photo by Erika Schultz (Seattle Times)
Those of you who aren’t NFL fans or didn’t care about the Super Bowl or, worse yet, were pulling for the Denver Broncos, you may want to skip this post. But that 43-8 win was a long time coming for Seahawks fans, and for the city of Seattle, and I have to do a little celebrating.
There sure as hell was a little celebrating going on in the streets of Seattle last night. It was a good place to be as people flooded outside in a display of mass delirium, the likes of which I’ve never seen here before.
Here are 8 9 reasons why the Seahawks 43-8 win in the Superb Owl was metal, even though it wasn’t music:
* It was the Seahawks’ first Super Bowl championship in the team’s 38-year history and the city’s first championship in one of the four major professional sports leagues since the Seattle SuperSonics won the NBA title in 1979. (It was the eighth professional sports championship overall: The Seattle Metropolitans won the Stanley Cup in 1917; the Sonics won the NBA title in 1979; the Seattle Storm won WNBA championships in 2004 and 2010; and the Seattle Sounders FC won the U.S. Open Cup in 2009-2011).
* The Seahawks were an underdog going into the game but won by the biggest margin of victory by any underdog in the game’s 48-year history. The 35-point margin of victory matched the third-biggest in Super Bowl history — but all those other winners were favored to win.
* They beat the team with the No. 1 offense in the NFL, the Broncos having set an NFL record for points scored during the season and Peyton Manning (the league MVP this year) having set NFL records for passing yards (5,477) and touchdowns (55). The Seahawks held that offense scoreless until the final play of the third quarter — and those would be the Broncos only points of the game.
* The Seahawks scored at the 12-second mark of each half (that opening safety being the fastest score in Super Bowl history). Fitting, since the fans are called the 12th Man.
* The Seahawks’ average age of 26.4 makes them the youngest team to win the Super Bowl (according to data compiled by Pro Football Reference).
* In addition to being a very young team, the Seahawks are also a team populated by late-round draft choices and led by a second-year quarterback who was a third-round draft pick (his 2013 salary of $526,217 was less than Peyton Manning made per game).
* Speaking of young and overachieving, it was fitting that the MVP of the game was linebacker Malcolm Smith, who was a 7th-round draft pick in 2011, wasn’t invited to the NFL combine, and didn’t even start a game for the Seahawks until after KJ Wright broke his foot against the 49ers on December 8.
* The Seahawks are just badass — swaggering, brash, trash-talking, punishing on the field, and ultimately epitomized by Richard Sherman and his spotlight-stealing on-field interview after the 49ers win. And for a city that’s got a reputation for being reserved, nerdy, and more than a little hipster, being represented by a team like that as the victors in the sport’s biggest game is very fuckin’ metal.
* UPDATE: The numbers are now in: Super Bowl XLVII was the most-watched U.S. television event of all-time, averaging 111.5 million viewers from start to finish. Surprisingly, even though the game was clearly a blowout, the game earned a 44.0/63 Nielsen audience rating from the 9:30 minute mark in the fourth quarter to the end of the game, meaning that even in the final minutes the rating was only 5% lower than it was for the entire game.
22 Responses to ““THAT’S METAL!” — BUT IT’S NOT MUSIC: 43-8”
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I would not want to get in a mosh pit with the Seahawks defensive line.
Understatement of the millennium.
Congrats Seattle! It’s always nice to see a city that has never been a NFL champion finally become one.
Thank you Rob. I’m still pinching myself to make sure this was real… It has been such a long wait.
I enjoyed that game immensely. Particularly as I have some reason to be invested this year!
Although I’m a Broncos fan, and much could be said about how the Denver team was having an off day, I have to say the Seahawks earned it. One wonderful thing about football is that every game really counts, and if you have an off day, there aren’t any second chances. (In other words, I have no respect for the World Series.)
I will not begrudge your city or the players anything. I do have to say two things, however. One, I don’t know what sources you were looking at, but everything I saw called Seattle the favorites to win. They were not underdogs. And two, I still hate your coach from his days presiding over the cheating USC Trojans.
I’m pretty sure I got the underdog story from a Bloomberg News piece, but the same info is in this:
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.com/2014/02/03/seahawks-post-biggest-margin-of-victory-by-an-underdog-in-super-bowl-history/
I found the Bloomberg piece:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-02-03/seahawks-defeat-broncos-43-8-to-capture-first-super-bowl-title.html
Huh. I didn’t see anything calling Seattle the underdogs before the game, but now I’m looking around and it’s looking like it was pretty much split. Looking at the odds from gambling sources, though, the Seahawks seemed to be a clear favorite, at least before a whole lot of people started betting the other way.
Also, I should add, the point spread was only 1 point, the smallest spread since 1982. So, I don’t think it’s fair to call the Seahawks the underdog going in. Overwhelming victors going out, yes, but not underdogs going in.
http://sports.yahoo.com/blogs/nfl-shutdown-corner/seahawks-barely-favored-lowest-super-bowl-point-spread-031941140–nfl.html
Granted, even based on the info I saw when I wrote this, they were underdogs by a pretty thin margin.
my wife and i are not into sports at all, not even a little bit. but we watch the Final Four (if our local Jayhawks make it that far, which is rare) and we watch the Superbowl because it’s a big extravaganza and there’s nothing on TV on Sundays, so it’s something to have on while we play on our laptops/kindles and wrestle with our three dogs and two cats on the living room floor.
last weekend, as the alpha male of the house, i explained to my wife how football is played; a bunch of big guys in tight pants get together on a big grassy field that somebody painted lines and numbers on. one team gets a brown ball that looks like it got run over by a car. they pass the ball around real sneakily and then the fastest guy takes the ball and runs away with it and won’t let anybody else have it. he tries to run to the safety spot but if the other guys catch up with him before he gets there they jump on top of him and beat him up. if he makes it to the safety spot he gets to do a happy dance and then he gives the ball to his best friend who doesn’t think a half-flat ball is a very good gift so he kicks it through a big H, and gets a point which he gives to the rest of the team because apparently the points the other guy got for reaching the safety spot wasn’t good enough. this goes on until they run out of commercials and the team with most points gets to go to an amusement park which they really love (you can tell because they get really excited and scream about it after they win).
also they have to stop in the middle of the game because some screwball booked a band to play the SAME arena on the SAME day. how many times does that have to happen before the guy in charge of making the reservations gets fired?!
congrats Seahawks and Seahawks fans 🙂
This might be the best explanation of football I’ve ever seen.
Too right. I’m a football addict and I still laughed my damn ass off.
i am so very much not a sports guy that every year my wife has to explain to me how the whole “first down” thing works. every. year.
If you had been a Broncos fan for this game, you really wouldn’t have needed that information.
Harsh.
nice 🙂
🙁
I feel your pain.
Actually, I don’t! Ha Ha! I feel great!! Ha Ha!! (I may also be a dick)
LOL. As someone who remembers the Super Bowl in ’90 where Denver had their asses handed to them by the 49rs, I wasn’t really shocked at what happened. And there was also the loss to the Redskins in ’88. There was also the loss to the Giants in ’87.
I need a beer.
That’s a bad riff you got yourself going on there. You might need two beers.