By Kyle Feldscher, CNN
San Francisco (CNN) — It’s one of the most memorable plays in Super Bowl history. It remains one of the most baffling decisions in the history of professional football. And its ramifications are still being felt 11 years later as the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots face off in Super Bowl LX.
There were 27 seconds left in Super Bowl XLIX and the Seahawks trailed by four to Tom Brady’s Patriots. Seattle needed one single yard to clinch its second-straight Super Bowl and usher in a new dynasty in the Pacific Northwest. In the backfield was one of the best running backs in the league, a destroyer named Marshawn Lynch.
Everybody in Glendale, Arizona, and around the world thought the ball was going to be in Lynch’s hands to get that final yard and clinch the game. Everybody was wrong.
“When I got in the game, I’m like, ‘Man, what can I do?’ I really can’t do nothing. They run the ball, I’m not gonna make that tackle, right? I’m not gonna make that tackle. I – excuse my language – I’m damn near wanting to leave from the cornerback position and go in the box and play linebacker, yeah?” former Patriot cornerback Malcolm Butler told CNN Sports on Thursday. “But I said, I’m just gonna do my job. And I went against the odds. They did too.”
What would happen next – Russell Wilson taking the snap, turning to Ricardo Lockette and firing a pass only for Butler to get there first and intercept the ball – changing the two franchises in ways that will last for the rest of their histories.
That win in February 2015 broke a 10-year Super Bowl drought for the Patriots and sent Brady and Bill Belichick into a second dynasty, cementing their places as the greatest quarterback and head coach of all time. Seeds sown during that incredible run – three more Super Bowls appearances, two of them resulting in championships, in the next five years – grew into a divorce that forced New England’s first wholesale rebuild in a generation.
For the Seahawks, it represented the moment the waters began to recede from the franchise’s golden era.
Lynch believes the Legion of Boom defense combined with himself, Wilson and a host of cornerstone receivers could have gone on to win at least one more Super Bowl if not more. The dynasty of the 2010s could have been blue-and-green rather than red-white-and-blue. Instead what followed was the slow disintegration of a championship core, an inability to reclimb the mountain and the slow, depressing slide into lamenting what could have been.
And it all started with one baffling choice.
Breaking Beast Mode
When he heard the play call in the huddle, Lynch was so stunned that he couldn’t really process what had just happened.
“If you go back and you look at the play, … I’m processing ,I’m lined up on the wrong side. I line up on the wrong side,” Lynch told Shannon Sharpe on the Club Shay Shay podcast in in 2023.
“I’m bouncing from back and forth behind (Wilson) like, oh s**t. By the time it sat in like, ‘M**********r, what did you just call?,’ you just hear all the cheering from the other sideline.”
Lynch said everyone in the huddle aside from Wilson was rocked by the decision to pass instead of run.
For a split second, it looked like Lockette might make the play. He had a lane to run through once the ball got to him. Butler simply beat him to the ball.
“It didn’t work out right. Guy made a move like he was gonna do something, and I said, ‘I’m gonna do something too.’ And just believing in getting another opportunity, and you might get a small opportunity,” Butler said, describing his mindset as the ball was snapped. “Like that game was supposed to have been over, but it wasn’t. But, like, that’s the point of taking advantage of these small opportunities and big opportunities when it when they present themselves.”