Saw this item this morning ahead of the Saints and Seahawks and was intrigued. After reading it, I’m disappointed.
The claim is the Seahawks secondary commits interference or holding penalties on every play and dare the officials to call the penalties. The big “secret” is they know the zebras won’t make the calls because officials don’t want to be seen determining outcomes of games.
So what’s the evidence? A bunch of egg-spurt testimony, a couple of bitter OC’s and a dubiously used statistic.
The stat is the Seahawks had 20 pass interference and holding penalties called on them this season, most in the NFL. I call this dubious since it could simply be that they play aggressive and got called a bunch. It does not follow that they are breaking rules on every play.
As for the egg-spurts and OC’s, do I really have to mention they’re obvious bias? Offensive people think the defense commits penalties every play. Kinda like defensive lineman accuse offensive lineman of holding on every play.
The only way something like this can be made credible is by breaking down every defensive play for the Seahawks, and then every defensive play for every other team. If the Seahawks have statistically higher occurrences of fouls, then there’s something to the claim.
Short that, it’s just sour grapes in a pass happy league from parties used to getting there way.