The Seattle Seahawks beat the Arizona Cardinals 27 to 24 courtesy of a 33 yard Sebastian Janikowski field goal with no time left of the clock. The win gave the Seahawks a 10-6 record and fifth place in the NFC West Playoff tournament.
The Seahawks will be in Dallas on Saturday ( 5:15 p.m. PST ) to take on Cowboys in round one of the NFC playoffs. It will be the second time the two teams will meet this year. The Seahawks were 24 to 13 winners when they hosted the Cowboys in week three.
PLAYERS QUOTES
DE FRANK CLARK
(On Jarran Reed’s play) “It’s awesome. Just watching my boy come in from the beginning, it’s been awesome. We’ve been with each other the whole time and the best thing we can do is grow. Grow as teammates, grow as a person, grow as a father, grow as a man. I feel like we’ve taken all the necessary steps to do so. That was just the sacks for a D-linemen, an interior D-linemen, a nose tackle, a three-tech, whatever you want to call him – it was impressive, I don’t care what you say. For him to get 10.5 (sacks) this year, I think my high before this year was 10.5. Just seeing my boy, him being able to take on the challenge under the duress of us not having all that we had, it’s just great to see. It just shows us young guys what our ceiling really is.”
(On how much having the defense in tune will help against the Cowboys)“I feel like playing them is going to be like any other time we play them, honestly. I just feel like it’s about us, you know. It’s just about our preparation. Games like today, there will be a lot of things that get away from us. If we allow the play of ourselves, not necessarily how good the offense was executing, but on defense. Just the play of the other team’s special teams allowing two blocked punts. That’s hard, we’re making the game harder for ourselves. We’ve got to make it easier. It’s the little things like that we’ve got to go in the lab and fix. We’re going to a better offense, we’re going to a better defense, we’re going to a better team in general coming up. We’re going to the best runner in the NFL right now in Zeke (Ezekiel Elliot) as far as rushing yards goes. We’ve just got to be on our P’s and Q’s. I feel like the pressure is not on us really because I feel like everything that we are thinking about is the Seattle Seahawks.”
Clark finished the game with two sacks to bring his season total 14 which is career high for the 2015 second round ( 63rd overal ) draft pick.
WR DOUG BALDWIN
(On playing the Dallas Cowboys again)“I’m excited about it because I didn’t get to play them the first time around. I know their defense is much better than it’s been in the past so it’s an exciting challenge and matchup for us.”
Baldwin was target five times and finished the game with two receptions for 17 yards
(On getting to ten wins on the season) “Yeah. It’s a good marker to measure yourself for season-by-season, but we’re not done so I don’t really care about the ten wins. I need four more.”
(On having a road warrior mentality) “We’ve done it before.”
(On if it’s that simple) “Yup. It’s that simple.”
LB K.J. WRIGHT
(On reaching the playoffs and 10 wins for the season)“It’s fun man. Just to achieve our goals that we set out to get, it’s fun to go into the playoffs. Obviously, we wanted to win the division, but that didn’t happen. We can go on the road, we’ve got a good team in Dallas who’s finishing strong, so it’s going to be a fun matchup for us.”
(On the Week 17 win against the Cardinals)“It was big, it was big. As you saw, everybody played and it was a lot of speculations on if they’d play the guys knowing that (we) clinched the playoffs, but we’re all about winning here and we wanted to get that tenth win. We just wanted to keep that momentum going. Coach (Pete) Carroll did a good job because everybody came out healthy for the most part.”
(On if he appreciates getting every opportunity to win as a player) “Yeah, let’s finish this thing man. We set out for 16 games and let’s go out there and make it happen. They did a good job in preparing us for the week. It’s going to be fun to go on the road and we’re going to try to get a win.”
(On if he feels as healthy as he has felt this season)“K.J. back, K.J. back. It feels good to be healthy. It feels good not having to rotate in and out. I told (Ken) Norton today on third down I wanted to be out there next week, so we’ve got to figure that out.”
(On Quinton Jefferson and Frank Clark)“Been killing it all year. When Mike B. (Bennett) and Cliff (Avril) left, we needed someone to step up in their room from a leadership standpoint. They’ve been doing outstanding all year and so I’m really happy for both of them. I’m glad they are having a good season so far.”
Wright finished the game with seven total tackles in his second game back as a fulltime starter.
K SEBASTIAN JANIKOWSKI
(On hitting his third game-winning field goal)“I mean, when they called that timeout just icing the kicker, it was a short field goal so I don’t think it really mattered. (Tyler) Ott did a great job, Dicky (Michael Dickson) put it down, the O-Line protected, and it went through.”
(On getting to 10 wins)“It’s special. In my career, I haven’t seen 10 wins in a long time but this is awesome.”
WR TYLER LOCKETT
(On what it means to win 10 games).“it’s amazing. It doesn’t matter what any critic said about how our season was going to be or how it was going to turn out. They don’t understand this bond that we have as a team. They don’t understand the chemistry that was built. Like I said, the foundation was laid a long time ago when we started OTAs. The type of relationship and the type of brotherhood that we have here, there’s no telling what we could accomplish. Like my coach in high school said, ‘It’s amazing what we can accomplish when no one cares who gets the credit’. That’s what makes this team so special and that’s what can take us so far.”
(On what allowed them to pull out of the rough start). “No. I mean the biggest thing is that nobody wanted to be put in that situation. It was good for us to be able to go through something like this in the last game in the season, especially against a divisional opponent before we go into the playoffs. You never know what’s going to happen. All you can do is go in prepared, but nobody can able to prepare for something that is going to happen like this. Just being able to have the ball at two minutes left, that’s something that we always look forward to and that’s something that we do every single day at practice. We know we’ve got Russell [Wilson] out there who is going to go out there and be a magician and do whatever he can to get us open and we have to go out there and run our routes.”
(On his connection with Russell during the touchdown play)“I mean, I had to run my route based off of what was there. I think it was just third and three, and I think Pat P [Patrick Peterson] wanted to play the sticks and so it’s just where I end up going and Russ just laid it out there for me to be able to catch it. The worse catches are the ones where you’re by yourself because you have to make sure you truly catch it and luckily I was able to catch it and I have to work on my front flip.
Lockett finished his best regular season as a pro with 57 receptions for 965 yards and ten touchdowns. Lockett averaged 16.9 yards per reception.
