Years removed from the worst moment of his otherwise stellar NFL career, Marshawn Lynch was still trying to process what the hell happened. In 2023, Lynch sat on a leather couch in front of a roaring fireplace, drinking cognac alongside former tight end Shannon Sharpe, and discussing the play call that inexplicably took the ball out of his hands and changed the course of professional football for the next decade. Here was one of the toughest and most imposing (and most effortlessly amusing) running backs of this era or any other era, looking as vulnerable as he ever has.
“That shit was painful,” Lynch told Sharpe. “Not only did they take a moment away, they took a dream.”
Super Bowl XLIX, February 1, 2015, under a minute to play, Seattle trailing 28-24, and everyone presumes they know what’s coming now. On first down from the New England 5-yard line, the Seahawks gave the ball to Lynch, who plowed his way inside the 1. Surely, the Seahawks would give it to him again; surely, they would let one of the best running backs in the league power his way into the end zone and win them their second consecutive Super Bowl.
But that, of course, is not how it went down.
Lynch recounted the confusion on his teammates’ faces in the huddle when the play call came down. He remembered how he was so shaken up by it that he lined up on the wrong side of quarterback Russell Wilson before the snap. Instead, Lynch floated harmlessly into the flat, where he was ignored, and quarterback Russell Wilson threw a pass into a tight window that was intercepted by Patriots defensive back Malcolm Butler. Lynch walked aimlessly toward the sideline, where he says he literally laughed in the face of his coach, Pete Carroll, and then drifted into the locker room before the game was even over. The refusal to give the ball to Marshawn Lynch became a meme, a metaphor for what happens when a coach like Carroll outwits himself. The Patriots burned the final seconds away and won the Super Bowl.
None of it made much sense then, and none of it makes much sense now. But the implications became clear over time: The Patriots would go on to win two more Super Bowls over the course of the next five years, making for a total of six over the course of the Tom Brady-Bill Belichick era. And the Seahawks, haunted by one play, would never make it back to the Super Bowl. Until now.
On Sunday the Seattle Seahawks will once again face the New England Patriots at a moment that once again feels like a hinge point for the NFL. And it is very possible that once again, a single play could dictate what happens over the course of the next decade.
Two Franchises, Two Paths Forward
The delicate balance for every championship team echoes the choices made by an experienced gambler: You have to thread the needle between thinking counterintuitively and overthinking what should be an otherwise simple choice. You have to know when to take chances, and when to do the obvious thing. You have to embrace your fundamental identity, and trust your gut. And you have to admit it to yourself and recalibrate when you get it wrong.
At that moment in the Super Bowl, it became clear that offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell and Carroll–focused too much on outside forces like the clock and the number of timeouts they had remaining–had outsmarted themselves. (It was so perplexing that even the referees in that Super Bowl found themselves questioning the decision not to give the ball to Lynch.) Bevell and Carroll cut against the Seahawks’ fundamental identity as a team who rode Lynch’s physicality in key moments, and instead put the game in the hands of Wilson, who simply wasn’t trusted by his teammates in the same way.
In the aftermath, the Seahawks lost faith, which led them to lose their sense of invulnerability. The atmosphere in the locker room after that Super Bowl, wrote sportswriter Michael-Shawn Dugar, was “dark” and “ominous.” One team executive likened it to a death, and that’s what it became: Carroll had spent the previous five years building a familial atmosphere in the locker room and throughout the organization, but one play–one second-guess–obliterated all that good will. Carroll insisted he wouldn’t allow one play to define his team, but it was too late. According to Lynch, Carroll never fully admitted that he’d made a mistake, and neither did Bevell, which allowed the frustration to linger as Wilson took further control of the offense and Lynch wound up announcing his retirement, and then getting traded to his hometown Oakland Raiders.
Carroll would remain the head coach in Seattle for nine more seasons, but nothing was ever the same. The Seahawks would never get beyond the divisional playoff round under him again.
As for the Patriots? Their faith in themselves, and in the galvanizing presence of Tom Brady, had only been fortified. Two years later, in Super Bowl LI, the Patriots trailed the Atlanta Falcons 28-3 in the third quarter. On the sideline, Brady shouted at his teammates, “No fear!” But instead of attempting to thread impossible throws into double coverage or to diverge from the game plan, Brady opted for short throws to keep the ball moving. He didn’t overthink it; he “continually dumped the ball off to a moving target on a check-down,” wrote NFL.com’s Bucky Brooks. “While those dink-and-dunk receptions didn’t seem like much initially, Brady’s patience and discipline targeting the underneath routes paid off handsomely.”
The Patriots won, 34-28, in one of the greatest comebacks in modern pro football history. “I wasn’t thinking much,” Brady said of his mindset down 28-3. “I was thinking, ‘We just gotta score.’”
That comeback itself became a meme, a metaphor for the Patriots’ ability to trust their instincts. Two years later, in 2019, the Patriots would win another Super Bowl over the Los Angeles Rams, while the Seahawks bowed out meekly to the Dallas Cowboys in the wild-card round. The Seahawks had become increasingly polarized and fractured, Dugar writes. And the question now, over a decade later, is whether either one of these franchises, reset and refreshed for this year’s Super Bowl, will be able to discover the balance that might turn it into the next NFL dynasty.
The Cost of Overthinking
At this moment, in the leadup to Sunday, there is positivity on both sides. But what happens next is what may come to define both franchises in their new iterations. Is Patriots’ quarterback Drake Maye fully prepared for this moment in only his second season in the NFL–and after he completed only 10-of-21 passes for 86 yards in an AFC Championship game win over the Denver Broncos? Is Seahawks’ quarterback Sam Darnold capable of overcoming the stigma that defined him coming into this season–that he is a talented passer who makes poor decisions at crucial moments? Will the underdog Patriots attempt to overcompensate by abandoning their fundamental identity, or will they stay true to the principles that head coach Mike Vrabel learned while playing under Belichick? Will the favored Seahawks–a team that’s entirely reset from the Carroll era–play too cautiously at key moments, or will they trust Darnold with the game on the line?
There is a moment awaiting both these teams–a chance for the Seahawks to reset from that 2015 loss, and a chance for the Patriots to start over again and renew a dynasty with fresh faces. The league hasn’t been this wide open in years. What happens on the field in the Super Bowl could determine the future, just as it determined the trajectory of the past.
“Yes, the Seahawks kept competing after that heartbreaking loss,” Dugar wrote. “ Still, they were never the same. Years went by, but the stain of the Super Bowl loss never faded. Not only could they not properly move on from Malcolm Butler’s interception, but they also couldn’t come to grips with the process that led to it. It was viewed as a betrayal. A befuddling one, at that.”
In the end, one of these teams will validate its identity, and the other will wind up questioning everything it got wrong. If the Patriots do get throttled, as many experts predict, will it set them back for a decade? If Seattle loses in an upset, will it evoke the same echoes of 2015? Or will the Seahawks learn from the moment and readjust, as smart gamblers do?
“You’ve trained your players to do the right thing,” Carroll said in the aftermath of that decision to throw the ball instead of hand it to Lynch, “and I trust them to do right.”
But the problem was that Carroll didn’t display that trust. In a team meeting, he said he’d throw the ball again in that same scenario, which led the entire room to fall silent. One player likened it to being punched in the stomach, and then having a knife rip through your soul. Carroll overthought the moment, and then refused to admit that he might need to change course. He betrayed his team’s identity, and he would never get it back. And the best chance for the Seahawks to finally bury the pain of that moment and reset themselves on the proper course comes on Sunday, against the same team that broke them in the first place.
Michael Weinreb is a writer and journalist and the author of Throwbacks, a bestselling Substack newsletter about sports, culture and history.