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Seattle Seahawks

We’ll see what Hawks are made of

Marshawn Lynch had only 10 carries against the Cowboys. (Associated Press)
Dave Boling Tacoma News Tribune

SEATTLE – Simple game, football.

Your guys run over the other guys, you win.

They run over you, you lose.

Sometimes it comes down to those man-on-man challenges, and that’s the plain and primitive truth about the game.

And when it’s late in the game, and you can’t stop the opponent on a third-and-20 play, you lose.

And you deserve to.

Seahawks coach Pete Carroll pinpointed that obvious factor after the 30-23 loss to Dallas at CenturyLink Field on Sunday.

He wasn’t happy with the Seahawks’ fundamentals, he said. His team just didn’t block and tackle well enough.

True enough. Dallas rushed for 162 yards. Seattle rushed for 80.

And when the game was there to be won, linebacker Bruce Irvin had a shot at sacking Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo on a key third-down play, but Romo shook free to make the long completion.

These are the kind of losses the Seahawks have dealt to so many other teams over the last couple of seasons, when they came up with the key turnover, made the dramatic late play, or, throughout the course of the game, just dominated the lines of scrimmage.

Not on Sunday, when the 5-1 Cowboys nearly doubled the Seahawks’ yardage, 401-206.

Receiver Doug Baldwin captured the frustration of the Seahawks in the locker room, and was absolutely correct in his assessment that the problems were “all over the board.”

Asked of the content of heated talks on the sideline between players late in the game, including Baldwin with quarterback Russell Wilson, Baldwin fired the answer: “What do you think? We’re frustrated. The offense can’t move the ball. We’ve got too much talent over here not to be moving the ball.”

The culpability is widely shared, Baldwin said, and the corrections will have to be a “collaborative thing.”

“We just left so many plays out there on the field. … We’ve got to get better,” Baldwin said.

Safety Earl Thomas called it a “hard lesson.”

“We didn’t have the right mindset today,” Thomas said.

Mindset? “Right, we knew how they were going to attack us and we didn’t execute. We didn’t stop the run the way we always do. That was it.”

That wasn’t solely it, though.

The Seahawks have had spotty performances during their recent run of success. But so often, Wilson came up with some improbable play and scored the late touchdown that covered the game’s warts.

But Wilson, under pressure all day, was shown to be human. He completed half of his 28 passes for just 126 yards for a passer rating of 47.6 – his lowest since a 38.7 rating as a rookie against the 49ers.

The man needs help sometimes. It usually comes from Marshawn Lynch. He averaged 6.1 per carry on Sunday but had just 10 carries.

When you get only nine first downs in the game, there aren’t enough plays to go around. And Lynch got shorted. It’s the formula that led to the other loss, at San Diego.

At 3-2, the Seahawks are a game behind Arizona in the NFC West. They haven’t had to deal with this kind of frustration in quite a while. So this will be a test for the Seahawks.

Will sideline discussions get more heated? Will this team, remarkably cohesive on the way to last season’s Super Bowl title, start quibbling about who gets the ball, or who gets the blame?

Or, can they, as Thomas suggests, arrive at the proper mindset?

Last year’s group won a championship, in part because of its resilience and its attitude.

This season’s team now has the chance to show it has the same qualities.