You guys see that Seahawks game?

Let me rephrase: You guys still willing to engage with the NFL?

If you aren’t, I get it. Really, I do. After another hellacious week for the league, I totally get stepping away. The NFL has been a dumpster fire off the field, and remains a brutal sport that pushes up against all sorts of ethical boundaries on it. But I have to say… that was a hell of a game! What a football game that was! Eh? Who can even remember ethics after a game like that one?

Oh, you can? Well, we’re going to break Sunday’s game down regardless.

In the first regular season Super Bowl rematch in 17 years (the result of a meaningless scheduling quirk), the Seattle Seahawks built up a 17-3 fourth quarter lead, before letting it slip away in gut-wrenching fashion. Regulation ended with Broncos quarterback and living legend Peyton Manning leading an 80-yard touchdown drive in the game’s final minute, before converting a two-point conversion to force overtime. How remarkable was this drive? According to Football Outsider’s Scott Kacsmar, no team had in NFL history had ever forced overtime from an eight-point deficit with a drive starting in the final minute. So that was special. We all witnessed history. Yay. *blows party blower, party blower somehow lurches backwards and pokes out an eye*

But then, as these Seahawks bear no resemblance to the Seahawks of the pre–Pete Carroll era (who were a collective 8-17 in overtime games including a traumatizing 0-7 run that stretched from just after my 7th birthday to the month I got my driver’s license), the Seahawks drove the field in 13 plays, and won on a Marshawn Lynch dive into the end zone. The Insufferable Journey to Rewinnining the Super Bowl™ rolls forward!

I, for one, never had a moment of doubt. Nope, not traumatized from my childhood at all. No sir. Not even a little bit.

We can look at how yesterday’s game ended and see it as a nail-biter. Or we can choose to minimize the importance of Denver’s comeback and view it as an example of the Seahawks being unstoppably awesome instead. Let’s do that one:

• Russell Wilson has now played 40 career NFL games and won 30 of them. I don’t know if Wilson is the best young quarterback in the league. I don’t really care. I just know he’s really good.

• Since joining the Broncos, Peyton Manning has been held under 21 points twice: yesterday against the Seahawks and in the Super Bowl last year against the Seahawks. See if you can spot the common factor in those two games.

• Marshawn Lynch caught a touchdown after lining up as a slot receiver in the first half. On a scale from fair to not fair, that play qualified as “the world, so you better get used to it.”

• The Seahawks’ injury luck has been absurd, with the team losing no one this week despite left tackle Russell Okung and safety Earl Thomas leaving the game at different points. Those are two of the team's least replaceable players and Okung in particular looked to be badly hurt. That neither will miss any time? Incredibly lucky. Oh lord, I’ve just jinxed everyone. Let’s move on…

Bad Announcing

Welcome to the Phil Simms experience, Seahawks fans! For the biggest AFC game of the week, CBS and the NFL trot out Simms, a Super Bowl–winning quarterback from the early ’90s. His time playing football also seems to have left him in no condition to announce a football game. He calls games with the improvisational instincts of an asshole making fun of jazz by making trumpet sounds with his mouth and then farting. Simms speaks as if he has to force the words he is saying through a fine mesh strainer in order to vocalize them.

At one point in the game, Simms said, “When you do it in slow motion, everything in the NFL looks like pass interference,” and later added, “In slow motion, it always looks like a catch.” HE SAID BOTH OF THOSE SENTENCES! To Phil Simms, in slow motion, every play looks like both a catch and pass interference. And, to be clear, the two specific plays he was talking about were ruled to be neither pass interference nor a catch. He staked out two completely contradictory positions about the rules of football, and managed to be wrong both times about both plays. Boffo buffoonery.

In a fun twist, Simms and his partner Jim Nantz, who sounds like a confused golf announcer pressed into football duty because that’s what he is, now call the league’s Thursday Night primetime game. If you play your cards right, being a football fan means listening to Phil Simms for eight hours a week. Seriously, why are we watching football? We could all be reading books or working to solve the nation’s energy crisis!

Oh right, the Seahawks are awesome.

Funny Bird to Make Life Worthwhile

The Seahawks spent halftime introducing a new mascot named Boom. He’s like the team’s other mascot Blitz, but with attitude, a schmear of surfer, a bit of a hiphop context, and 10 percent more rastified.

Here he is.

Wait, no.

There it is. Seriously though, where was Boom when 8-year old me was suffering through the Rick Mirer era? Eight-year old me would have been all about Boom. Hot tip to the Seahawks: You don’t need to waste a mascot introduction on a season when everyone is already watching the games. Leave some rounds in the chamber.

A “Whose Haus” Update

While Seahawks punter Jon Ryan was arguably the team’s MVP on Sunday, firing off an array of booming punts including a gasp-inducing 79-yard free kick, Seahawks kicker and Dan Savage crushee Steven Hauschka had an up-and-down day, with two made field goals paired with what proved to be a crucial miss. But then, in overtime, he did this.

That’s right, Hauschka was planking during overtime of the biggest NFL game of the year. Look at that form! As Phil Simms would say, “that’s some, uh, ground roll from the punt man there!” Steven Hauschka is a Middlebury alumnus who does yoga and wins Super Bowls. Whose Haus is CenturyLink Field? That’s right: It’s Chka’s Haus.

The Seahawks now head into their bye week 2-1, a game ahead of the San Francisco 49ers, having survived an opening to the season featuring three play-off teams with Hall of Fame quarterbacks at the helm. After the bye is a Monday nighter at Washington, so I recommend spending these precious free Sundays reinvestigating your personal notions of morality so that you can come back to the Seahawks with renewed ambivalence when they go up against a team named after a racial slur.