Seahawks get run over by Panthers as playoff chances take big hit

When push came to shove Sunday, it was the Seahawks who got both pushed and shoved.

With the game – and maybe, in some respects, the season – on the line in the fourth quarter Sunday at Lumen Field against a Carolina team playing with an interim coach, it was the Panthers who ran all over the Seahawks.

Two punishing Carolina drives in the final 12:23 salted away a 30-24 victory in which the Seahawks never led. The loss severely damages Seattle’s postseason hopes.

“When it came down to it in the fourth quarter, we didn’t have what we needed to have to get it done,” coach Pete Carroll said.

And now the Seahawks find their backs against the wall – as opposed to their backs simply being on the ground, as the defense’s seemed to be for most of Sunday’s game – to make something of a season that once seemed so promising.

The loss was the third in the past four games to turn a 6-3 record when the team left for Munich to 7-6 and two games behind the 49ers in the NFC West standings. The Seahawks now have to defeat the 49ers on Thursday night at Lumen for any chance to win the division.

The Seahawks also fell to the eighth spot in the seven-team NFC playoff ladder, and with games against the 49ers and Chiefs the next two weeks – hot take, they won’t be favored in either – have little if any margin for error left.

But most frustrating for the Seahawks is that despite falling in a 17-0 hole, due in part to maybe Geno Smith’s worst pass of the season on an interception on the first play that led to a Carolina touchdown, the Seahawks entered the fourth quarter down 20-17, and the game was there for the taking.

Instead, it was a Carolina team – which had fired coach Matt Rhule and appeared to be playing out the string, though is suddenly a game back of the lead in the bizarre NFC South division – that did the taking.

First, the Panthers forced a Seattle punt, then took over at their 26-yard line with 12:23 left.

From there the Panthers pounded the ball down Seattle’s throat with a 10-play drive that included just two passes, one a go-for-the-jugular flea-flicker that fell incomplete, to move methodically down the field.

Carolina had runs of 11, 6, 2, 12, 16, 6, 7 and then 8 yards on a touchdown by Raheem Blackshear with 6:57 left that put Carolina up 27-17.

The Panthers then forced another punt, got the ball at their 35 with 6:17 left and moved 44 yards in nine plays – all runs – for a field goal with 1:56 left that ended it.

In all, Carolina had 101 yards on 17 rushes in the fourth quarter, 5.9 per attempt in finishing with 223 on 46 attempts overall. That Seattle played the second half without both starting linemen Al Woods and Shelby Harris surely took a toll. But players said it was more than that.

“It was super frustrating,” safety Ryan Neal said of Carolina’s fourth-quarter success. “Unbelievable. It makes you sick in the stomach. Stuff like that, I’m not going to sleep on that tonight, because that just irritates my soul. When you come into the game knowing that’s how they’re going to play, you just have to strap up and be ready to go four quarters. It’s going to be a four-quarter game, and teams like that, that’s how they like to play. We have to dig deep, we have to look within, and we got to respond.”

Indeed, the Seahawks knew what was coming.

Carolina has become a run-heavy team under interim coach Steve Wilks, having rushed for 169 or more in four of their previous six games. And the Seahawks have had – to put it politely – issues defending the run. So there was no secret about anything.

“They ran their game,” Carroll said. “That’s their running game. We were trying to knock them back, and we couldn’t get it done. We tried everything that we had to get it stopped, and we were not able to stop them.”

Or as safety Quandre Diggs said: “I mean, they ran the same play over and over and over. At some point you have to take a stand and know that, ‘I’m going to take my shot here.’ That’s what it has to be. Like I said, it’s tough to see. It’s not that guys don’t want to. We just have to do it consistently.”

Indeed, Seattle – which entered the game 31st in the NFL in run defense – has allowed an average of 209.5 rushing yards in the past four games. That four-game stretch of solid run defense that got Seattle to 6-3 seems as distant as the sun did Sunday when this game mercifully ended.

And when it was over, the Seahawks had the dubious distinction of having gone 0-4 against an NFC South that doesn’t have a team with a winning record. The South’s four wins against Seattle account for 20% of the division’s 20 total wins.

So what is it, veteran Bruce Irvin (the only remaining link to the Legion of Boom glory days)?

“It’s not communication,” he said. “It’s not anything. It’s just man on man. You have to beat your man, get off the block and make the tackle. That’s what it comes down to. It’s a mentality. I don’t care about play calls or anything. At the end of the day, it’s man on man. You have to whoop your man in front of you and make the tackle. That’s what it comes down to.”

And linebacker Jordyn Brooks said the Seahawks can expect to see the same thing from the final four teams they play until they show there’s any reason to change.

“We brought this on ourselves, where every team is going to think that they can run the ball 40 times,” Brooks said. “For 40 plays we need to play hard. Once we get tired, we give in. That’s when stuff gets out. That’s when the ball starts to leak, and we’ve got to make tackles. It’s a combination of all those things.”

It was a bad mix on a day the Seahawks had no running game of their own to take the pressure of Smith and the passing game – just 46 yards on 14 carries while playing without Kenneth Walker III and DeeJay Dallas.

And when Smith threw an early bad pass for one pick, and then threw another interception on a play he thought the Panthers had jumped offsides and had given him a free play, the Seahawks found themselves in a hole the offense couldn’t dig out of. Not when the Panthers held the ball for 39 minutes and 16 seconds.

“They came in, they were tougher than us,” Smith said. “They played harder. They played to win, and they got it done. We’ve got to learn from these things.”

Time, though, is running out to get that done.