Explaining the Infamous Scheme of Seattle’s Fleeting Super Bowl Victory

It’s been over three months since the Superbowl. It seems as though this piece may have lost some relevance; however, in sports these days, relevance is in the hands of the informants, predominantly ESPN. The “worldwide leader in sports” has become more like the vanity child of TMZ, Fox News, and Yahoo’s best clickbait. Major sports media has conformed to the pointed, bias, flash-pan 24 hour cycles made famous by CNN, Fox, and lesser outlets, like CourtTV and MS/CNBC, and that’s a damn shame. I fondly remember when ESPN was fun AND informative and featured hardline journalism. Those days are long gone. This Superbowl was a marvelous game, one of the best Superbowl games I’ve ever seen, and one of the most viewed sporting events of all time. What’s funny is that any and all remnants of the game disappeared completely from sports discourse less than six days after its completion, probably for some Johnny Manziel debauchery or another pseudo-scandal. Three months lapsed in sports coverage might as well be three years. Despite popular culture’s perceived relevance of this game three months later, I want to revisit the game’s significance here, as, if you recall WAY BACK in February, the finale of the event was as contentious as any game in recent memory. Here’s a few things about it worth talking about AGAIN: Whether you subscribe to the idea that, bar none, the Seahawks should’ve ran the ball or you are in the minority that defends the idea of splitting play-calls between pass and run to keep the clock and the defense honest, one thing needs to be clearly understood: you never, absolutely never move yourself away from the goal when you’re in the “red zone,” or the area within 20 yards of the goal line. It’s very, very simple. The world will argue this ad nauseam for the immediate present and future, and the final two minutes of this game will be relived and replayed for as long as there are Super Bowl games. But if you want to try to seriously understand how ineffective and dumbfounding this strategy was, or make sense of all this commotion, you needn’t forget the golden rule of offense: get in the end zone. Football is physical chess, and goal line offensive sets (tight and compact formations, straight-ahead runs, misdirection and fakes) are designed to keep your team as close to checkmate as possible; therefore, the decision to form a “shotgun” set (wherein the QB is 4-6 yards away from the line of scrimmage, the starting point) as the Seahawks elected to do with 26 seconds left in the game, three chances for victory, and one timeout goes against the cardinal rule of offensive football, especially when you are two yards away from payday. It’s point A to point B mathematics (is that “point-slope equations?”). It doesn’t matter really if you argue to exhaustion that the call came down to the merits of a run versus a pass, it’s more than that, because both plays are viable options, but it is entirely in how they are setup and planned for performance that provides the logical strategy for success. In football, and very much in life, the success of execution comes down to innumerable variables: human error and luck, good or bad, mostly (see this). The main issue with the outcome of Seattle’s last play was that they didn’t give themselves the best, most logical, or fundamental opportunity to execute, thus, the variable of human error was at a higher probability. Furthermore, the trends of gameplay are great conditional factors in how you strategize continually through four quarters. A team has an overall game plan that they’ve constructed in preparation for a particular team. You come into the game with a plan. Plans change, however, when said plans cease to yield success. You then have backup plans, and NFL teams have many, many strategies reserved for failure. If something is working, like running the ball outside, then you continue to run the ball to the outside until you are forced to change that plan. For Seattle, they were having great success in pure execution and luck (Kearse catch) with pass plays that allowed their quarterback to use his mobility to extend time for his receivers to get open. The Seahawks had run the ball very successfully throughout the game as well. Both of these factors translate very simply to a play-call involving a tight, compact formation that looks to do one of two things 1) hand the ball off to their ace runner who is not easily corralled or 2) call a misdirection pass play that plays to both gameplay strengths the Seahawks featured in the game: the threat of Lynch as a runner and the fluidity and mobility of Wilson as a passer. Seattle did neither of these things all from two yards to victory. In football, strategy is primary, execution secondary. You want to put a strain on your opponents’ responsibilities, reactions, and adjustments and increase their probability for mistakes. This is what practice is for: learning tactical formations and practicing execution (chess pieces, in pre-thought and movement). If you fuck up your strategy from the jump, you are asking your players to execute above their means, to “make plays” as pundits commonly call it. And there are very few players in football that can execute above tactical means. Those that can are “Pro-Bowlers” and “All-Pros.” No offense to Lockette, the target for Russell Wilson during that fateful play, but he is not a player necessarily comfortable with playing above his designated role in that formation and play (a converted track athlete with less than 20 career catches), which is why the outcome, the error occurred. The best thing about this event is better-than-usual fodder for analysis and, most importantly, a more entertaining, well-played game, which is what you want from a game pitting together the league’s two best teams. That’s why you watch. But, to me, the best outcome from this Super Bowl is the potential for non-football fans to understand how intellectual this game is: ideational, tactical, and strategic. That it’s not the cliché of “huge men killing each other,” that it is the physical manifestation of chess. And while chess is an abstract strategy sport that teaches critical thought, risk and reward, and consequence, football does all of those things, but with much, much higher consequence as we’ve come to understand biologically over the last ten years. I hope that this event, which might arguably be the most heavily covered football game in history (my opinion based solely on our times of exposure and information accessibility), can get more people on-board with how interesting and enjoyable the sport can actually be is at its center. That the sport itself, though too often circumstantially gaudy and bawdy, is a “thinking man’s” game. Wade through all the bullshit for that, because it is worth it.

Pat Marino appreciates Sundays.