Seahawks rely on offense to beat Steelers

SEATTLE — Ladies and gentlemen, like Alice and her amazing adventures in Wonderland, we have stepped through the looking glass. Black is white, up is down, and the Seattle Seahawks are leaning on their offense.

Say what?

For nearly four years the Seahawks have taken the field every Sunday with their identity firmly established: This is the team that wins with its defense. The team that led the NFL in both fewest yards and fewest points allowed in each of the past two seasons. The team with the secondary with the flashy nickname. When the game is on the line, it’s the defense that steals into a phone booth, does a quick costume change and emerges with a big red “S” on its chest.

So it was an unfamiliar feeling Sunday afternoon at CenturyLink Field when it was Seattle’s offense that bailed out the defense for a change, with Russell Wilson and company leading the charge in the Seahawks’ 39-30 victory over the Pittsburgh Steelers.

“We expect our defense to shut everybody out, so you never go into a game thinking, ‘OK, we’re going to have to score this many points,’” said Seattle receiver Doug Baldwin, who had a career day with six catches for 145 yards and three touchdowns. “We knew we just needed to take advantage of our opportunities when we were given them. We were able to do that efficiently today.”

Over the past three-plus seasons Seattle’s defense has regularly bailed out the offense when the Seahawks had trouble moving the ball. Just this season there’s the example of the Detroit Lions game, when strong safety Kam Chancellor needed to force a miracle fumble at the goal line in order to preserve Seattle’s 13-10 victory. Or against the Dallas Cowboys, when the offense struggled to move the ball effectively either on the ground or in the air, but the defense kept the Cowboys out of the end zone from start to finish in a 13-12 win.

But the other way around? It just hasn’t happened. Russell Wilson took over as Seattle’s quarterback at the beginning of the 2012 season. Since then the Seahawks hadn’t won a game in which the opposition scored more than 24 points.

Until now.

“I know that’s not a stat that sticks out on weekly basis, but it’s something that I’ve paid attention to and that we as an offense have paid attention to,” Baldwin said about the 24-point threshold. “We wanted to do better in those situations. We didn’t want to just lean on our defense all the time. So to me it means a lot.”

And it meant everything to the Seahawks on Sunday. Seattle’s defense was anything but its usual dominating self as Pittsburgh’s quarterbacks threw the ball from CenturyLink all the way to Xfinity Arena in downtown Everett. Ben Roethlisberger and Landry Jones combined for 480 yards passing, which was the second-most Seattle allowed in a game franchise history — eclipsed only by the 494 yards the Air Coryell San Diego Chargers dropped on the Seahawks in 1985. Those are the type of numbers that make the Legion of Boom go bust.

But on this occasion the roles were reversed, with the offense picking up the defense when the defense seemed down and out.

Wilson was imperious. Seattle’s quarterback woke up Sunday morning feeling unwell, requiring three IVs while he was on the sidelines. He began the game looking like someone who had trouble rolling out of bed, completing just one of his first five passes for 11 yards.

After that? Wilson was 20-for-25 for 334 yards and five touchdowns. His 345 total passing yards and five TDs were both career highs.

“That’s big for our offense to put some points on the board and give us a little break, a little breather,” Chancellor said.

“The offense made their plays,” Chancellor added. “Russell had a great game back there, (running back Thomas Rawls), everybody over there, man. Everybody over there is capable of making plays and they did it when they had their chances to. It just shows the true definition of team ball.

“You can’t do it individually, you can’t do it by yourself.”

Too often this season Seattle’s defense has been asked to do just that, and more often than the past three seasons the defense has not been up to the task. So seeing the offense step up and win the game was a welcome sight for the Seahawks, especially now that a playoff spot is back within their grasp. At 6-5 Seattle moved into the NFC’s final wild-card position, ahead of the Atlanta Falcons on a tiebreaker, and inexplicably it may actually fall to the offense rather than the defense to drag Seattle to the finish line.

“It was kind of an unorthodox way to play and win the football game, but that’s what we had to do today,” Seattle head coach Pete Carroll said.

“I think, as we continue to play football, we can count on to win games in tough situations in a number of different ways and all that,” Carroll added. “It gives us the chance and the hope that we can go get another one.”

Even if it’s the offense instead of the defense that needs to do the fetching.

Check out Nick Patterson’s Seattle Sidelines blog at http://www.heraldnet.com/seattlesidelines, and follow him on Twitter at @NickHPatterson.

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