As you might or might not know, I am a Seahawks fan. It's been rough and I'm sorry to admit that over the years my interest in the team has waned because of their constant letdowns and overall mediocrity... This is what you sign up for as a Seahawk fan (or any fan in general unless you are very lucky), and it is a well known rule that to give up on your team or to not put everything you have behind them in every situation is equivalent to sin. I consider this post to be a sort of confessional for me to vent just a little and show where my allegiances lie. Now on with the show:
This was the first time since '96 that I have been able to enjoy one of my teams in a Championship Game (in '96 the Supes lost to Michael Jordan and the Bulls who were beginning their second Threepeat), and I was more than moderately excited. I wasn't concerned that the Steelers were 4 point favorites heading in or that approximately 256,365 Steeler fans showed up compared to Seattle's 7.
As the game wore on I could tell this team was not only beatable but likely to be beaten even with the missed chances the Seahawks were amassing through an assortment of drive killing penalties and dropped passes. We were holding up the Steeler's blitzburg packages that had been talked about all week with relative ease and this was the brightest sign of the night.
When Seattle took the field for their final drive of the first half I started to have my doubts especially when D-jack's TD was called out of bounds (much more on this later). We ended up with nothing, missing a 50 yard field goal as time expired. No worries right. I certainly wasn't worried at that point. Maybe I should have...
I'm not going to talk about the officiating too much because it's already been dissected by everyone in the "real" media (that's right, I am a self-proclaimed member of the "fake" media). One drive that stands out was in the fourth quarter right before Hasselbeck's costly INT during which there was a Horse collar tackle not called, a phantom holding penalty, and a block below the waist called on Hasselbeck while he was making a tackle. Seriously... how can you call it a block when the player is on D? It seems a little counterproductive to be blocking someone on D.
Here is a list of partisan grippers that I feel adequately put the debacle into perspective:
1) Micheal Smith - "Here's what referee Bill Leavy's crew did, point blank: It robbed Seattle."
2) Skip Bayless (who had been killing us in the media for weeks on end for being undeserving) - "On this night, the Steelers had their own version of [the Seahawk's] 12th Man. He wore a striped shirt and a whistle. He threw a flag."
3) Gene Wojciechowski (just so I can say I'm presenting both sides of the argument) - "Enough already with the whining. The Seahawks had their chances. Plenty of them to overcome the Steelers and, if they insist, the refs, too."
OK I lied... More gripping about the refs along with indisputable video evidence showing Seattle got jobbed (at least for one touchdown). Did I mention I had a three-way $100 bet on this game? FUCK!
How is this not a Touchdown? It's a documented rule that if you touch the pylon while still in-bounds it's a touchdown. D. Jackson caught the ball, his left foot hits in-bounds then his right foot hits the pylon - TD right?!?! In the rulebooks yes but not at this Superbowl.
"A player no longer can be ruled out of bounds when he touches a pylon unless he already touched the boundary line." Straight from the NFL site, ruled changes made in March of 2002!
In fact John Clayton wrote about this exact rule change on ESPN as well: "A player will be ruled in bounds if he touches the pylon at the goal line before going out of bounds. For example, a pass would be considered complete if one foot touches the pylon and the other foot is in bounds". Which happened exactly as the rule is written to the letter. Unreal.
But since it was inside 2 min mark Sea couldn't challenge it (why is that anyway?), and the replay official didn't even stop play to review it. AND Pit called a timeout to stop the clock. Which gave them plenty of time to call for a review. WTF?
And the NFL has the audacity to support the officiating by saying it was 'properly officiated'. The ESPN poll asking readers whether or not they agreed with the NFL on this issue shows that (at the time of this post's publishing) out of 32,778 people polled 78.4% disagreed with this assessment. Of course I did vote about 24,834 times so maybe I skewed the data a bit. Now you must please excuse me while I go rip my eyeballs from my skull with my bare hands...
Enough about officiating. Moving on to the walrus...
What was Holmgren thinking, down by 11 at the 50 yard line, punting on 4th and about 12 with 6:30 to go in the game? Doesn’t he know that the only thing Pittsburgh has been able to do all season is run the clock out? Predictably the punt sails deep into the end zone for a touchback.
In conclusion I don't blame the refs, even though I should. The game was very winnable, but in-game coaching blunders (especially at the end of the halves) doomed the Seahawks when they still had at least a chance to come back. However, you can be damn sure I'm going to be bitter about this game for a long time.
1 comment:
Spot on, Charlie.
I was delighted to see that you have in fact shaken yourself out of the catatonic state in which you went to work on Monday and really torn into this.
The important point in all of this is that if the Seahawks were in fact robbed, then they were accomplices in the crime.
The only thing to do now is to defy the odds, come back next year, and deny the Steelers the satisfaction of creating another dynasty.
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