Seahawks’ Doug Baldwin, Tom Cable have emotional moment on sidelines
Oct 22, 2017, 6:44 PM | Updated: 10:51 pm
(AP)
EAST RUTHERFORD, N.J. – It was more than a nudge, but definitely short of being a full-fledged shove.
And however you describe the way in which Doug Baldwin interrupted offensive line coach Tom Cable with a one-armed push on the Seahawks’ sideline, there’s no denying that it ended up moving Seattle in the right direction as an emotional moment that helped jump-start this undeniably emotional team.
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“Honestly, I wasn’t even going at Cable,” Baldwin said. “It was just in that moment, I needed the players to take accountability for what we were doing. That’s how I felt.”
He certainly wasn’t alone. The Seahawks were behind 7-0 when Seattle’s offense returned to the sideline with just over 5 minutes remaining in the first half. They had dropped a touchdown pass, been flagged for seven penalties and ran nine plays from at or inside the Giants’ 10-yard line without scoring a single point.
As Seattle came to the sideline, coach Pete Carroll gathered the entire offense and prepared Cable to talk to the players. However, quarterback Russell Wilson was already speaking, according to Carroll.
“Russ was ahead of us by a step,” Carroll said. “Russ and Doug, and he just tried to hold him off because he wanted Russ to have his chance right there.
“No big deal.”
Well, it became a bigger deal because when CBS returned from the commercial break, it showed the footage of Baldwin reaching out and pushing Cable. First Cable, and then Carroll, reached out to calm Baldwin.
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“I lost my cool,” Baldwin said. “It’s 100 percent my fault. At that moment, I was really frustrated with the team as a whole, offense as a whole. Not the coaching staff, the players.”
That’s why Baldwin wanted Wilson to continue talking.
“We weren’t executing as players,” Baldwin said. “And to me, there’s nothing a coach can say. We have to take accountability for that so I got a little passionate about it.”
A little too passionate, evidently.
“You all know, I love Cable to death,” Baldwin said. “Me and Cable have one of the best relationships from coach to player. I already apologized to him. He knows how I am. It’s just at that moment, the players needed to realize it’s the players, it’s not the coaches.”
And it was the players who turned things around, outscoring the Giants 24-0 from that moment on. Seattle finished the game with more than twice as many yards as New York and Wilson threw a touchdown pass to three different players in the second half.
And just like that, a sideline incident that would have been characterized as an embodiment of the dysfunction on Seattle’s offense instead became a reason for the turnaround.
“The cool thing was that Doug was trying to make sure that Russ had his chance to rally the guys,” Carroll said. “Because he was fired up and he wanted to go. They believe in what Russ was going to say and they wanted to hear what he had to say, and that was pretty apparent.”
A little too apparent, in fact.