When Green Bay’s Morgan Burnett intercepted a Seattle pass with five minutes to play on Sunday, he figured he had just sealed a victory in the NFC Championship Game. And so he slid on his own, not wanting to risk a fumble if he tried to return the pick.
Of course, Burnett hadn’t sealed a victory. The Packers punted on their ensuing possession, the Seahawks scored two touchdowns in less than a minute late in the fourth quarter, and Seattle won the game in overtime. So does Burnett realize he screwed up?
Nope.
“I don’t take anything back that I did,” Burnett told the Journal Sentinel. “It’s easy to sit here after and say ‘we should have did this, we should have did that.’ If the outcome was different, we wouldn’t even be talking about it. I was just trying to secure the catch, I got the ball in my hand and the main thing was just gaining possession of the ball.”
Burnett said he got a signal from Julius Peppers to slide, so he did it.
“I got the ‘no mas’ signal, which means ‘no more, no return, get down’ and secure possession of the ball, give our offense the ball,” Burnett said.
Peppers and Burnett may have thought the game was clinched, but they were wrong. Burnett should have tried to return the interception, especially because he had lots of room to run. Burnett might have scored a touchdown if he had returned the pick, and if he hadn’t scored there’s a good chance that he would have returned the ball into field-goal range. To lose a game in overtime after giving up on a chance to score three or seven points late in the fourth quarter is enormously disappointing, even if Burnett doesn’t think he did anything wrong.
“There is nothing that I would change or nothing that I would take back,” Burnett said.
That’s a shame. Burnett made a mistake, and it appears that he hasn’t learned from it.
