NFL Dos and Don'ts: Seattle Seahawks

As we prepare for another year of NFL football, let's take a look back at the highs and lows from 2014 for each team. Welcome to NFL Dos and Don'ts. If you missed one, you can read all our recaps right here.

Do

Ah, the Seattle Seahawks. The 2014 Also Rans. The Dewey Defeats Truman of the Super Bowl. The midwife who coaxed this picture from satan's womb:

Way to go, guys. Way to fucking go. But we'll get to all that later. For now, we're going to talk about the things that don't make you want to fix one end of an indestructible tether to Everest and the other to a rocket headed for a black hole. For that, we turn to Marshawn Lynch.

There are a ton of reasons to love Marshawn Lynch and make him Seattle's Do: the bruising running style, his long-term relationship with tiny fruit-pellet candy, his trolling of traditional sports media. What does it for me, though, is this GIF, in which he is just a background extra.

I feel like this is the essence of Marshawn. Kam Chancellor put the final nail in Carolina's playoff coffin and sealed a trip to the NFC Championship with a 90-yard interception return for a touchdown in the waning minutes of the game. And there was Marshawn along the sideline, left hand raised, right hand tastefully gripping his balls, with an overall presence that says, "That's what's up." Pride in winning. Pride in another teammate's play. Pride in team, period. The excitement over another possible Super Bowl appearance, but also the confidence to act like you've been there before. That is what's up.

Before we get to all the sadness, let's trot out a brief Honorable Mention Do from the Super Bowl. Before the game went to shit for Seattle, they enjoyed a comfortable lead in the third quarter, and Byron Maxwell had a little fun at the Patriots expense. After an incompletion, he walked over and checked the air pressure on the ball. Times were better then.

Don't

I'm not going to sit here and say that choosing to throw a pass on the goal line instead of feeding it to Marshawn Lynch in the final seconds of a Super Bowl everyone in the world thought you were going to win—especially after Jermaine Kearse's ridiculous David Tyree-esque catch—is an automatic Don't. I'm not a coach, and questioning play-calling is a pointless exercise to begin with buuuuuuuuut, goddammit why didn't you just give it to Marshawn?

The amount of things that had to go right (or wrong, depending on your point of view) on this play is exactly why questioning a play call is a waste of time. Wilson had to throw it slightly high. Ricardo Lockette, Malcolm Butler, and the ball all had to arrive at the same point at the same time. Butler had to have seen and practiced that exact play several times to recognize it, and, thanks to the Pats Director of Spygate Operations Ernie Adams, he did. All of these things had to happen and Butler had to make the catch and hang onto the ball. Still. Guuuhhhhhhh.

Maybe they were cosmically asking for this kind of heartbreak after a very dumb attempt at social media #synergy. One day after a positively bonkers comeback win over the Packers in the NFC Championship, the Seahawks Twitter account made a ham-fisted attempt to celebrate Martin Luther King Day and their own improbably victory. If you are a team, or a brand, or another highly visible person or thing with a Twitter account, you Don't want to see screencapped images of your tweet. Because that means you did something stupid, people told you that you did something stupid, and then you deleted the tweet.

Nothing says fighting for racial equality quite like Russell Wilson crying after a football game. We shall overcome this social media faux pas.