For a coach whose mantra is that every week is a “championship opportunity’’ it can be hard to admit that some “championship opportunities’’ may mean just a little bit more than others.
But as he met the media Monday roughly 18 hours after his team’s dramatic goal-line stand to hold off the New England Patriots had been completed, Seattle coach Pete Carroll acknowledged it was not just your average regular-season win.
The Seahawks entered the game as 7½-point underdogs, the most since early in the 2012 season, and had shown some uncommon vulnerability in finishing the first half of the season at 5-2-1.