The Seattle Seahawks have already snapped one streak by winning a play-off game the season after winning it all, but can they take the final step to greatness by becoming just the seventh team to triumph in back-to-back Super Bowls?
This year’s Super Bowl has more storylines than a soap opera, but once you get past the cheating scandals, crotch grabs, rivalries and outsized characters, the match-up between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks boils down to a classic ‘new money vs old money’ feud.
The Patriots are seeking a fourth championship in the sixth Super Bowl of the Tom Brady-Bill Belichick era, the exclamation point on more than a decade of dominance in the AFC. No team has won back-to-back Lombardi Trophies since New England in the 2003 and 2004 seasons. In fact, no defending Super Bowl champion has even come back to win a play-off game the following year. Until now.
Until these Seahawks.
Seattle is back in the big game thanks to an eight-game winning streak dating back to mid-November, but for a while it looked as though 2013’s dominant outfit had, like so many before them, gotten caught up in their own press.
Defensively, they were pushed around by Dallas on their own patch, while a defeat by a St Louis Rams team quarterbacked by undrafted rookie Austin Davis showed a lack of focus against a much weaker foe. Malcontent receiver Percy Harvin, who it emerged had gotten into a scrap with a team-mate in the lead-up to last year’s Super Bowl, was traded away for next-to-nothing, while running back Marshawn Lynch’s griping about his contract led to speculation about his future with the team.
Another loss, in Kansas City, dropped Pete Carroll’s side to 6-4, not quite in trouble but far from a convincing Super Bowl contender.
So Carroll did what all good managers do when things are turning for the worse, he called a team meeting. Coaches met with senior players prior to the November 23rd trip to then NFC West leading Arizona, when grievances were aired and the air was cleared.
Safety Earl Thomas described the discussion as: ‘Hard talks. Arguments. Like a family. And just like a family, we came together.’
Come together they did. The defence, in particular, regained it snarl, allowing just three touchdowns in its final six games, albeit to a succession of struggling or back-up quarterbacks.
The Seahawks were back to their ‘us against the world’ best and the rest of the league didn’t stand a chance. Carolina were no match in the divisional round, setting up an NFC championship clash with Aaron Rodgers and an inspired Green Bay defence.
Seattle, and quarterback Russell Wilson in particular, looked a shell of themselves for the first three quarters of the game. The Seahawks of the first half of the season would not have fought back, but come back they did, from a 19-7 deficit in the final five minutes, with Wilson throwing the game-winning touchdown in overtime.
The Seahawks had defied the odds and are back in the Super Bowl. Greatness and the potential for a decade-long dynasty awaits.
