If the Seahawks had scored on 2nd-and-goal with 20 seconds to go, we'd all be hailing Pete Carroll as a genius and Russell Wilson as the next great quarterback. We'd also be wondering why in the hell Patriots coach Bill Belichick decided to sit on that timeout.
On the play before The Interception, Marshawn Lynch ran for four yards before he was tackled at the 1. There was 1:06 left as New England clung to a 28-24 lead. But Belichick didn't signal for a timeout to stop the clock. In fact, he didn't do anything.
We talked about those final, fateful moments in the latest Eye on Football Podcast, embedded below (you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes right here).
“We put our goal-line defense in probably around the same time they were sending in their multiple receiver group, and that's kind of what we wanted to be in there, to make sure they didn't run the ball in,” Belichick told WEEI radio on Tuesday, via ESPN.com.
“I'd like to think had they tried to run the ball against our goal-line defense, with three receivers on the field -- we couldn't ask for any more than that in terms of trying to stop the running game. We saw that matchup and we certainly gave some consideration to taking a timeout there and leaving some time on the clock. I don’t know if that would have been a bad thing to do. It might have been a good thing to do.
“But it just seemed like in the flow of the game that we were okay with where we were.”
We all know what happened next.
In the days leading up to the game, we said that Belichick and Carroll were two of the NFL's best coaches, in part because they rarely made late-game mistakes. In Super Bowl XLIX, Carroll's (or offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell's) decision to let Wilson throw in what should've been a running situation ended up costing the Seahawks' back-to-back titles.
