SEATTLE – After the week Maurice Mann had, Steve Smith didn’t have a chance.
Jennifer Buchanan / The Herald
Mann is the member of the Seattle Seahawks’ practice squad who impersonated Smith during the week of practices leading up to Sunday’s NFC Championship Game. At one point Wednesday he was doing so well against Seattle’s defense that coach Mike Holmgren stopped practice and chewed out his defensive starters.
After that, anybody who remotely resembled Smith had a defender in his face and the bumps and bruises to prove it.
First Mann paid the price, and then Smith, the Carolina Panthers’ Pro Bowl wide receiver who was all but invisible in Seattle’s 34-14 victory Sunday at Qwest Field.
“It was a pretty physical week,” said Mann, a second-year wide receiver out of Nevada. “Steve Smith is a great player, and I wanted to do whatever I could to help the team.
“I got the biggest compliment today by (Seattle safety) Mike Boulware. He said, ‘Mo, you did a better job than Steve Smith today.’ “
That’s probably true.
Smith returned a punt for Carolina’s first touchdown, but on offense he had only five receptions for 33 yards on a day that was so filled with frustration that it spilled out in a shouting match on the sideline with Carolina offensive coordinator Dan Henning.
“Some people think I’m getting upset when I’m not getting the ball,” Smith said in an edgy tone after the game. “I get upset when we’re not moving the ball, when we’re not operating as an efficient unit as an offense.
“If I don’t get the ball and we’re winning, I’m still happy. But we were not executing the way we usually do,” he said. “This is a team effort, and when a team is not moving the ball the way we would like to, everybody’s frustrated. I’m just not afraid to show my frustration.”
Smith had 22 receptions for 302 yards and three touchdowns in Carolina’s playoff victories over the New York Giants and Chicago Bears, and his catches Sunday gave him an NFL-record 27 receptions for the postseason.
But while he took over the games in New York and Chicago, he didn’t have a chance Sunday in Seattle.
First, Carolina fell behind early.
Then, running back Nick Goings left the game in the first quarter with a concussion. With Stephen Davis and DeShaun Foster already out with injuries, that put fourth-stringer Jamal Robertson into the lineup and Carolina’s running game into neutral.
The Panthers ran for only 36 yards on 12 carries, and quarterback Jake Delhomme was their second-leading rusher with three carries for 15 yards.
Smith, who led the NFL during the regular season with 103 receptions for 1,563 yards and 12 touchdowns, was the Panthers’ only hope, and the Seahawks pulled out all the stops to keep him under wraps.
The strategy was to have one defender in his face at the line of scrimmage and another one in support about 10 yards downfield. When the other team can’t run the ball effectively, you can afford to do that, and the Seahawks played it to the hilt.
Safety Marquand Manuel estimated that he was “rolled” to Smith’s side of the field about 40 percent of the time. Cornerback Andre Dyson said the defense might have been slanted to Smith’s side as much as half the time.
“If we could have run the ball a little bit, it would have helped, but they got on top of us, and we had to start throwing it, and it was just one of those deals,” Delhomme said. “We’ve seen just about everything that you could try to do to Smitty. It was just that we weren’t sharp all around as an offense today.”
One Seahawk who had a great time of it was linebacker Kevin Bentley, who plays in Seattle’s nickel pass defense. He was split out on Smith a number of times and amused himself all afternoon by muscling the smaller man at the line of scrimmage.
That allowed cornerback Marcus Trufant to drop back into a safety-like position, giving Seattle great coverage deep and plenty of speed with which to help Bentley double-cover Smith.
“It was great. I had so much fun doing it, especially on such a great wide receiver,” Bentley said. “The whole game we were getting hands on him, even the corners. And then I came in, got a few jams on him and almost knocked him down a couple times. He was getting real frustrated.”
Bentley said he’s been doing that all year, but usually only two or three times a game. He said the Seahawks called for that Sunday at least 10 times.
Dyson said the Seahawks’ coaches had Carolina’s offense sniffed out so well that for most of the game the players were able to accurately predict the route Smith was going to run.
“The coaches did a good job of game planning and giving us the right keys to know what he was doing,” Dyson said. “In the huddle we would say the route, and he ran it.”
Smith’s 59-yard punt return in the second quarter lit a spark of hope on the Carolina sideline. It made the score 17-7, but Seattle responded with a drive to a field goal that made the halftime score 20-7.
“It helped us. It gave us a little boost. We had a little momentum going,” Smith said. “Then they came out, and it fizzled out real quick.”
And when the Seahawks scored a touchdown on their first possession of the second half, the outcome was pretty much decided.
“Everything that team did today was superb,” Smith said of the Seahawks. “They outplayed us. They outhustled us. They overall just flat-out beat us.”
Maurice Mann can tell you about that.
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