TEMPE, Ariz. – He plucked the errant pass out of the air and took it to a place he had never gone before.
He was so overcome with emotion that he taunted an opponent just before the goal line, then stepped into the end zone for the first return touchdown of his life.
And afterward, all Ken Lucas could do was talk about the plays that he didn’t make in the Seattle Seahawks’ 25-17 loss to the Arizona Cardinals.
“I feel like I lost the game for us,” Lucas said. “If I would have made those two tackles near the end, we could have had a chance. But I didn’t.”
Of course, Lucas wasn’t to blame for Seattle’s disaster in the desert. He and an injury-ravaged defense did almost everything they could to keep the Seahawks in the game, but the effort turned out to come up short in the end.
Injuries forced the Seahawks’ defense to open with three different starters than it had in the first five games of the season. Things got even more depleted when Isaiah Kacyvenski suffered a sprained ankle in the second quarter, forcing rarely-used middle linebacker Solomon Bates to play outside in his first action of the season.
“That’s part of football. Injuries are going to happen,” said Antonio Cochran, who made his first start at defensive end because of a knee injury to Grant Wistrom. “As long as you’re out there playing hard, they’re bound to happen. You can’t control that. You’ve just got to play.”
Playing without Wistrom, Anthony Simmons and Chad Brown – not to mention having to bring Rashad Moore off the bench because of a lingering shoulder injury – the Seahawks held their own for most of the game. They held the Cardinals to a respectable 316 yards of offense despite being on the field almost twice as much as Arizona’s defense was. They allowed just one offensive touchdown until Emmitt Smith avoided Lucas on the final meaningful possession to help turn a one-point lead into a 25-17 victory.
Yet Seattle’s defenders weren’t satisfied – most notably Lucas.
“We’ve got to learn to tackle better, and we’ve got to learn to make plays,” he said. “You’ve got to be accountable.”
Following his first NFL touchdown – and his first interception return for a touchdown at any level – Lucas couldn’t stop the game’s all-time leading rusher. He missed Smith on a second-and-10 late in the fourth quarter, giving up a 14-yard run that provided Arizona with a fresh set of downs to run valuable time off the clock.
On the Cardinals’ next possession, Lucas whiffed on Smith again during the most important run of the game.
Arizona was staring at a third-and-9 from the Seattle 23-yard line with two minutes to go, leading by one point, when Smith took a handoff and ran left. Lucas contained Smith from turning the corner, but missed him when the veteran running back cut back inside. Smith squirted between Lucas and safety Ken Hamlin, then ran 23 yards untouched to give Arizona an eight-point lead.
“He just made a good play, and I missed the tackle,” Lucas said. “I have no excuse. He made a nice cut, I wasn’t able to get enough of my body on him to stop him, and he just made a play.”
Lucas made a play of his own 11 minutes earlier, when his interception return gave Seattle its first lead of the game. Lucas saw Cardinals tight end Freddie Jones chasing him from behind, so the Seahawks cornerback slowed down inside the 5-yard line and tiptoed into the end zone.
” (The coaches) said something to me,” Lucas said of his premature celebration. “I was just so excited to finally get that first touchdown. But that was all for nothing. I don’t really want to dwell on it because we lost the game.”
No matter how hard the defense tried to stop it from happening, the Seahawks indeed lost the game.
“We did all right,” defensive end Chike Okeafor said. “Injuries are going to happen, and we’ve got to pick up the slack. If (starters) aren’t out there, the second team has to come in and play just as well. Everyone knows that, and everyone’s accountable.”
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