Jamie O'Grady @JamieOGrady
I don’t buy Carroll wanting to keep Lynch from scoring game-winner, but can confirm SEA locker room is DIVIDED. Many dudes are ANTI-Russ.
I've been trying to wrap my mind around the playcall all day and I'm convinced one of the contributing factors they didn't run the football is because they didn't want Lynch to ultimately be the hero and win the MVP. I feel crazy for even considering such a conspiracy but after the play last night it was honestly my intitial reaction and a thought I don't find particularly far fetched at this point. Sure it's been reported Seattle would like to bring Lynch back next year if possible but we already know the Hawks are probably going to make Wilson the NFL's highest paid player with his contract extension fairly soon. So when given a choice as Pete Carroll was it looks as if he made an overconfident, cocky misstep and decided to put the ball in the hands of the assumed face of the franchise for years to come instead of handing it off to the 29 year old, at times controversial, near lock to score, beast of a RB and it cost them a Super Bowl. And there are unnamed players and people somewhat close to the locker room sort of backing up this claim:
Quote:
I contacted someone inside that locker room and they said to me as if on repeat: “Can’t believe it. We all saw it. They wanted it to be Russ. They didn’t want Marshawn to be the hero.”
Mike Silver for the NFL network reported on these “mutterings” as well, writing that he wanted to “refrain from lending any legitimacy to the conspiracy theory which one anonymous player was willing to broach: That Carroll somehow had a vested interest in making Wilson, rather than Lynch, the hero, and thus insisted on putting the ball in the quarterback’s hands with an entire season on the line. ‘That’s what it looked like,’ the unnamed player said, but I’d be willing to bet that he merely muttered it out of frustration, and that it was a fleeting thought.”
http://www.thenation.com/blog/196697...awks-last-play