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Tony Dungy saw it coming; Pete Carroll apparently didn’t. And to his credit, Carroll took the blame for his team’s 14-5 loss in Tampa to the Buccaneers.

“Really disappointed with our performance yesterday, from the top on down,” Carroll told reporters on Monday. “I thought I didn’t do a good job in this game getting our guys right for it.”

He explained that, although the defense was able to turn things around after giving up a pair of early touchdowns, the offense never responded.

“We couldn’t nail it,” Carroll said. “I feel like we didn’t adjust the way we wanted to, the way we need to as we look at. I’m not going into all that but I’m just telling you we didn’t do a good enough job. Three turnovers and six sacks no third downs, it’s really hard to win, obviously. That’s exactly what we saw. It was a tough day.”

It was a tough day, but Carroll seems to believe it was an aberration.

“I don’t think this is a trend or a turn in the wrong direction or any of that kind of stuff,” Carroll said. “I think we had a bad day out, a bad outing but we’re going to get right this week and get back at it. . . . I thought it was pretty clear, we were just clearly off. This was game 11 for us, I think this was the first time we really felt like that. I’m going to go with what we know and how we know to be, and we’ll get this thing fixed and get back on track.”

Carroll also praised the Buccaneers for their performance, pointing out that they did some of the same things they did a week earlier in Kansas City.

During Football Night in America, Dungy explained that he believed the Buccaneers would win because the Seahawks had been in some tough games lately, had criss-crossed the country from games in Seattle to New England back to Seattle and then to Florida, and had possibly overlooked a Tampa team that had been 1-4 at home.

The end result is that the Seahawks are now 7-3-1, a two-and-a-half games behind the Cowboys in the race for the No. 1 seed in the NFC. Which means that the Seahawks have to make up three games in the next five weeks. Which means that the road to Houston likely won’t be going through Seattle. Which will make it much harder for the Seahawks to get to Houston for the Super Bowl.