Although I'm going to be smiling all day, it's going to be tough making it through work. I'll be writing more this evening, but here are some quick thoughts on the game:
* How could Seattle not have seen the Randle El pass coming? As soon they saw him running toward Parker, they should have had at least two defenders on Hines.
* Shaun Alexander may have had the quietest 95 rushing yards in Super Bowl history.
* In part of his Washington Post column, Michael Wilbon writes, "Jerramy Stevens (three dropped passes) was even softer than Joey Porter suggested." For all of his talk, Porter did not play as well as in the past games, but he didn't make the mistakes that Stevens did.
* Here's the breakdown of how Ike Taylor played yesterday.
* While not all of my predictions were correct, I got the winning team right and predicted that "Randle-El will be involved in a TD (maybe even throwing it)."
* Although no one is talking about this, Seattle punter Tom Rouen helped keep the Steelers in the game in the first quarter when the team had no first downs. Rouen kicked at least three punts into the end zone, which made a huge difference in field position.
More later...
Yes -- the Seattle punting was very bad, and no one mentioned it. Boxscore says he had 4 touchbacks --that's atrocious. Jerramy Stevens had a weird game. He really dropped a lot of passes, but he also could've killed the Steelers between the one TD he did catch and the pass he caught at the 1 that was called back on the strange holding call. But he showed just how "soft" he was when he failed to get out of bounds on 3d down at the end of the game to allow the FG unit to come on.
ReplyDeleteAlso, Seattle had a lot of questionable calls go against it. The push-off P.I. to negate the TD was a legit call, but a bit wimpy. The hold on the Stevens catch at the 1 was pretty weak. And the personal foul on Hasselbeck during the INT run-back was wrong, but I think the Steelers have been twice called on that type of deal. Hasselbeck made contact with a blocker below the waist, but made the tackle. So I don't know which way that should cut.
I do think that it was more-likely-than-not that Big Ben made it into the end zone. Wilbon says no way, and I think that's very wrong. He may be thinking about where the ball landed, not forward progress. I don't think you can tell definitively, but from the best angle available, I think he's in.
As to your question regarding the Randle El pass, one answer is from an article on espn.com:
ReplyDelete"Key to the play, Whisenhunt and Steelers players said, was the realization that the Seahawks were playing minus two starters in the secondary, and that the backup Pruitt was likely to bite on the reverse, and come up into the no-man's land in which no defensive back wants to be caught."
http://sports.espn.go.com/nfl/playoffs05/columns/story?columnist=pasquarelli_len&id=2320657