“They beat us,” a friend of mine says. He’s sitting across from me outside the CC’s on Esplanade. “They outplayed us and beat us. But if they say they weren’t worried, they’re full of shit.” He drinks his iced coffee. “That insane Seattle weather clears up. Our strategy has worn their D down a little. Suddenly we’re off. Boom! Boom! Boom! Right down the field.” He mimes rapid-fire Drew Brees passes with one hand.

“The stadium goes completely silent twice,” he continues. “Boom, boom, touchdown, and then the two point conversion shut them the hell up for the first time the entire game. The second time was when we recovered the onsides kick. They couldn’t believe it.” He rests his hands on the top of his head, mimicking the anxiety of a Seattle fan who watched the game from a nearby seat at CenturyLink Field. “This Seattle fan stands there and says, ‘This can’t be happening.’”

My friend smiles. “Yeah. They were worried. I hope we get them in the Dome this year in the playoffs. Because we will destroy them.”



The swirling rain shut down both quarterbacks for much of the game, but Drew Brees entered a classic Breesian zone in the fourth quarter.

L

et’s get this out of the way: the Seattle Seahawks, the best team in the NFL from the start to the finish of the 2013 season, outplayed the Saints in the divisional round of the playoffs. Seattle, a heavy favorite, won a game it deserved to win.

But the narrative about the Seattle juggernaut leaves out a few parts of the experience, especially as recounted by those of us who made the trip up to “the Link”1; the Seahawks might have been the better team, but a masterful Sean Payton gameplan, followed by the weakening of a Seattle monsoon, flipped the game in the Saints’ favor in the third quarter and stretched the Legion of Boom to the breaking point.

The Seahawks won, but not by knockout, as they did the teams’ regular season game. This one was a decision, scored rightly in Seattle’s favor, but it went the distance; and, by the final round, the Saints were landing powerful body-blows.

For Seattle, the trouble started with 2:38 left in the third quarter. Leading 16-0, the Seahawks had been in control of the game throughout, with the Saints’ only sustained drive a nine play, 53 yard thing in the first quarter, which ended in a missed field goal. Meanwhile, Seattle nailed each of its three field goal attempts and scored a touchdown on a short 24 yard field provided by a Mark Ingram fumble.

But as the fourth quarter approached, something changed. The Saints lined up at their own 26 yard line and proceeded to slice the Seahawks’ defense apart. They did it fast too, requiring only about four minutes to score.

Here’s how it happened:

Following Khiry Robinson’s touchdown run, Mark Ingram scored a two point conversion. Re-watch the game to hear how it sounds: The Seattle crowd goes silent. The announcer’s voice echoes off the stadium walls. Moments before, as Robinson fell forward across the goal line a smattering of boos, more nervous than angry, descended from the Twelfth Man.2 This is not the scene of a comfortable triumph.

The Saints subsequently forced the Seahawks to punt, and cost themselves a chance to take over the game on their next possession. Here’s how:

Travaris Cadet’s drop here, behind the best screen pass the Saints set up the entire night, was heartbreaking, especially when reviewed with the aid of coaches’ film. Had Cadet made the catch, he’d have run a long way.

A few moments later, a holding penalty called on Zach Strief negated a long pass to Kenny Stills. It’s not as damning a play as Cadet’s drop — after all, Strief’s hold may have enabled Brees to escape the rush — but it still hurt an opportunity to finish off the Seahawks’ defense early in the fourth quarter.

Still, the Saints quickly forced Seattle to punt, and then the Saints’ offense stunned Seattle with the kind of explosive insanity that makes them so fun to watch.

The Seahawks weren’t the only ones stunned by the second-wildest big play of Robert Meachem’s career, though. Somehow confused, the Saints drew a delay of game penalty before the next snap, ran a messy little failed dump-off pass attempt, and then had to call a timeout they couldn’t really spare.

The wonkiness gave Seattle’s defense time to regroup, they forced a pair of incomplete passes, they watched Shayne Graham miss another field goal, and then Russell Wilson and Marshawn Lynch made their only respective huge plays of the night on back-to-back snaps, ending in Lynch’s big touchdown run.

Then the Saints’ offense did this:

Between the end of the third quarter and the Saints’ onsides kick attempt near the end of the fourth, Seattle’s defense gave up a staggering 222 yards.3 That’s only about 50 fewer yards than the Seahawks gave up per full game during the regular season.

In the stands at CenturyLink, a Seahawks fan, having just watched the Saints incinerate his formerly-indestructible defense and then steal the ball back for another go, puts his hands atop his head and knows, for a moment, that everything is lost.



To Seattle, the Saints were that one dude who won’t stay down, regardless of how hard he’s hit.

M

y partner,, created a visualization of how the game unfolded that illustrates the increasing danger the Seahawks were in.

This visualization relies on a simple measurement: On a play-by-play basis, who “won?”

For example:

First and 10: Marshawn Lynch rushes for four yards. That’s a Seahawks win, since four yards on first down is a good, solid gain that any offense would accept.

Third and 8: Russell Wilson scrambles for six yards. We’d score this a Saints win, obviously, because the defense held on third down.

These aren’t difficult calls to make. In the play-by-play of the game, only about five plays fall into something like a grey area. As a result, our chart, which we’re tentatively calling the Momentum Meter,4 is a pretty good indicator of how the game was unfolding at a given time. Think of this like those line graphs you sometimes see during basketball games, which show the back-and-forth nature of scoring runs.

In this game, each team had a spurt during which they consistently dominated the other. For the Seahawks, that happened around the time Mark Ingram fumbled; the Seahawks did all almost all their damage and built their lead starting here. The Saints took over with a handful of minutes left in the third quarter and never relinquished their new advantage.

The Seahawks, you might say, were saved by the bell at the end of the fifteenth round.



By the start of the fourth quarter, Seattle’s defense was frustrated.

F

or Seattle, of course, everything wasn’t lost. After the onsides kick, only a couple dozen seconds remained and the Saints had no timeouts, so the odds were against them even before Marques Colston’s failed lateral attempt

Nationally, the game itself would end up an undercard to Seattle and San Francisco’s main event. Even the shoutiest, most inane sportswriters would shift their attention from irresponsible and unsupportable charges of Saints headhunting to resonant Richard Sherman/Michael Crabtree drama. I suspect even most Saints fans don’t realize what happened in the last act of this game.

For just over 17 minutes of actual game time, in the heart of Seattle, the Crescent City Express broke the Legion of Boom — and began to set the stage for 2014.