All eyes are focused on Seahawks rookie Lockett

SEATTLE — Tyler Lockett is changing games even when he doesn’t touch the ball.

Lockett not only scored his second special teams touchdown in three NFL games on Sunday, he helped set up another score when most of the Chicago Bears ran after him when he pretended to catch a punt.

Unfortunately for the Bears, Lockett had intentionally run away from the ball, which allowed Richard Sherman to catch it on the other side of the field and return it 64 yards more or less unmolested.

The play set up a first-quarter field goal, the first score of the game, and Lockett later returned the second-half kickoff a club-record 105 yards for a touchdown that sent the Seattle Seahawks on their way to a 26-0 victory over the Bears at CenturyLink Field.

“It was going to be on me to be a great actor, and I always wanted to be an actor, so I got my first gig,” Lockett said of Sherman’s punt return. “It was just to try to make sure everyone was around me, and luckily I was able to do that, and after Sherman got the ball he just did what he did.”

“You’ve got to be able to sell it, and if you don’t sell it people aren’t going to buy it, and all of a sudden it’s hard to make something out of that return,” Lockett said.

Lockett was Seattle’s third-round draft pick this year out of Kansas State, and the Seahawks traded four draft choices to move into position to select him.

He has already paid huge dividends on that investment.

In the season-opener at St. Louis, Lockett returned a punt 57 yards for a touchdown the first time he touched the ball in an NFL game.

Sunday he scored his second touchdown to open the second half.

“We are counting on him being a factor,” Seattle head coach Pete Carroll said of Lockett. “I think it’s exactly what we had hoped to see, and to see his factor show up so soon this season is really enormous for us.”

The kickoff return was blocked extremely well as Lockett was neither touched nor significantly detoured at any point. He took the ball five yards deep in the end zone, ran straight up through a huge hole in the coverage then ran around the Chicago kicker at about midfield.

Then it was just a race down the left sideline to the end zone, and Lockett, who ran 100 meters in 10.85 seconds as a high school track star, is going to win most of those.

“It was so perfectly blocked, and it was so clean,” Carroll said of the kickoff return. “As soon as he gets in one of those chances where he has the opportunity to outrun somebody, you feel like he’s going to do it. Again, he certainly did.”

Just the threat of Lockett returning a kick is also paying off as the Seahawks did to the Bears what the St. Louis Rams did to Seattle on a punt return last season. Utah also did it to Oregon in a college football game Saturday.

“You have to respect Tyler,” Sherman said. “All eyes have to be on him. If anybody’s not watching him there’s a problem. You’re going to put yourself out of position. It’s difficult for people to look up at the ball.”

With Pat O’Donnell’s punt in the air, Lockett ran over to the left sideline, and the Seahawks blockers also set up as though the ball was going that direction.

Sherman had lined up on the right end. He ran straight back, caught the ball on the right sideline and returned it up the right side to the Chicago 19-yard line.

“We thought we’d have a chance. The difficult part was to make sure I could catch it, making sure I could track it down and catch it,” Sherman said. “That’s the difficult part of that play.”

Sherman didn’t deny that he might have run out gas near the end of the play as O’Donnell and Lamin Barrow, a linebacker, were able to keep him from scoring.

“I might have ran out of gas at the beginning,” Sherman said. “Don’t forget about the 60 yards I had to run the other way just to catch it.”

Fair enough. Altogether, it was a round trip of well over 100 yards for Sherman, and during the first half of it he had to find the ball in the air and make an over-the-shoulder catch. After that, most of the trip was relatively easy as most of the Bears were near the other sideline anticipating Lockett to make a return on that side of the field.

Later, Lockett justified that kind of attention with his record kickoff return, which broke the old team record of 101 yards set by Leon Washington in 2010.

That was the first touchdown of the game, and it brought the CenturyLink crowd to life after the Seahawks held a nervous lead of only 6-0 at halftime.

“It was a good welcoming back,” Lockett said of the sound and feel of his first CenturyLink touchdown. “Obviously, it was really loud, and the biggest thing is it feels just like home.”

The Seahawks are planning for Lockett to feel very much at home in the end zone.

“That dude’s big time,” Seattle linebacker K.J. Wright said. “I said before the season he’d have at least five touchdowns, and he’s on pace to do that. So he’s real big for us.”