The earth moved. Again.
The two prior times the Saints played in Seattle, the crowd at CenturyLink Field became sufficiently raucous to register on the Richter scale. When running back Marshawn Lynch scored what appeared to be a game-clinching touchdown with less than three minutes remaining in the game, another Beastquake happened.
And it may have been the biggest one.
“This signal looks bigger than the one three years ago,” John Vidale, director of the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network at the University of Washington, told the Seattle Times. “But we don’t know yet.”
What we do know is that, by scoring instead of going down deep in Saints territory, Lynch set the stage for a potential earthquake in New Orleans, if the road team had found a way to force overtime.
Our pal Howard Balzer has pointed out that Lynch’s decision to score gave the Saints a slim chance that they shouldn’t have had.
The Saints had no timeouts. If Lynch had taken a knee on a play that began with 2:48 left, the Seahawks wouldn’t have had to take another snap before the two-minute warning. The Seahawks then could have milked the final two minutes with three snaps and the minimum of 40 seconds after each one.
And since we’re dabbling in “should haves,” the touchdown should have been called been called back because (as the photo shows) coach Pete Carroll was roughly 10 feet into the field of play, along with someone else from the Seahawks.
