EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. — In 2006, the late Dennis Green, then the Cardinals' head coach, famously proclaimed, "They are who we thought they were," after his team blew a 20-point halftime lead against the Bears en route to a 24-23 defeat.
On Sunday, cornerback Richard Sherman proclaimed that the Seahawks "are who we think we are."
Seattle is an imperfect team that stumbled into a 7-3 halftime deficit against the one-win Giants on Sunday. In the second half, the Seahawks found their land-legs and scored three offensive touchdowns to cruise past New York, 24-7.
Seattle has aspirations of making the playoffs for a sixth consecutive season and winning the NFC West for the fourth time in five years. To become that team, the Seahawks will have to look more like the team that played the second half Sunday and helped Seattle improve to 4-2, keeping place with the first-place Rams in the division.
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"We're going against the Texans (next week), and we're not looking at the Rams," said defensive end Michael Bennett. "The Rams are playing somebody else next week, so we’re just looking forward to playing the Texans.
"That’s just the fans. Fans always make different things that they see; that they talk about. Obviously the media makes up stuff so y'all can have something to talk about."
The Rams, with a star running back in Todd Gurley and an up-and-coming quarterback in Jared Goff, present the biggest challenge in the Seahawks' divisional ecosystem. But this is a script with which the Seahawks are familiar; one they're not reading into as the NFL calendar rolls into Week 8.
"We never concern ourselves with other teams," Sherman said. "We concern ourselves with our building and what we do.
"We just played the Rams two weeks ago, so we'll leave that up to you guys."
(The Seahawks won that game, 16-10.)
Instead, Seattle is more focused on its biggest impediment to success: itself.
On Sunday in New Jersey, dropped passes, costly penalties and a shoved coach highlighted an ugly first half against a bottom-dwelling Giants team. The Seahawks led in time of possession 20:38 to 9:22, but ownership of the ball did not equal ownership of the scoreboard. Drives of 16 plays (89 yards) and 11 plays (33 yards) each ended in the Seahawks coming up pointless. On the former, Seattle faced a third-and-goal from the Giants' five before five straight incomplete passes. The drive was punctuated — in Comic Sans — by a Jimmy Graham dropped touchdown.
"It's always frustrating," Paul Richardson said. "We’re on offense; we want to score points and we want to help the defense win. When we're not doing that we’re not helping the team."
The next Seahawks drive was much shorter but significantly more costly. It lasted one play, when Russell Wilson handed the ball to Thomas Rawls, who tried to bounce the play to the outside before having the ball stripped by the Giants' Avery Moss, recovered and returned by safety Landon Collins to the Seahawks' 17 yard line. Two plays later, Eli Manning hooked up with Evan Engram to give the Giants a 7-0 lead.
"One bad series, and a play we shouldn't have gave up," Sherman said.
The 11-play drive came next, when Graham made another costly mistake. With the ball just inside the Giants' half of the field, Wilson rolled to his left, saw Graham all alone down the sideline and threw the ball. But the 6-7 tight end looked at the finish line before beginning the race. He dropped the pass on a drive that ultimately ended in a punt.
The Seahawks' offense has been anemic for large swaths of the season, and when Seattle flocked to the sideline following its latest disappointing sequence, wide receiver Doug Baldwin shoved offensive line coach Tom Cable, leaving the world to wonder whether the Seahawks were imploding amid an aloof two quarters.
"It comes with the territory," Sherman said of Baldwin's incident. "In the outside world it's kind of misunderstood. They think about it as disrespect, but in the locker room, and in an environment like this, we look at each other as peers — coaches and players — because they’re dependent on us like we’re dependent on them and their play calling."
But Baldwin lamented his actions postgame. He said he was immediately apologetic to Cable, and he wanted only to get the message across to his teammates on offense that the onus was on them to step up.
"To me, there’s nothing a coach can say: We have to take accountability, so I got a little passionate about it," Baldwin said. "Honestly, I wasn't even going at Cable, it was just in that moment, I needed the players to take accountability for what we were doing."
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Baldwin said he was attempting to let Wilson address the offense.
"I was able to say that message in a less antagonistic way at halftime to the offense," Baldwin said. "All of us including myself, we were talking to the offense in a calm manner, and letting them realize, we’re good; we’re ‘OK.’ Yeah, we haven’t played like we’re capable of, but it’s still a close game."
It was a microcosm for the Seahawks' season. Seattle has made its fair share (and then some) of offensive blunders, showing its warts on that side of the ball. But approaching the halfway mark of the season, Seattle is as much alive in the NFC as any other team.
It's why questions asked of them about the Rams, or about the rest of the conference, are answered sarcastically or with clichés.
"No; I think we’re going to lose," Bennett said of the division race. "We don't want to look too far ahead. We just want to take it week-by-week."
Seattle knows it has to become a better team for it to reach its ultimate goals. Luckily, through seven weeks, while its offense has attempted to find its rhythm, the defense has steered the ship, and the NFC as a whole has been "meh."
"(Coach Pete Carroll) has done that since I've been here," Baldwin said. "He’s always talked about, you don't win the game in the first quarter, or the second, or the third, you win it in the fourth. The sentiment that he's trying to demonstrate there is that it is a process.
"It doesn’t matter how crappy you play in the first half, you have an opportunity to still win the game in the second half. Fortunately we’ve got one of the best defenses in the NFL right now that keeps us in the game. All we have to do is continue to progress."
The Seahawks sleep-walked through the first half of the game on offense Sunday, before Baldwin beat Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie off the line of scrimmage and caught a perfectly-weighted Wilson pass for a 22-yard touchdown.
"Cover zero, again, defenses, figure it out," Baldwin said with a smirk. "You guys still haven’t figured it out. In the red zone, it’s a look that we like to go against."
And in short order, Seattle's offense figured it out. Wilson connected with Richardson on a trick play that resulted in a 38-yard score. With the game in hand, Wilson finally connected with Graham, who held on for the catch, and a touchdown to put Seattle up 24-7.
"Nothing much was said at halftime, just we know we’re a better team than that," Sherman said. "Just poor execution, a few overthrows, a few missed blocks, and a few drops."
Because the Seahawks know as well as anyone that the biggest threat to someone poking a hole in their nest isn't their newest Hollywood co-stars, but the nest-dwellers themselves. That was the marching order a frustrated Baldwin was trying to convey.
"The basic sentiment was, ‘What are we doing?’" Baldwin said. "We have all the talent in the world, we have everything we need right here, it’s not the play calling, it’s not the Xs and Os, it’s not the other team, it’s us."
The Seahawks have long sat on the throne of the NFC West. In a George R.R. Martin-ian sense, the lion doesn't concern itself with the opinions of sheep.
"When I was young, when I was rookie, it was (San Francisco)," Sherman said. "San Francisco was the big, bad wolf, and Seattle was the up-and-comer. And then the next year, it’s us. And then the next year, you’re saying Arizona is better is than us. Now it's the Rams.
"It’s always somebody new, so we don’t worry about things like that."