How the Seahawks won Super Bowl LX: Inside a championship night

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Before Sunday night, Kenneth Walker Jr. had never seen his namesake play a professional football game in person. Sixty-one games across a four-year career for Walker III, but never one with pops in the building.

He doesn’t like crowds, so stadiums aren’t his thing. Don’t confuse that for not supporting his son, though. He was there by his son’s bedside at Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital when blood clots threatened Walker III’s life and football career as a high schooler. He regularly makes trips to Seattle for home games, and he watches all of them. Just not from the stands.

Last month, though, Walker III began interviewing for a new agent as he prepared to potentially become an unrestricted free agent for the first time in his career. He met longtime NFL agent David Canter, who heads Aura Sports Group. Canter says that within his pitch to the Walkers was the promise that ‘The Third’ would be able to be mentally free and play at his highest level because his agency would handle everything outside of the white lines.

“I laid out the next month,” Canter tells me. “I said you will dominate this month like no back has and the Seahawks will ride you and the defense to the Super Bowl where you’ll win MVP.“

And to his father, Canter said: “It’ll be something you won’t want to miss.”

Walker III rushed 27 times for 135 yards and became the first running back to win Super Bowl MVP this millennium Sunday night in Santa Clara as the Seattle Seahawks trounced the New England Patriots, 29-13. It was one of so many prophecies fulfilled in a magical season that gave the franchise its second Lombardi Trophy.

How could the Patriots win this game? Mike Vrabel would play a smart, tight contest, which he did for just more than three quarters even if the 12-0 Seahawks lead felt insurmountable. New England would have to make Sam Darnold make mistakes — plural — in order to win, and old history rather than recent play was the only reason to believe those errors would come.

Darnold, on his fifth team at just 28 years old, had to deal with a “seeing ghosts” narrative for the better part of a decade because audio that should have never aired did. He dealt with the meat grinder of New York, the embarrassments that followed in Carolina, a backup role in San Francisco and one season in Minnesota that nearly changed his entire career until the last two games.

If you were looking for New England to win, you were waiting for the implosion. And then he turned in a clean one-touchdown, one-sack, zero-interception performance in Levi’s Stadium that made him turnover-free for the entire postseason.

And if you were looking for any “told you so” moment from Darnold after the game, you’d be equally disappointed. All week, all postseason long he has been asked about the past, the critics and the doubters. The former No. 3 overall pick kept saying he took things one day at a time, expressing only gratitude for his journey.

“Everyone’s made a narrative of this guy,” said head coach Mike Macdonald, who spent more time than ever these past two weeks in interviews with the quarterback. “They have tried to put a story and a label on who he is as a person, who he is as a quarterback. He does not care. He is the same guy every day since he showed up. He’s so steadfast. He’s a great teammate. His teammates love him.

“All he has done since he’s walked in the door has just been a tremendous player on our football team and a tremendous leader who is the same guy every day. And that’s who he is. And that’s how we need to talk about him moving forward.”

Hoping for Darnold to make errors isn’t a strategy, but New England believed it could force them by getting great coverage from Christian Gonzalez on Jaxon Smith-Njigba and protecting the edges in the run game to disallow explosive runs. Gonzalez did his part, allowing just one catch for 16 yards when matched up against the Offensive Player of the Year. The rest of the defense when it came to Walker? Not so much.

No one was better at cleaning up their mistakes in the run game than New England entering the game. But Walker forced nine missed tackles, giving him 79 yards after the would-be tackle. He did his most damage when he got on the edge, getting 114 of his yards on 21 carries outside the tackles. Macdonald calls it the “softening process” as Walker built up throughout the game to break through against the Pats defense.

When the Patriots say after the game that nothing the Seahawks offense did surprised them, they’re telling the truth. They just weren’t prepared for the jab steps Walker put on them.

The Seahawks’ path to victory was easier to conceive. Seattle allowed the fewest points in the entire league thanks in overwhelmingly large part to its ability to effectively rush the passer with just four. Before even getting into disguises, leverages or coverages, the simple math of it gives the Seahawks seven players to cover five eligible pass-catchers.

One of Seattle’s greatest strengths was going up against the Patriots’ greatest weakness. One Seahawks player told me the team didn’t fear New England because they didn’t possess the pass catchers like the Rams, the only team this player thought matched up well against them. Without those guys on the outside, and with those guys on the inside, this player believed it would be quick work for Seattle.

The 14 pressures given up by Patriots left tackle Will Campbell made him decline multiple opportunities to speak with the media. Those pressures, along with his poor play all postseason, will be the narrative that follows him into next season. The Patriots knew he didn’t have long arms when they drafted him fourth overall as the No. 1 offensive tackle selected, but he would make up for that with his technique.

That technique gave way to the Chargers pass rush, and then the Texans, and then the Broncos. It crumbled against the Seahawks in such a way that New England will have to consider ahead of free agency whether it gets in the market for a left tackle and slide Campbell inside to guard, or if a healthy offseason and months of fundamentals work will do the trick (the Patriots will choose the latter). 

“I think before the game we saw throughout the playoffs that they played some great defenses in Houston and Denver and those guys were getting after the quarterback,” All-Pro defensive lineman Leonard Williams said. “We realized that was something that we were going to have to do to win this game.

“Quarterbacks are the No. 1 player to turn the ball over. If you can get to the quarterback, a lot of good things are going to happen in our favor.”

By the end of the game just about every Seahawks defender had their own scalp. The selfless defense lived up to its billing, making it nearly impossible for voters to choose one of them for MVP.

Nine Seattle defenders had either a sack, quarterback hit, interception, pass deflection, forced fumble or fumble recovery. None had a better day in the stat book than Derick Hall, who recorded two sacks in the game after having just two sacks all season long. Hall added a forced fumble in his career night that he wound up celebrating with his mother on the field afterward.

When he was born at 23½ weeks, he weighed less than three pounds, had a brain bleed and had no heartbeat. The odds were against him living beyond a few hours, much less ever living a normal life. Much less dominating in the Super Bowl 24 years later.

As she cried hugging him on the field, he told her: “Mom, this moment is for you.”

John Schneider would be lying if he said he expected this Super Bowl to happen so quickly. He admits that in the smoke-filled locker room an hour and a half after his second championship as a GM.

It was just more than two years ago the Seahawks let Pete Carroll walk and gave the entire football operations reins to Schneider.

He is known to zig when others zag. He confuses the hell out of anyone attempting to do a seven-round mock draft of his team (good call on taking Kenneth Walker III in the second round when he had Chris Carson and Rashaad Penny, by the way). When it came time to hire a new head coach, he actively rooted for the Kansas City Chiefs in the AFC title game so he could speak more quickly with the Ravens defensive coordinator.

The interview with Macdonald two years ago made Schneider’s choice obvious. But as obvious as it was to him then — and as obvious as it is to anyone watching the 60th edition of this wonderful game — eschewing the offensive-play-caller-at-head-coach route that had dominated the league in years prior for a 36-year-old defensive-minded head coach who never played college or pro ball was risky.

What he saw in Macdonald was a coach who knew both sides of the ball incredibly well, who was a clear and smart thinker without a whiff of fraudulence. Macdonald is a true football obsessive who constantly overthinks and overstrategizes. That was a perfect match for a kindred spirit in Schneider, who famously sweats through dress shirts at room temperature.

Before this year, the Seahawks had gone to the playoffs just once in the previous four years and had not won a playoff game since 2019. The perennial title contenders had weakened significantly, and stress built on this football architect.

“I just feel blessed that (team owner) Jody (Allen) hung in there with us and trusted us to do our jobs in the manner we wanted to do it, and lead the way we want to lead and operate the way we want to operate,” a clear-eyed Schneider said after the game, full of humility.

Schneider now has two championships done in two different ways, equaled only by Philadelphia’s Howie Roseman among his contemporaries. The Seahawks of the 2010s were dominant but only went to two NFC title games as the Legion of Boom dissipated in the middle part of the decade.

Now Schneider has a head coach who could outlast Carroll in Seattle. He has a quarterback who is under contract for at least the next two years if he doesn’t decide to break precedent and extend him earlier. If he and Walker III can’t agree on the massive contract extension Walker just earned the past few weeks, he can issue the franchise tag at around $14 million and still have more than $70 million in cap space to play with.

Hours after the party had moved from the Levi’s Stadium locker room to the San Jose Convention Center, an executive shook my hand, pulled me closer to shout over the deafening music and said: “This is more sustainable.”

Rumor has it that the Seahawks had tried to book Post Malone for their postgame Super Bowl party but that, for whatever reasons, he opted for the Patriots.

A dozen years ago the Seahawks had Macklemore perform after their thrashing of the Broncos. No one seemed to care a year later when Snoop Dogg had the honors after the heartbreaking loss to the Patriots.

The 12s count Dave Matthews as one of their own, but his catalog doesn’t exactly align with post-championship vibes. He walked through the adjacent San Jose Hilton having clearly enjoyed his team’s victory and subsequent celebration before buying one bottle of brown liquor from the store. Excuse me, please, one more drink.

The Seahawks went with Ludacris, a veteran of these Super Bowl parties. For more than an hour he played his hits, opening appropriately with “Number One Spot.” Throughout his hour-plus-long set he reminded the crowd just how many bangers he’s made over his quarter century in the business.

You can’t help but be transported back to those younger years when you first heard the hits like “Money Maker,” how you got a geography lesson through “Area Codes,” how you learned a new way to refer to a Holiday Inn or just how damn catchy it can be to keep saying “Yeah!”

Leonard Williams, all 6-foot-5 of him, stood in the crowd dressed in all black. For a 31-year-old from California who went to high school in Florida, Ludacris had to be one of the main artists on the soundtrack to his childhood. And I couldn’t help but think back to what Williams had said just three hours earlier as he tried to describe what winning the Super Bowl meant to him in that exact moment.

“The best way I can describe it is, I’ve heard when you have a near-death experience you kind of have this reel of memories happening all at once,” Williams said. “And that pretty much is what it feels like right now.

“I have this highlight reel of all these memories from high school and college, all the coaches I’ve had, the trade and injuries and hardships I’ve been through. All for this one moment.”

When you win the Super Bowl, there’s so much beauty in the world.