How the most infamous play call in Super Bowl history set the Seahawks and Patriots on course for a rematch 11 years later

New England Patriots strong safety Malcolm Butler (21) intercepts a pass intended for Seattle Seahawks wide receiver Ricardo Lockette (83) during the second half of NFL Super Bowl XLIX football game, in February 2015, in Glendale, Arizona. (Kathy Willens/AP via CNN Newsource)

San Francisco — It’s one of the most memorable plays in Super Bowl history. It remains one of the most baffling decisions in the history of professional football. And its ramifications are still being felt 11 years later as the Seattle Seahawks and New England Patriots face off in Super Bowl LX.

There were 27 seconds left in Super Bowl XLIX and the Seahawks trailed by four to Tom Brady’s Patriots. Seattle needed one single yard to clinch its second-straight Super Bowl and usher in a new dynasty in the Pacific Northwest. In the backfield was one of the best running backs in the league, a destroyer named Marshawn Lynch.

Everybody in Glendale, Arizona, and around the world thought the ball was going to be in Lynch’s hands to get that final yard and clinch the game. Everybody was wrong.

“When I got in the game, I’m like, ‘Man, what can I do?’ I really can’t do nothing. They run the ball, I’m not gonna make that tackle, right? I’m not gonna make that tackle. I – excuse my language – I’m damn near wanting to leave from the cornerback position and go in the box and play linebacker, yeah?” former Patriot cornerback Malcolm Butler told CNN Sports on Thursday. “But I said, I’m just gonna do my job. And I went against the odds. They did too.”

What would happen next – Russell Wilson taking the snap, turning to Ricardo Lockette and firing a pass only for Butler to get there first and intercept the ball – changing the two franchises in ways that will last for the rest of their histories.

That win in February 2015 broke a 10-year Super Bowl drought for the Patriots and sent Brady and Bill Belichick into a second dynasty, cementing their places as the greatest quarterback and head coach of all time. Seeds sown during that incredible run – three more Super Bowls appearances, two of them resulting in championships, in the next five years – grew into a divorce that forced New England’s first wholesale rebuild in a generation.

For the Seahawks, it represented the moment the waters began to recede from the franchise’s golden era.

Lynch believes the Legion of Boom defense combined with himself, Wilson and a host of cornerstone receivers could have gone on to win at least one more Super Bowl if not more. The dynasty of the 2010s could have been blue-and-green rather than red-white-and-blue. Instead what followed was the slow disintegration of a championship core, an inability to reclimb the mountain and the slow, depressing slide into lamenting what could have been.

And it all started with one baffling choice.

Breaking Beast Mode

When he heard the play call in the huddle, Lynch was so stunned that he couldn’t really process what had just happened.

“If you go back and you look at the play, … I’m processing ,I’m lined up on the wrong side. I line up on the wrong side,” Lynch told Shannon Sharpe on the Club Shay Shay podcast in in 2023.

“I’m bouncing from back and forth behind (Wilson) like, oh s**t. By the time it sat in like, ‘M**********r, what did you just call?,’ you just hear all the cheering from the other sideline.”

Lynch said everyone in the huddle aside from Wilson was rocked by the decision to pass instead of run.

For a split second, it looked like Lockette might make the play. He had a lane to run through once the ball got to him. Butler simply beat him to the ball.

“It didn’t work out right. Guy made a move like he was gonna do something, and I said, ‘I’m gonna do something too.’ And just believing in getting another opportunity, and you might get a small opportunity,” Butler said, describing his mindset as the ball was snapped. “Like that game was supposed to have been over, but it wasn’t. But, like, that’s the point of taking advantage of these small opportunities and big opportunities when it when they present themselves.”

From the moment Butler hit the turf with the ball in his hands, everything changed for both franchises.

Lynch said his initial reaction was to walk off the field and laugh directly in head coach Pete Carroll’s face. The man known as Beast Mode didn’t stick around to watch the Patriots’ final plays – he went straight to the locker room. By the time the rest of his teammates were coming in from the field, he was headed back out to meet up with his family and friends.

Lynch would spend one more year in Seattle. He announced his retirement after the next season (it was short lived, he’d sit out a year and then return to the then-Oakland Raiders, his hometown team). The more time has gone by, the more it seems to hurt – the pain was still evident in his voice in that 2023 interview.

“You took a dream away. You took a moment away. You arguably, you take a dynasty away,” Lynch said to Sharpe. “I mean, because then you in position that, hey, we win two Super Bowls. Maybe I don’t want to be the highest paid corner or the highest paid safety or the highest paid receiver, nah, spread that cheese through the whole team so we can bring everybody back. And we could go try to do three.

“And we felt, let’s see what we could get out of it. So, I mean, you know, not only do you take away all that s**t, but you know, you put us in the history books as the dumbest call in football history. And then, I mean, you know, for my situation on the other end of it, it’s gonna be an everlasting question that I’m getting: Why?”

Lynch said in that interview he’s heard all the theories. That if he scored that touchdown, he’d have been Super Bowl MVP and Carroll didn’t want that or that the NFL didn’t want that. That it was better for the team or the league for Wilson to be the Super Bowl MVP. In private, he said he never got a straightforward explanation for why pass the ball instead of running it.

“Now that it’s been so much time in between, it probably wouldn’t even matter,” Lynch said.

Breaking the Seahawks

The Seahawks were never the same after that moment.

The swagger with which the 2013-14 and 2014-15 teams played could never be recaptured. It might be best expressed by the heartbreak and shock that crossed Richard Sherman’s face on the sideline after Butler’s interception, melting away the confidence that was there moments before.

What the play represented, in retrospect, was a conscious choice by the team’s front office: The Seahawks were Wilson’s team and they’d go as far as he’d take them.

They went to the divisional round a few times, but no further.

Wilson was the golden child when he first arrived in Seattle but as the 2010s turned toward the 2020s, the relationship he had with his organization, his fan base and his teammates soured. At a live taping of Lynch’s podcast last month, several former Seahawks who played with Wilson were asked about their relationship with their former quarterback.

The crowd booed the mention of Wilson’s name. The group of Wilson’s former teammates demurred. No one wanted to speak on how things fell apart.

It was a long, slow decline. After putting the team in Wilson’s hands on the field, the relationship between the quarterback, his coach and the front office deteriorated – first slowly, then all at once. There had been rumblings of discontent between the star and the front office for years when, in early 2021, Wilson went public with his frustrations at not being treated similarly to Tom Brady or other top-level quarterbacks who were instrumental in their franchise’s decision making. He complained about how many hits he’d taken by defenders, insinuating the team didn’t do enough to protect him.

In 2022, he was traded to Denver. He spent two disappointing seasons there before underwhelming spells in Pittsburgh and New York with the Giants. He’ll be a free agent again this spring.

Carroll, meanwhile, went on to be the elder statesman of NFL head coaches but could never get back over the hump. His teams after Super Bowl XILX were rarely bad but never great. After Wilson was sent to Denver, he relied on a resurgent Geno Smith to quarterback his team and two 9-8 seasons followed.

He eventually left the team after the 2023-24 season as the Seahawks officially moved into a new era.

Making (and then breaking) the Patriots

On the opposite sideline of State Farm Stadium was a resurgent giant.

The Patriots won three Super Bowls in 2002, 2004 and 2005 and then proceeded on an incredible run of almosts.

They almost pulled off an undefeated season in 2007-08, losing to the Giants. They almost beat the Giants again in Super Bowl XLVI three years later. They almost got back to the Super Bowl in the two seasons after that, losing in the AFC championship game each year.

And then they almost lost Super Bowl XLIX against Seattle, if not for Butler’s heroics.

Instead, a weight was lifted and the Patriots went on another generational run. After losing in the AFC championship again the following season, the Pats rolled off three straight Super Bowl appearances. Their thrilling win over the Falcons in 2017 and less-than-thrilling win over the Rams in 2019 ensured their leaders would be legends of the game.

But what it also fostered was a sense of pride – and not the good kind. Instead, tension built between Brady and Belichick after 20 years of working together. Brady wanted more money – for himself and for better offensive weapons after talent drain in New England. Belichick wanted to look toward the future and didn’t want to spend the money Brady wanted to shell out.

And, deep down in both men, there was surely a desire to prove that they could do it without the other man.

Ultimately, it was Brady who did.

As the world shut down for the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, Brady shocked the football world by announcing he was signing with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He’d made it clear over the previous few years that he didn’t feel appreciated by Belichick or the Patriots front office – going to Tampa was the chance to prove he didn’t need to be in red-white-and-blue to win a Super Bowl.

And that’s what he pulled off, winning his final championship in 2021 with a resounding thumping of the Kansas City Chiefs, 31-9. Another 13-4 season followed with a divisional round exit and Brady began his dance with retirement – announcing in the spring of 2022 that he was retiring before unretiring and playing one final season with the Bucs, winning another division title before being knocked out of the playoffs. Brady called it quits after that season.

Belichick, meanwhile, couldn’t do it without Brady. The Pats went to the playoffs once in the years after Brady left and finished under .500 in three of those four years. Eventually, Belichick left the Patriots by mutual agreement in early 2024 and he spent a year as a distinctly un-Belichickian TV host – funny, insightful, charming in a grumpy guy kind of way – before moving to the college game as the head coach of the University of North Carolina.

The Patriots themselves bottomed out last year, going 4-13 in the first season since 2001 without Belichick or Brady.

Ultimately, it was a stalwart of the first Patriots dynasty, the one that seemed so unlikely when it formed in 2001-02 and changed the course of 21st century football, to bring them back to the mountaintop. Head coach Mike Vrabel played linebacker for Belichick and caught multiple touchdown passes from Brady.

Kyle Feldscher, CNN