The most successful playoff road trip in franchise history couldn’t have started off much worse.
The 1983 Seahawks were ready to head on the road for the first time in the team’s history — only a week earlier they played in their first playoff game — when a mechanical problem led to lengthy delay.
“The thing I remember about that is we were supposed to leave, and we all headed out to the airport on a bus, but there was something wrong with the airplane, so we had to wait around at the airport,” said Keith Butler, a linebacker on that team and currently the linebackers coach for the Pittsburgh Steelers. “We went into a hotel and stayed there for about four hours before we finally got on the plane down to Miami.”
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It was early Saturday morning before the team finally arrived in Miami, and Butler admits he overslept the next morning and was late to a team meeting.
All was forgotten, however, when the Seahawks stunned the Dolphins with a come-from-behind victory the next day. And while nobody could have known it at the time, that was the last time the Seahawks would win a postseason game away from Seattle. Ever since that 27-20 win at the Orange Bowl, the Seahawks have lost all seven of their road playoff games as well as their one Super Bowl appearance.
To put into perspective just how long it has been since Seattle won a playoff game on the road, consider that 27 of the 53 players currently on the active roster were born after that game.
“They’re due,” said Paul Johns, a receiver and punt returner on the 1983 team who is currently the team’s assistant director of community relations. “That was what, 1983, and now it’s 2011. It’s been a long time. That’s more than a quarter of a century, so it’s about time.”
And while head coach Pete Carroll isn’t a fan of history — what happened in the past, he insists, has no bearing on his current team — the Seahawks would love for history to repeat itself this weekend, because there are plenty of similarities between the 1983 Seahawks and the 2010 version.
In 1983, first-year coach Chuck Knox took over a team with a losing record and, after an up-and-down season, led the Seahawks into the playoffs, where nobody was expecting them to do anything. But Seattle won a home game over Denver, leading to a long road trip against a team nobody expected it to beat.
Sound familiar?
“We had a lot of change and turnaround going on, and went through a lot of ups and down that year,” Johns said. “We were 9-7, there were a lot of similarities. People didn’t expect much of us, then we won at home (beating the Denver Broncos 31-7 at the Kingdome), then we went down to Miami and there was no way we were going to win that game, but we went down there with the feeling we could win.”
But on a Seattle-like day in Miami — “It was overcast, it even started raining a little bit,” recalled Hall of Fame receiver Steve Largent — the Seahawks hung with the defending AFC champs, and with 10 quick fourth-quarter points, the Seahawks clinched a place in the conference championship game.
After Miami took at 20-17 lead in the fourth quarter, quarterback Dave Krieg hit Largent for completions of 16 and 40 yards to set up a 2-yard touchdown run by running back Curt Warner that gave Seattle the lead with 3:43 left in the game. The Seahawks’ Sam Merriman recovered a fumble on the ensuing kickoff to set up a field goal, then the Dolphins fumbled again on the kickoff, giving the ball back to the Seahawks, who ran out the clock.
“We went out their and played our tails off,” Largent said. “… It’s a cliche now to talk about it being a new season, and the game you’re playing is the only one that matters, but in reality, that’s exactly how we approached our first trip to the playoffs, and it worked out really well for us. We actually went a lot further than people anticipated us going, and it was very, very exciting.”
Like a lot of his former teammates, Largent sees some of that 1983 team in the current incarnation of the Seahawks.
The 2010 Seahawks can only hope the similarities last another weekend.
“The goal in the NFL is always to come together at the end of the season and give yourself a chance going into the playoffs,” Largent said. “That’s exactly what the Seahawks have done and that’s what we did that year.”
Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com. For more Seahawks coverage, check out the Seahawks blog at heraldnet.com/seahawksblog
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