in this moment.”
(I don’t really understand the explanation, because I doubt that the Seahawks practiced and prepared to blow a win in the Super Bowl. But I digress.)
Carroll told Lauer that he’s struggled with sleep since Super Bowl 49.
“I’m sleeping some, but I wake up and can’t stop thinking about it,” Carroll said. “The sleep part works because we’re so worn out after the six months of the season that you can’t help but fall asleep, but it’s the waking up — it’s getting back to sleep that’s the challenge.”
Carroll acknowledged that he’d cried when thinking about the game’s abrupt outcome. And that he’d be living with the emotions for a long time. But he claimed the failure will motivate him.
“These don’t go away,” Carroll said. “These occurrences, they don’t leave. These occurrences have stayed with me over the years in a manner that they fuel me.”
Carroll had been through something like this before. He was blistered by criticism while coaching USC for not having Heisman-winning RB Reggie Bush on the field for a critical fourth-down play in the Trojans’ loss to Texas in BCS championship game.
As former USC defensive back Tony Burnett said on Twitter: “No Reggie. No Marshawn. Might haunt Pete forever.”
But the Trojans had plenty of chances to make a play and win that game. This was different; Super Bowl 46 came down to one play, and one play call.
Not only did Seahawks players second-guess Carroll after the game, but WR Doug Baldwin and others were miffed when offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell criticized intended receiver Ricardo Lockette for not being physical in an effort to ward off the Butler INT. That was incredibly bad form by Bevell.
This is the kind of lingering, festering controversy that can rip a team apart. Can the Seahawks shake the sadness and bitterness? Will the payers forgive the coaches and have the same level of confidence in Carroll going forward? It will be a challenge.
It’s so difficult to win a Super Bowl — even one — and the Seahawks were less than 3 yards away from winning two in a row. And one awful decision not only lost the game, but it could impact the players’ legacies.
Will the current Seahawks’ nucleus get a chance to win a second Super Bowl? After handing away Super Bowl 36, the “Greatest Show” Rams never came close to another opportunity. That setback ruptured the organization.
The Rams did rally from a shaky 2002 season to win 12 games in 2003, but were upset by Carolina at home (in overtime) in the 2003 NFC playoffs. Martz was criticized in that game for his choice to play for a tie instead of going for the win at the end of the fourth quarter.
The 2004 Rams went 8-8 and won a playoff game, then disintegrated in 2005. Martz became seriously ill during the 2005 campaign and was fired after the season.
The Super Bowl loss created a rift between Martz and Rams management. Martz has said that Jay Zygmunt and John Shaw — the team’s highest-ranking executives at the time — never forgave him for losing the Super Bowl. Distrust set in, and the feud between the coach and the front office created a terrible situation that exacerbated the sad decline of the “Greatest Show” Rams.
Carroll and the Seahawks are in a tenuous position. They can bounce back from this Super Bowl loss that rocked them so wickedly, but it won’t be as easy as they think. These kind of defeats can stick with a team for a long time — resulting in lost trust, damaged relationships, and cracks in the team harmony.
Carroll should ask Martz about that. It might help Carroll get through this. Aside from that, the Seahawks will have to try and hold off Arizona, San Francisco and St. Louis in the NFC West next season. And Seattle’s mission won’t be any easier.
February 6, 2015 at 12:36 am #18002znModeratorI dunno. That all sounds a little over-apocalyptic to me.
February 6, 2015 at 6:56 am #18011
WinnbradParticipantThe Hawks still have a good QB and a great D. They’re not gonna fall apart.
February 6, 2015 at 9:48 am #18064
ZooeyModeratorOh, they already have fallen apart. It’s over for that team.
From what I’m hearing, they aren’t even really talking to each other anymore, or even holding practices.
February 6, 2015 at 10:12 am #18065
wvParticipantOh, they already have fallen apart. It’s over for that team.
From what I’m hearing, they aren’t even really talking to each other anymore, or even holding practices.
Yeah, i heard M.Lynch isnt even
speaking to anyone anymore.w
vFebruary 6, 2015 at 10:25 am #18068znModeratorYeah, i heard M.Lynch isnt even
speaking to anyone anymore.Well he stopped talking to the press. That right there alone all by itself is a bad sign.
Carroll is finished. He’ll be lucky if he can get a job running the concessions stand at high school games.
February 6, 2015 at 10:43 am #18075
bnwBlockedSuper Bowl 36 again but in a good way.
The upside to being a Rams fan is heartbreak.
Sprinkles are for winners.
February 6, 2015 at 12:11 pm #18083
rflParticipantI agree that this is a silly column.
There are some parallels, but what Bernie doesn’t refer to here is the vast gulf between the SEA FO and the Shaw/Zygmunt insanity. Our SB loss revealed the rotten foundations on which the GSOT was built.
Martz was a great OC. He was a questionable HC and a lousy talent evaluator. All of that could have been fine on a team grounded by a quality GM running a sound ship. We were being run by the Keystone Kops. And, actually, the folly of our “leadership” is revealed in Bernie’s assertion that they never forgave their HC for losing a close game. Who does that? People who don’t know the game. I dunno if Bernie is right or wrong. But the assertion sounds plausible because those morons didn’t get the first thing about football.
By contrast, SEA is run by one of the sharpest GMs in the game. I see no indication that that foundation is rotten enough to be shattered by one game.
Of course, it IS possible that Pete may have some problems with his players. We’ll see how much credibility he has built up with them. I would think that they’d settle down and it would all be fine. But, lingering effects are possible.
But let’s imagine the worst. Pete loses the locker room. They fire him. OK, the stream of talent won’t stop as long as the GM is running a capable ship. They’ll be an attractive gig for a really good coach. The organization has a great chance to keep chugging along as the Whiners did under Siefert.
In general, I think Carroll is taking a lot of unfair heat. I figure the call was fine. A pick was really unlikely. An Inc, for example, would have been fine. Trust your top 10 QB to run the play without losing the game, and it’s a good call. That is, it’s perfectly defensible.
And yet …
I loathe Pete Carroll. His arrogance and faux-boyish emotionalism are irritating. I understand that he has some program called “Win Forever.” That sort of arrogance calls for a correction. Glad to see it happen.
By virtue of the absurd ...
February 6, 2015 at 12:32 pm #18084znModeratorAll of that could have been fine on a team grounded by a quality GM running a sound ship. We were being run by the Keystone Kops. And, actually, the folly of our “leadership” is revealed in Bernie’s assertion that they never forgave their HC for losing a close game. Who does that? People who don’t know the game.
Good post.
I was recently in a discussion “elsewhere” about this article, and someone claimed that JZ criticism was all hindsight. At the time, all “we knew” according to this argument was that the league and the sports media viewed JZ’s regime favorably. I disagreed, cause I knew full well (as you do too and others here) that at the time, in the early 2000s, there was a vocal minority which kept insisting JZ was a problem (let alone Shaw).
Here is a kind of memorial to that, drawn randomly from a faulty memory.
In terms of how JZ operated, even in 2000 he was nasty in a rare way…it was a routine Rams thing, for example, to leak nasty stuff about a player whenever they were in contract issues with them. For example (and it’s just one example) JZ leaked stuff questioning Kurt’s integrity and saying he charged to speak to charities. Now the thing about that is, it was completely unnecessary, and indicative of JZ’s character. You have to ask, who does that? That was a regular theme in debates about JZ, with the majority buying into the “exec of the year” stuff but also with some constantly pointing out his flaws. Leaking nasty stuff during contract negotiations is something you don’t do unless you have problems as a leader and an exec, and he just did it on a regular basis. That was 1 of his many flaws…and it strongly indicated that he did not know how to run the ship. (This included btw constantly leaking nasty stuff about DV in 98.)
And of course he also started intervening in personnel decisions, something he had absolutely no qualifications to do. I actually discussed this with people who insisted he had been around football long enough to be a personnel guy. They defended it.
There was also his misguided “position value” chart which dictated in advance how much you would give in-house FAs at different positions. This is what caused him to dump Fletcher while claiming that LF wanted more than the Rams could afford, which in fact turned out not to be true…LF signed with Buffalo with less than JZ thought he would demand. Plus of course you don’t put this arbitrary limit on what you pay a team leader. It’s the same thing that led him to say you could not take Polamalu that hight in the 2003 draft because a safety wasn’t worth that kind of money, so they took Kennedy instead.
Then there was the feud with Armey, which got ugly and went public (again, JZ was a big time leaker).
And so on. It was issue after issue, thing after thing, from 2000 on. This stuff kept coming up, leading to very heated exchanges. Month after month the debate continued and there was a minority who said over and over, JZ is not what you think he is and in fact he’s a mess. As I said that was a minority view…and a very embattled minority, because for some reason a lot of people thought “attacking” (actually, criticizing) JZ was paramount to treason. It was ugly stuff. If you wanted a nasty fight in the early 2000s, all you had to do was criticize JZ. We here on this board know all that…we were in on a lot of it. I even invented a catch-phrase for those disputes: I asked, why are the suits beyond criticism?
Eventually JZ got so unpopular that the earlier contentiousness among posters was forgotten. I figure that was by 2007.
And yes, absolutely, the very fact that JZ had power dictated the fate of the franchise and the people who saw through him kept saying how bad he was. In a lot of cases it fell on deaf ears. People thought, they’re winning, why complain. The truth was, they went only so far with Vermeil’s team and then fell apart because it became THEIR team not Vermeil’s. JZ lay the groundwork for that kind of franchise destruction and he was doing it from the day he got some power. So yes there were people who saw through JZ very early on…as we well know.
February 6, 2015 at 1:03 pm #18086rflParticipantThere was also his misguided “position value” chart which dictated in advance how much you would give in-house FAs at different positions.
To me, this is the screaming, smoking gun. I mean, this is freaking insane.
And the worst part about it?
The arrogance of NOT REALIZING THAT YOU REALLY DON’T KNOW what experts in the field know. That’s unforgivable. Everyone–all leaders–have limits in their expertise. If a leader knows that and learns to draw on people who do, it can be fine. But faux leaders who think they know when they don’t … man, they are the worst.
By virtue of the absurd ...
February 6, 2015 at 2:30 pm #18092wvParticipantI agree that this is a silly column.
There are some parallels, but what Bernie doesn’t refer to here is the vast gulf between the SEA FO and the Shaw/Zygmunt insanity. Our SB loss revealed the rotten foundations on which the GSOT was built.
Martz was a great OC. He was a questionable HC and a lousy talent evaluator. All of that could have been fine on a team grounded by a quality GM running a sound ship. We were being run by the Keystone Kops. And, actually, the folly of our “leadership” is revealed in Bernie’s assertion that they never forgave their HC for losing a close game. Who does that? People who don’t know the game. I dunno if Bernie is right or wrong. But the assertion sounds plausible because those morons didn’t get the first thing about football.
By contrast, SEA is run by one of the sharpest GMs in the game. I see no indication that that foundation is rotten enough to be shattered by one game.
Of course, it IS possible that Pete may have some problems with his players. We’ll see how much credibility he has built up with them. I would think that they’d settle down and it would all be fine. But, lingering effects are possible.
But let’s imagine the worst. Pete loses the locker room. They fire him. OK, the stream of talent won’t stop as long as the GM is running a capable ship. They’ll be an attractive gig for a really good coach. The organization has a great chance to keep chugging along as the Whiners did under Siefert.
In general, I think Carroll is taking a lot of unfair heat. I figure the call was fine. A pick was really unlikely. An Inc, for example, would have been fine. Trust your top 10 QB to run the play without losing the game, and it’s a good call. That is, it’s perfectly defensible.
And yet …
I loathe Pete Carroll. His arrogance and faux-boyish emotionalism are irritating. I understand that he has some program called “Win Forever.” That sort of arrogance calls for a correction. Glad to see it happen.
Well, they have four guys in the secondary that are injured
and i think they all may need surgery. I dunno,
but that might mean they cant really work out and stay
sharp in the offseason. Might be a drop off in the
effectiveness of the Legion of Boom next year.
We’ll see.I dont loathe Pete Carroll anymore. I dunno why
but he’s grown on me for some reason. Especially
now that every celebrity-pundit in the Universe seems to think
he blew the super bowl.w
vFebruary 6, 2015 at 2:58 pm #18094
DakParticipantI actually feel sorry for Carroll right now. And, I hate him, too, usually. While I didn’t like the play call, and understand the immediate dissatisfaction of his team and fans, when you see that the play usually is low-risk, I can get to where Carroll was strategically in that moment. I still think he made the wrong choice, but you also have to give more credit to the CB for making a great play there.
As for comparing the Seahawks to the Rams’ post-GSOT hangover, no, I don’t buy it, for all the reasons that zn and rfl mention.
February 6, 2015 at 8:38 pm #18099ZooeyModeratorThis is what a team of quitters looks like:
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