Did I ever tell you about the time the Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl by 35 points? Strange so much of the discourse about this team is about what happened the following year, so somehow one of the most dominant performances in the history of championship football goes under the radar.
In any case, in retrospect Seattle seemed destined to take down Denver that day. After barely squeaking past the obscenely tough division super-rival 49ers by the length of Richard Sherman’s middle finger, the rest seemed a given – fortune clearly had a favorite. The stories are all canon by now.
By the time the ball flew past Peyton Manning’s head on the opening snap of the game, you could feel something special happening already. You have probably heard about Denver’s star players partying in New York in the week leading up to the game, the defense breaking the OMAHA code of Manning’s audibles, the relentless hunger driving this group of super-competitive “misfits.”
That said, nobody really had any idea just how badly the historically-great Broncos offense would get beaten. Until this happened.
#Seahawks safety Kam Chancellor with the tone-setter on Denver's Demaryius Thomas early in Super Bowl XLVIII.
8 years ago tonight pic.twitter.com/bVYOOGEjcq
— Kevin Gallagher (@KevG163) February 3, 2022
With that hit on Demaryius Thomas, alpha lion Kam Chancellor set the tone and sent a message – this was their day.
Chancellor played one of his finest games, but in the end the Super Bowl MVP trophy went to linebacker Malcolm Smith. While he was a fine defender, Smith won the award seemingly for being in the right place at the right time for a clutch sack and a pick-six.
If it felt like an injustice at the time, you weren’t wrong.
In a new list of the 15 biggest Super Bowl MVP snubs in history, Doug Farrar at Touchdown Wire ranks Bam Bam at at No. 4 all time.
“After the Seahawks’ “Legion of Boom” defense poleaxed Peyton Manning’s high-flying Broncos in a 43-8 romp, it was decided that Seattle linebacker Malcolm Smith would be the game’s MVP. Understandable to a point, as Smith’s 69-yard pick-six took the first-half score to 22-0.
But anybody who really watched this game understood that safety Kam Chancellor, the LOB’s primary enforcer, was the most valuable man on the field. Perhaps Chancellor suffered from a case of box-score scouting, but he did have an interception of his own, he put up 10 tackles, and he completely eliminated any chance the Broncos had of throwing anything short and intermediate over the middle… because every time Wes Welker or anybody else tried a slant, there was Chancellor, ready to blow it up and reinforce the fact that those passes were Very Bad Ideas.”
The Seahawks took home the trophy that really mattered that evening, but the MVP should have gone to Kam.
