RENTON — It’s the image that summed up not only the Seattle Seahawks’ 27-23 loss to the Carolina Panthers on Sunday at CenturyLink Field, but Seattle’s season as a whole.
There stood two members of the Seahawks’ vaunted Legion of Boom, All-Pros Richard Sherman and Earl Thomas, staring at one another and pointing fingers while the Panthers celebrated what was the game-winning touchdown.
It was a critical communication breakdown at a critical moment, and in this instance it cost the Seahawks the game. It’s not the kind of mistake one expects to see from a secondary often held up as the class of the NFL.
“I haven’t seen the players yet, so I don’t know any more than what I learned in the locker room (Sunday) night,” Seattle head coach Pete Carroll said Monday at the Virginia Mason Athletic Center when asked what happened on that play. “They just thought it was something different. They just missed it.”
Here’s how the play developed. Carolina, trailing by three, had the ball at the Seattle 26-yard line with 37 seconds remaining in the game. The Panthers lined up with three receivers on the left side of the formation and tight end Greg Olsen alone on the right, just off the tackle. Olsen streaked up the numbers, was left completely uncovered by Sherman playing left cornerback and Thomas playing safety, and hauled in a game-winning touchdown pass from Cam Newton.
How is it possible Olsen, by far Carolina’s most dangerous receiver, was lost on the game’s decisive play? It turns out Sherman and Thomas were inadvertently playing different defensive schemes.
In a cover 2 scheme, which has two deep defenders, Sherman, as the left corner, is responsible for the left flat while Thomas, as the left-side safety, has to cover deep on the left. In a cover 3 scheme, with three deep defenders, Sherman is supposed to stay with any receiver who goes deep, while Thomas remains deep centrally.
Unfortunately for the Seahawks, Thomas thought the team was in a cover 3 scheme while Sherman thought the team was in a cover 2 scheme. The result was neither player thought they had deep responsibility on the left, meaning Olsen was able to split straight between Thomas and Sherman and wind up uncovered deep.
In the postgame interviews, it was revealed that Sherman was in the correct defense and Thomas was in the wrong one.
“(The defensive coverage call) comes in over the headset, the (middle) linebacker gets the call and he distributes the call, as well as we signal it to cover the guys that may not get the signal, if guys look to us,” Carroll explained about how a defense is communicated to the players from the sidelines. “We have a back-up plan that we execute every snap as well.
“That’s the first time I can ever remember Earl not knowing what the other guys were doing,” Carroll added. “I don’t know how that occurred. There were a couple other guys, too, who were in question on the call, so something happened there. I’m not exactly sure how that happened yet on the field. We know what we called, and what we signaled in. K.J. (Wright, playing middle linebacker) got it, and he started the process, but it just didn’t get exchanged properly for whatever reason.”
While Carroll didn’t know exactly where the communication breakdown occurred, it wasn’t because of anything Carolina did. The Panthers spiked the ball on the previous play to stop the clock and call a play in the huddle. Therefore, Seattle was not hurried into making a defensive call.
“Yeah, it was not rushed,” Carroll confirmed.
The Seahawks talked extensively about communication being an issue earlier in the season. Part of those communication issues could be because Seattle has a new defensive coordinator, Kris Richard, after Dan Quinn departed in the offseason to become the head coach of the Atlanta Falcons. But Carroll dismissed that as the reason for the breakdown on the game-winning play Sunday.
“None of that has anything to do with anything,” Carroll said. “That’s nothing. You guys keep trying. That has nothing to do with it. We just missed the signal that we normally get and it comes in verbally, we show it to them and we just missed it. Our communication now is really at a high level, and unfortunately you can make a mistake, and we did. We let them down there before that all happened. They already were in field-goal range and all that. We hadn’t done the right things earlier, but that was a big mistake. It was in communication, but it wasn’t because of all those other things that you’re talking about.”
Check out Nick Patterson’s Seattle Sidelines blog at http://www.heraldnet.com/seattlesidelines, and follow him on Twitter at @NickHPatterson.
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