Marshawn Lynch, who struggled to crack depth charts with the Buffalo Bills and Seattle Seahawks, pulled off one of the most improbable runs in NFL Playoff history while putting the Seahawks ahead of the defending Super Bowl champion New Orleans Saints for good, 41-37. Lynch’s 67-yard run, in which he threw off more defenders than he seemed to in the year to date, was the culmination of a strange win for the Seahawks, who finished the regular season as NFC champions with a 7-9 record and an ugly win over the St. Louis Rams.
As a long-time Marshawn Lynch skeptic I still can’t quite rationalize what happened. The final tackle Lynch breaks looks like someone running into an electric fence, or Professor Quirrell trying to touch Harry Potter and having his hands melt. Lynch, who’s struggled mightily the last two years and seemed strangely sluggish at times, was remarkable. If conditions were already weird enough for the Seahawks to beat the Saints, I guess it might as well have come on a Lynch touchdown sprint.
Shaky video evidence of Lynch’s inexplicable run available here: