An Insufferable Tribute to Marshawn Lynch

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Marshawn Lynch on his way to winning the Super Bowl last time.

Last week, we Seahawks fans were at a crossroads on the Insufferable Journey to Rewinnining the Super Bowl™. Would the Seahawks take the high road toward Rewinnining? Or would they take Rick Mirer Boulevard toward not Rewinnining? For the first half of Sunday’s game, the Seahawks Mirer’d it up, turning the ball over three times, and letting Eli Manning and rookie phenom Odell Beckham Jr. connect on a number of big plays.

But then the Seahawks remembered that there’s only one way to travel on the road toward Rewinnining: running down the middle of it. And so they ran a lot. Forty-five times in fact. Russell Wilson ran a bootleg off of the read option 14 times and the Giants defended it properly maybe once. Christine Michael had the best game of his young career, gashing the Giants for 17.8 (!) yards a carry. The Seahawks in total amassed 350 yards and five touchdowns on the ground on Sunday. And with everything that everyone else did to make that happen (Wilson, Michael, ginormous new fullback Will Tukuafu, and a healthy Max Unger, among others), it was Marshawn Lynch that stood above. Let me take a circuitous path in describing how good Lynch was on Sunday…

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The retiarius class of Roman gladiators were essentially gladiator fishermen, armed with weighted nets and tridents.

As a child I was obsessed with the retiarius class of Roman gladiators. Essentially a gladiator fisherman, the retiarius was armed withTo my kid brain, this was lunacy. Who would agree to play this part? Why was everyone copacetic with some of the people in a bloodsport being weird fishermen? And how humiliating would it be to get killed because some guy threw a net on you and then stabbed you with a trident?

Watching Marshawn Lynch have the best game of his career on Sunday, all I could think was that the New York Giants could have all been armed with nets and tridents and they still would have had no chance to contain him. This also got me to thinking, we may only have the rest of this year to cherish Marshawn Lynch’s contribution to the Seahawks, and Lynch deserves as many tributes as can be given. Unfortunately, his performances are so unique that we don’t really have the vocabulary to describe them. Given that we’re doomed to fail, the question is how best to fail to capture his contributions to the team in words? A number of attempts follow:

• Marshawn Lynch roughed up the Giants defenders like he was a defender and they were the offensive players, which is quite a subversive role-reversal, eh?

• Marshawn Lynch throttled the Giants defense like he was Maverick in Top Gun and now Goose is dead and we’re all sad, but Goose in this metaphor is also the Giants defense so are we really all that sad?

• Marshawn Lynch beat up the Giants so badly that Eli Manning accidentally called him Peyton.

• Marshawn Lynch ran so well that the Academy changed course and gave the 1995 Best Picture Oscar to Pulp Fiction.

• Marshawn Lynch hammered the Giants' front seven like he was attaching wood to other wood and didn’t have a lot of time or wood glue, but he did have nails.

• Marshawn Lynch nailed the Giants' front seven like he was attaching wood to other wood and didn’t have a lot of time or wood glue, but he did have a hammer.

• Marshawn Lynch didn’t take the Giants' lunch money because he’s a well-compensated professional athlete, but he did run through a number of their players in humiliating fashion.

• Marshawn Lynch was so good on Sunday I thought he was Seahawks kicker Steven Hauschka.

• Marshawn Lynch had so many touchdowns on Sunday that the managers at Air Traffic Control at Sea-Tac Airport were like, “Guys, stop watching the Seahawks game, you have a very important job to do.”

• Marshawn Lynch smashed through Giants defenders like Sean Connery smashing guidance chips in The Rock: stomping them to bits, ensuring that no one would be left to do harm to San Francisco in the coming days (important note: the New York Giants play the San Francisco 49ers next week).

• Marshawn Lynch… wait a second… What’s that Marshawn Lynch?

Oh, sorry. I’ll stop.

The Seahawks go to Kansas City next week in a showdown with a 6-3 team who runs the ball well, has a great coach with clock management issues, and has a stadium that’s amongst the loudest in the world. If you want to see this Seahawks team fight its evil twin, tune in on Sunday. But beware, it may turn out that the Seahawks are themselves the evil twin? Win or lose, next week’s game will at least lend us some insight as to the nature of evil.