SEATTLE — Any time a team suffers a loss as surprising as Seattle’s last Sunday against the Giants, an obvious question is whether the favored team might have overlooked its opponent.
Monday, during his radio show on 710 ESPN Seattle, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll volunteered that he did not think the team’s focus or preparation was a factor in the 17-12 defeat to a Giants team that was an 11-point underdog and playing with a backup quarterback.
“We did not take these guys lightly, if you think that’s a lesson (from the game),’’ Carroll said. “That didn’t happen. We were playing tough and physical in this game and went after it and respected them. We just needed to function better and adapt better as the game went on.’’
But at least one player thinks otherwise.
During a Zoom session with media Thursday, cornerback Shaquill Griffin said he thinks the Seahawks did overlook the Giants, and that making sure that doesn’t happen again — especially with another big underdog coming to town this week in the winless New York Jets — has been a big talking point the last few days.
“I feel that we kind of eased up off the gas a little bit, and now it’s everybody’s locking back in,’’ Griffin said,. “ ... we came in, taking the team lightly, just being totally honest. In this league you can lose to anybody, it doesn’t matter who it is, no matter if they lost every single game, you can lose in this league if you don’t play right. And I felt like we took that game lightly and I feel like the focus point now is just refocusing, treating every team the same, treating it like a championship game that we continue to preach about — we’ve just got to live by it.’’
To be fair to Carroll’s assertion, the Seattle defense pitched a shutout in the first half, the only time this season the Seahawks have held an opponent scoreless for a half, so especially for that side of the ball, there wasn’t a lot of early evidence of taking a team lightly.
And while the offense struggled mightily throughout, hindsight makes clear that the Giants are a better defensive team than may have been realized going in and had a plan of laying back and limiting big plays that Seattle — from the coaching staff on down — didn’t adapt to as quickly as necessary, as Carroll noted.
Seattle also had a tough turnaround from playing at Philadelphia the previous Monday night and getting in early Tuesday. The Seahawks had just two non-walkthrough practices during the week.
But Griffin said taking a better approach to the game was a “focus point’’ for this week after what happened against the Giants.
“A situation like that, you’ve got to attack it head on,’’ Griffin said. “A lot of people (might) want to beat around the bush a little bit, kind of shy away from what actually was going on, what actually happened. But I feel like what’s great about this team, this organization. we don’t do that. We don’t shy away from what actually is happening, what’s actually going on. We talk about it, we fix it, we’ll move forward from it. We came in that Monday and we spoke about the game and the mistakes that we made, we tried to correct it. But understand that that team was not supposed to beat us — just to be totally honest, they was not supposed to win that game and we’ve got to live with that.
“That’s the taste in your mouth that no one ever wants, that’s the part that you can’t go on with — you’ve got to live with that, and that’s the main thing, so understand that we lost that game, we don’t want that feeling anymore, we don’t want to feel like this anymore. So that’s why it was so great for us to go ahead and attack that head on, attack that elephant that’s in the room, understand we took this team lightly, a team that was ready to play, that’s got a lot on the line, that’s still got a chance to be in the playoffs, and as you see there they in the run for it. So understand that’s the team we were going against, we couldn’t take them lightly and we did. So we addressed that. We’ve got to fix it, we did. And now we’re going on to the next week and we can’t have that same taste in our mouth. So it was cool to be a part of that discussion and understand that we can’t let that happen again.’’
