Late in the second half of the Seahawks’ 43-8 Super Bowl XLVIII rout of the Broncos Sunday night at MetLife Stadium, the clamoring began on the jubilant Seattle sideline.
“You might be the MVP,” Malcolm Smith’s teammates kept telling him.
“No way, no way … not me,’ ” the Seahawks linebacker kept responding.
It was 8:30 Monday morning and there was Smith standing at a podium talking about being the game’s MVP and his impending trip to Disney World.
The takeaway: The MVP of the game could have been any one of about four or five Seahawks players other than Smith, who had a 69-yard interception return for a touchdown and a recovered fumble. This is how deep and talented the Seahawks are, and it sends a powerful message about the long-term sustainability of this team as it looks to repeat next season.
“[The MVP] could have gone to anybody,’’ Smith said Monday.
“It is a very fitting statement for the style that our guys play and the togetherness that they represent that any one of those guys could have been MVP,’’ Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said.
This is why the Seahawks are here to stay for the foreseeable future. Sorry NFC. Sorry 49ers. Sorry Giants. Deal with it. Carroll has built this program for the long run, not for one season of glory.
“We really have an eye on what’s coming, and we don’t dwell on what just happened,’’ Carroll said. “We’ll take this in stride.’’
The Seahawks have been built to win … and to keep on winning. There isn’t much of a hint this team is a one-hit wonder destined to blend into the cracks of NFL parity.
The Seahawks, with an average age on the roster of 26 years, 175 days, have the fourth-youngest roster of a Super Bowl winner. The 1975 Steelers, who had the youngest Super Bowl roster in history, repeated the following year.
So draw your own conclusions.
Dating back to his year as the Jets head coach in 1994, Carroll has always had a vision about how he wants to build a program; it simply took until he arrived at USC and then Seattle before he was given the latitude to implement it all, and he’s done it beautifully in concert with sharp 42-year-old general manager John Schneider.
Carroll, 62, and 20 years removed from his New York days, was never given a professional chance with the Jets. There were too many chefs in the kitchen in New England. And he was only an assistant in San Francisco. Now that he’s been given the keys to the kingdom, Carroll has shown everyone what he had in mind all along.
The foundation is sturdy in Seattle, beginning at quarterback, where Russell Wilson, a former third-round pick who is scheduled to make only $662,000, has two more years left on his original contract but will eventually score a huge contract.
So, too, will cornerback Richard Sherman and safety Earl Thomas, cornerstones of the defense who are entering the final year of their respective rookie contracts.
The Seahawks don’t have a lot of key players who are unrestricted free agents. They’ll need to make decisions on defensive end Michael Bennett, defensive tackle Tony McDaniel and cornerback Walter Thurmond as well as receiver Golden Tate and right tackle Breno Giacomini — all contributors.
According to various reports, the Seahawks are projected to be about $5 million under the 2014 salary cap. Based on their results to date, the Seahawks will find a way to make it work.
“John Schneider has done an extraordinary job of structuring this roster contractually and with the vision of looking ahead so that we can keep our guys together,” Carroll said. “One of the things that happens so often is teams have a big fallout after they win the Super Bowl. We’re not in that situation. We don’t need to be in that situation. We’ve done it with foresight and looking ahead.”
There will be a parade and a celebration in the streets of Seattle on Wednesday to celebrate the deserving city’s first major sports title since 1979, and then Carroll and the Seahawks will return to work.
“We won’t miss the fun part of it,’’ Carroll said, “but that doesn’t mean we’ll lose sight of where we want to go.’’