Seahawks defensive lineman Quinton Jefferson was a fount of bubbly positivity as he listed off the virtues of Seattle’s 23-6 win over the New York Jets on Sunday.
“I felt that was the first time we played a complete game in all three phases,” he said.
Jefferson’s mood darkened only when someone reminded him of the wins that got away, as if he had been visited by the Ghost of Letdowns Past.
“That’s what it is with a young team,” he said. “You don’t realize how that can come back and bite you in the ass, you know? We just win one of those games — New Orleans, Carolina, Atlanta — we don’t have this problem.”
The curse of the NFC South — an 0-4 record against its four teams, all at .500 or below — is a large part of the Seahawks’ current predicament of still needing help in the final weekend to secure a playoff spot.
You can throw in an overtime loss to the 6-10 Las Vegas Raiders, too. The fact that three of those defeats were at Lumen Field, whose luminous home-field advantage has dimmed considerably, and that all were by the margin of a touchdown or less, and you realize how agonizingly close Sunday was to being a celebration of something bigger than merely having a playoff chance.
But there would be no Cal Raleigh walk-off vibe for the Seahawks to end their seemingly endless postseason drought of, uh, one year. That will only come if they beat the Rams in next Sunday’s finale, accompanied by a victory from the surging Detroit Lions over the surging-even-harder Green Bay Packers
“It is what it is,” concluded Jefferson. “I know next week, we’ve got an opportunity to get in, so we’ve got to handle it.”
But as Shelby Harris pointed out, even if the Seahawks “handle it” against the Rams — as they absolutely should versus a team that’s lost eight of its last 10 games — it could be for naught.
“At the end of the day, it’s win or go home — and then you still might go home,” Harris said. “It sucks we’re in a position where we’ve got to watch other people, and we did that to ourselves.”
And that’s the paradox of Seattle’s season, the reason their cup doesn’t runneth over with praise and applause. They undoubtedly overachieved from their preseason expectations, but by the revised expectations of many after four straight wins and a 6-3 record in early November, their cup should have been filled with Champagne.
Instead, it’s either half full or half empty, depending on how much you bought into the turnaround.
“Earlier in the year, we were right in position to really control our own destiny, and obviously we hit a rough patch,” said quarterback Geno Smith.
The fact that they brought this dilemma upon themselves with losses to objectively inferior teams undercut the boisterous cacophony of earsplitting music that reverberated through the Seahawks’ celebratory locker room on Sunday.
You want a metaphor? A couple of Seahawk players — Tariq Woolen, Colby Parkinson — were “slimed” by a Nickelodeon crew that was on hand. It was clearly great fun for all — but afterward they struggled to rid themselves of the green mess.
“It took me about 10 to 15 minutes in the shower to get all of the slime off, especially with this hair,” laughed the generously maned Parkinson.
Meanwhile, the Seahawks are trying to rid themselves of the mess of those untimely losses. But they will need someone else to figure out how to stymie a resurgent Packers’ team that looked dead in the water when they lost five in a row and seven out of eight to sit 4-8 on Nov. 27. The leaguewide scuttlebutt was whether the Packers would blow up their roster after what was clearly a lost season and part ways with Aaron Rodgers.
Since then, the Packers have rolled off four wins in a row with Rodgers back to his craftiest and most resourceful self. They will have a stockpile of momentum and motivation on Sunday while playing on the infamous frozen tundra where no one wants to go in January.
The Seahawks’ best asset is a Lions team that is nearly as hot as Green Bay, with seven wins in their last nine games. The Lions share a quandary with Seattle, in that both need help to seize a playoff spot that few saw in the realm of possibility when the season started. The Lions, however, are relying on the burnt-out shell of a Rams team that bears scant resemblance to the team that one year ago was on a Super Bowl-winning path.
One of the frustrations for Seattle is that Sunday’s performance, albeit against a nose-diving Jets team, showed the optimal side of the Seahawks’ potential. Their hot-and-cold defense is warming up again, holding their second straight opponent under 300 yards (the previous one being the explosive Chiefs, the league’s No. 1 offense).
The Seahawks didn’t turn the ball over at all for the first time all season and incurred three Jets turnovers of their own, the surest way to warm Pete Carroll’s heart. The second-surest way is to rack up 198 yards on the ground, led by another breakout game by Kenneth Walker III (23 carries, 133 yards). Smith, minus many of his top receiving weapons and barely able to find a double- and triple-teamed DK Metcalf (one catch, 3 yards), played a solid, mistake-free game.
All that was enough to put some bounce in Jefferson’s 291-pound step.
“I love the fight in these guys,” he said. “Man, it’s been a crazy up and down season. But these dudes have no quit in them.
“At the end of the day, all you want is a chance to play in the big game. If we get there, it’s 0-0 and then you know we can start it up. So we’ve just got to keep playing good ball. Give ourselves a chance. If we go win next week, we’ve got a chance, and everything else is what it is.”
It is what it is — and the Seahawks will be kicking themselves if it isn’t.