On February 1, 2015, in Glendale, Arizona, the Seattle Seahawks were one yard from a second straight Super Bowl title. They trailed the New England Patriots 28 to 24. It was second-and-goal at the New England 1-yard line, with 26 seconds to play and one timeout left.
They had got there on a wild catch. Jermaine Kearse pulled in a deflected pass while lying on his back. Then, on first-and-goal from the 5, Marshawn Lynch, whom NFL.com’s Michael Silver called “the most powerful goal-line runner in football,” carried the ball to inside the 1.
New England’s Darrelle Revis said afterwards that he “just figured that they were just going to try to pound it with Marshawn Lynch for the touchdown.” Lynch lined up in the backfield. Russell Wilson took the snap and threw a quick slant to Ricardo Lockette. Malcolm Butler, an undrafted rookie cornerback with no career interceptions, jumped the route and caught the ball. The Patriots won 28 to 24.
“I told those guys, ‘That’s my fault, totally,’” Carroll said on NBC after the game. Some of his own players were less forgiving. “Best back in the league, and the 1-yard-line?” linebacker Bruce Irvin asked Silver, and added: “I will never understand it.”
The next morning NPR rounded up the verdicts. Jerry Brewer of The Seattle Times called it “the worst play call in Super Bowl history.” On ESPN, Ian O’Connor called it the “worst Super Bowl play of all time.”
Carroll’s reasoning was about the clock. He didn’t want to leave Tom Brady time to answer, and with one timeout Seattle could not run three times. An incomplete pass on second down would stop the clock and leave room to run on third and, if needed, fourth down. “That’s ball logic, not 2nd guess logic,” he texted Silver that night, adding that “you never think you’ll throw an interception there, just as you don’t think you would fumble.”
The numbers were less one-sided than the headlines. According to ESPN Stats & Information, Wilson’s was the 109th pass thrown from the 1-yard line that season, and the first intercepted. Over the previous five seasons, including playoffs, teams running from the 1 had scored 54 percent of the time and turned the ball over 1.5 percent of the time; passes scored just under 50 percent of the time, with turnovers slightly more often. FiveThirtyEight’s Benjamin Morris worked through the clock and found that running came out ahead by 0.3 percentage points of win probability under the assumptions most favorable to Lynch, and passing by up to 3 points under others. Some critics faulted the process instead: NFL.com’s Gregg Rosenthal pointed out that Seattle took 40 seconds between plays, which made the clock a bigger problem than it needed to be.
On the Thursday after the game, Carroll talked to Matt Lauer on the Today show.
“It was the worst result of a call ever,” he said. “The call would have been a great one if we catch it. It would have been just fine, and nobody would have thought twice about it.”