Worst Football Play of the Year?

Gregg Easterbrook, the economic and social policy wonk who moonlights as a football analyst on ESPN.com, rips the Seattle Seahawks for their collapsed play on Sunday, when they faced 3rd and 10 with about a minute to go, needing to just get in range to boot the winning field goal.

Now, admittedly, that play was one of a string of plays the Seahawks either failed to execute on or that the Bears just stymied. But Easterbrook singles out this particular play as the Single Worst Play of the Season So Far.

Huh?

He blames the offensive line for just standing around instead of blocking for Hasselbeck. Fine, they blew their assignments. But Single Worst Play of the Season So Far? Worse than Romo's botched field goal hold? Worse than virtually any play run by the Raiders?

Easterbrook then goes on to detail a litany of bad judgement on the part of the Chargers, who were pretty much assumed to be guaranteed a Super Bowl appearance. The Seahawks, by contrast, were a struggling 9-7 team that battled a real contender to a standstill. No one expected the Seahawks to win.

Plus, if you had to pick the worst play of that game, it was the play immediately before Easterbrooks Single Worst Play of the Season So Far. I wrote about that here.

I might have to go watch those plays on TiVo again.

Heartbreak

Well, that was disappointing. Not unexpected, but disappointing nonetheless. The tough thing was that the Seahawks actually played some of their best football of the year. They could have won -- not on a Romo-esque fluke, but through talent, skill and perseverance. They lost. The defeat was all the more painful given how close victory was.

From where I was sitting, the key offensive play that blew the game was when it was 2nd and 10 with about a minute to go in regulation. The Seahawks just needed 6 or 7 yards to put Josh Brown -- one of the game's elite clutch kickers -- in range. So what happens? Hasselbeck airs it out to the endzone and waaaay overshoots the receiver. Now it's 3rd and 10 and they failed to advance far enough. Why were they calling a pass play -- much less one to the endzone, when the running back was having a 100-yard game? To be fair, it sounds like the play was designed to do something difference, and that tricksy Bears defense messed it up:

"I was surprised we threw the ball there," Holmgren said. "I was hoping to get a bit of extra yardage, maybe kick a long field goal. I don't know if we were fooled by the coverage. Maybe they adjusted their coverage. I was not going for a long one. We were trying to do something else."

I really wish I could say something about how the Bears played dirty, how the officiating sucked, or whatever. But hey, this wasn't Super Bowl XL. It was a remarkably clean game, the refs called it fairly, and the Bears played their hearts out. Despite the doubts, Grossman had a sweet 30-yard pass in OT that set them up for the winning figgie.

I highly recommend Art Thiel's column from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (linked above). Thiel proves why he's the only sports writer in the Emerald City I make a point of reading regularly:

The season was hardly devoid of fortune. It is not unreasonable to suggest the Bears kicked the field goal that a week earlier the Cowboys should have kicked, but didn't, for reasons perhaps better explained in monasteries, synagogues, bars and other places of worship.