SEATTLE — Ordinarily, you don’t feel like your defense had a great day when you give up 36 points.
But Saturday was a little different for the Seattle Seahawks.
“Ordinarily, you’re not playing a team with that kind of offense and that kind of quarterback,” Seattle lin
ebacker Will Herring said.
So it was that on a day when the Seahawks gave up 474 yards, the defense earned praise throughout a jubilant locker room after a shocking 41-36 victory over the defending Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints in an NFL wild-card playoff game.
The Saints scor
ed 17 points on their first three possessions and made it look easy, but they didn’t score another touchdown until the fourth quarter, by which time they were trying to erase a 14-point deficit.
“They are a notorious start-fast team,” Seattle coach Pete Carroll said of the Saints. “They are pretty good in starting games. They’re pretty famous for it. But we already had that in our mindset. It was not part of our thinking (to get frustrated), and we just kept playing football.”
New Orleans quarterback Drew Brees had an NFL playoff record 39 pass completions on 60 attempts, good for 404 yards and two touchdowns.
But they were the quietest 404 yards you’ll ever see.
“Here’s the thing that you have to know going into a game like this, playing against Drew Brees and such a high-powered offense,” Seattle safety Jordan Babineaux said. “He’s going to throw for 280. He’s going to get his yards. He’s going to get his first downs. He’s going to move the ball.
“But if you defuse the explosives and don’t give up the deep shots and at times in the red zone you make them kick field goals, it pisses him off.”
That is exactly — exactly — what the Seattle defense did.
Three times, the Seahawks held New Orleans to a field goal inside the 10-yard line. They held on a fourth-down play in the third quarter. They recovered a fumble to set up a field goal in the second quarter.
They bent themselves into a pretzel all day, but they never did break.
“When you’ve got an offense like that, you can’t look at the scoreboard and say they threw for this many yards and they ran for that many yards,” Seattle defensive end Chris Clemons said. “It’s just about getting key stops. When they got down in the red zone we were able to force them to field goals.
“It was a matter of will and it was a matter of heart.
And, yeah, Brees was frustrated.
“We made it inside their red zone seven times. Seven times! We came away with four touchdowns and three field goals,” Brees said. “Just imagine if we could have gotten one more touchdown, two more, out of those three stops.
“They made a lot of big plays. We just didn’t make enough plays when it came down to it.”
Brees had only two completions of more than 30 yards, and 20 of his completions went to running backs. Seahawks defenders kept the Saints’ receivers in front of them, tackled well, and got decent pressure on Brees with their standard four-man pass rush.
In particular, Seattle defensive end Raheem Brock was a pest from beginning to end.
He had Seattle’s only sack, had two other tackles for losses, forced the second-quarter fumble and made a third-down stop inside the 5 in the fourth quarter.
It was his second straight strong performance after notching 2.5 sacks in last week’s do-or-die victory over St. Louis.
“Raheem has been capitalizing on his one-on-ones,” Clemons said. “That’s one of the big keys. Going into a game we always have a conversation that we’ve got to change the game.
“We affect the game,” Clemons said. “If we get a chance to hit the quarterback, get sacks and cause fumbles, that’s how we change the game.”
Brock was with Indianapolis last year when the Saints beat the Colts in the Super Bowl. The nine-year veteran was cut by the Colts in March and by Tennessee in September, then signed with Seattle.
He enjoyed this victory down to his toes.
“It feels good to get them back,” Brock said. “It is a great feeling, especially to hit Brees a couple of times. It’s a great feeling to take those guys out of the playoffs.”
And it was all the more impressive given the way things started for the Seattle defense.
“When the world champions were up 10-0,” safety Lawyer Milloy said, “we didn’t blink.”
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