Let’s get the injury update out of the way first. Pete Carroll said Jeremy Lane aggravated the same groin injury that had limited him in practice last week. No timetable yet, though Lane wrote on Twitter after the game that he’ll be OK.
I will be ok ..!!!!
— jeremy lane (@StayingInMyLane) September 5, 2014
If Lane is going to miss some time, however, the Seahawks might need to add help at cornerback with Tharold Simon expected to have a minor knee surgery soon.
Now, onto the game, a 20-point thumping of the team most consider to be one of Seattle’s biggest threats in the NFC. What probably stood out the most for the Seahawks is how unremarkable the performance felt even though they handily beat a very good team by a large margin. Yes the offense was good, especially with the addition of Percy Harvin, and yes Marshawn Lynch looks as good as ever, and yes the defense kept Aaron Rodgers in check, but this still looked like a performance the Seahawks can improve upon going forward.
“It wasn’t dominant at all,” said cornerback Richard Sherman, who had to fight boredom on a night he wasn’t targeted a single time. “We have a lot of things to clean up. We missed some opportunities on some turnovers. We missed some tackles on key drives we could have stopped we had some key penalties. These are all things we need to clean up because we have a really high standard.
“It was off. We weren’t up to par today, we weren’t up to snuff and I think everyone feels that way. We’ve got to play better.”
Dominant or not, however, there was a lot to like for the Seahawks in this one, from Lynch’s 110-yard, two touchdown performance to Harvin’s 160 all-purpose yards to Wilson’s performance, which saw him go 19 of 28 for 191 yards, two touchdowns and a 110.9 passer rating.
“That’s a real good start for us, a lot of things happened,” Carroll said. “To keep Aaron down like that for the whole night—I know it might not have seemed like it—but when they only throw for 175 yards in a game, I’m really excited about that. Our formula on defense held up real nice… Probably I’m most excited about running the ball for over 200 yards. That’s really cool for us to do that, it’s so important for us.”
And the Seahawks didn’t just beat the Packers on the scoreboard, they just beat them up, according to defensive end Michael Bennett.
“Obviously we were the more physical team today, offensively and defensively,” Bennett said. “I saw supposedly some of the best players in the league not want to tackle Marshawn Lynch.”
That physical play was perhaps most apparent in the Seahawks’ 7-minute, 13-play, 80-yard drive in the fourth quarter that put the game on ice.
“The best part of the game was that seven-minute drive to end the game pretty much,” Wilson said of the drive that saw them rush nine times and throw just four. “That’s how we like to play football.
“We want to mix it up, we want to have a balanced attack. We want to be able to do a lot of different things. We want to be able to hand the ball off to Marshawn Lynch and Robert Turbin, and we want to obviously be very effective in the passing game as well. Our goal is to have that balance, 50-50, and we definitely did that tonight.”
Or as Zach Miller put it: “We played a good opponent, and you saw how our formula works out. We really run the football—rushed for over 200 yards tonight—and part of that was Percy, a lot of that was Marshawn. We want to run the football and be smart when we throw it, and Russell did a great job of that tonight.”
The Seahawks finished the game with 207 rushing yards, which C Max Unger called “A big benchmark to be able to do that against a good defense… We want to be able to… We want to run the ball and be explosive in the passing game, and I think we did that tonight. This is what we structure our offense to be.”
A few other random notes…
—The Seahawks got touchdowns from a pair of players who haven’t score many of them, Ricardo Lockette and Derrick Coleman, each of whom had one in their careers before today. Lockette’s last touchdown came in the last game of the 2011 season, while Coleman’s lone score was a bank shot off the face of tight end Kellen Davis last sason.
—Bobby Wagner matched a regular-season career high with 14 tackles (he had 15 in a playoff game).
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