'Hawks point finger at themselves after all-thumbs effort

DETROIT -- There's no mystery to what happened to Seattle in Super Bowl XL. The Seahawks beat themselves.

They dropped passes. They committed stupid penalties. They missed field goals. They had one touchdown called back and missed on another when they were caught holding.

Seattle's Jerramy Stevens has it -- nope, wait, d'oh! (AP)

In short, they screwed up big time. And in the end they got what they deserved, which was a 21-10 loss they can blame on no one but themselves.

"We just didn't execute to the best of our abilities," said quarterback Matt Hasselbeck. "That's why (Pittsburgh) is the Super Bowl champion, and we're not."

Well, that's one explanation. Another is the Seahawks blew it.

The team that didn't make mistakes the last four months -- when it won 13 of 14 starts -- made a slew of them, beginning with a first half where Seattle absolutely manhandled Pittsburgh yet trailed 7-3.

Then, when Pittsburgh's Willie Parker broke an off-tackle run for a 75-yard touchdown -- the longest scoring run in Super Bowl history -- on the second snap of the second half, the Seahawks were suddenly, and inexplicably, in trouble.

Though they recovered, scoring after an interception to close the game to 14-10, they also seemed doomed to beat themselves. And they succeeded.

Trailing by four early in the fourth quarter, Seattle drove to the Steelers 19, where Hasselbeck hit tight end Jerramy Stevens -- yeah, that Jerramy Stevens -- with an 18-yard pass that had the Seahawks first-and-goal at the 1. Only the play was called back because of a holding call against tackle Sean Locklear.

Three plays later Hasselbeck was intercepted by Ike Taylor, and that was all, folks. The turnover led to Pittsburgh's game-clinching score and a deficit from which Seattle couldn't recover. "We fizzled when we got in the red zone," said Hasselbeck. "That hasn't been characteristic of our team. That's not us."

No kidding. No one was better inside the 20 this year than Seattle, but not on this night. In the first quarter an apparent Darrell Jackson touchdown was nullified by a penalty, this one on Jackson for pushing off.

Seattle settled for a field goal.

Then the Seahawks seemed to be set up for another score when Locklear struck. This time they produced no points.