RENTON — The strangest thing about the Seahawks’ resurgence isn’t the way they’ve played in winning their past two games. It’s that none of them, not even the coach, is quite sure how it happened.
Heading into the final game of the regular season, there was no reason to believe the Seahawks would beat St. Louis to win the division, let alone go on to beat New Orleans, the defending Super Bowl champion, in a playoff game. After all, heading into that game against the Rams, the Seahawks had lost seven of their previous nine games, all by 15 or more points. And since starting the season 4-2, Seattle’s only two wins came against Carolina and Arizona, two of the worst teams in the NFL this season.
Yet somehow, when the stakes were as high as they could be, the Seahawks turned a corner and have played two of their best games of the season on back-to-back weekends.
Just don’t ask them how they did it.
“I don’t know,” quarterback Matt Hasselbeck said. “I really don’t know. I don’t think we’ve treated (the last two games) any different. … But you get hot sometimes. You get on a roll sometimes. Play-callers get on a roll, players get on a roll. Sometimes you get all three parts working together in the same way. But I don’t have a great answer. I don’t know. We’re gonna just keep doing what we’re doing though.”
As the Seahawks move forward, trying hard to live their motto that the past doesn’t matter, Hasselbeck insists he wouldn’t have even known his team had as bad of a November and December as it did if he weren’t repeatedly asked about it by the media.
But whether the Seahawks think about the fact that, for two months, they played like one of the league’s worst teams before rewriting the script over the past two weeks, that doesn’t change to suddenness with which they did it. And if it was simply a matter of the team waking up when it became win-or-go-home, well, that’s better than nothing, but hardly the way coach Pete Carroll would have liked the season to have gone.
“When it finally came down to the last game against St. Louis we played our best football,” Carroll said. “I’m not real proud of that, I would have rather seen that for all the right reasons earlier on, but I’m having fun with it, enjoying it, and we’re going to see how far we can ride it.”
So far the Seahawks have ridden it into the divisional round of the playoffs, a place nobody expected them to be after falling 38-15 in Tampa Bay to fall to 6-9. And while nobody is sure how it happened, there are some definitive reasons why Seattle is winning.
For starters, the Seahawks defense has gotten back to the run-stuffing ways that helped the Seahawks get off to a fast start this season, and on the other side of the ball the Seahawks run game seems to finally be getting off the ground. Prior to their win over the Rams, the Seahawks had the league’s lowest ranked rush attack, but after a slow first half against St. Louis, Seattle rushed for 119 yards in the second half, then rushed for 149 against the Saints.
“We found some consistency here the last couple weeks, more so than we had,” Carroll said. “… I’m hoping that’s part of just growing together. It’s taken us seemingly forever to see some continuity and some growth in the positive direction with the running game. We’ve been spotty at best, but the last two weeks when we needed it most it’s been there, so we’ll try to take that with us to Chicago.”
Another important stat has been Seattle’s two turnovers in the past two games. While the Seahawks would prefer to avoid turnovers all together, one per game is drastic improvement over the way things were going late in the year for Hasselbeck and the offense.
Perhaps most importantly, the Seahawks finally played well from behind. A team that has had a tendency to get buried once it falls behind, Seattle instead overcame two 10-point deficits against the Saints Saturday. Again, Carroll wishes that wasn’t something his team took 17 games to figure out, but he sees it as an encouraging sign.
“It didn’t have to take all year,” he said. “I would have liked it to take a few months or something, a couple months. It’s taken more than I would like, but I feel like we’re communicating well and they understand it. In the first part of this game, when it’s 10-0 and they jump out on us, it looks easy. It didn’t faze our guys. … That’s strength of mentality.”
And as tight end John Carlson, who himself has undergone a resurgence with two touchdowns Saturday, put it, whether or not the Seahawks know why they’re playing better now, they’ll certainly take it.
“I don’t have an answer for you,” he said. “But it’s the right time to be getting to this point and gelling.”
Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com. For more Seahawks coverage, check out the Seahawks blog at heraldnet.com/seahawksblog
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
