To add insult to Denver Broncos injury, the Seattle Seahawks defense now is saying it had the battle against Peyton Manning before he even took to the field during Super Bowl XLVIII.
Richard Sherman told Sports Illustrated's TheMMQB.com that his unit did an outstanding job scouting against the Broncos quarterback because they figured out the meaning behind a lot of Manning's hand signals.
That left Manning telegraphing the plays to the Seattle defense.
"All we did was play situational football," Sherman told The Monday Morning Quarterback. "We knew what route concepts they liked on different downs, so we jumped all the routes. Then we figured out the hand signals for a few of the route audibles in the first half."
The website reported that Sherman went on to demonstrate Manning's hand signals and their meaning and said the secondary was calling out the plays throughout the game.
"Me, Earl (Thomas), Kam (Chancellor)... we're not just three All-Pro players. We're three All-Pro minds," Sherman said. "Now, if Peyton had thrown in some double moves, if he had gone out of character, we could've been exposed."
Manning won the NFL MVP Award the day before the Super Bowl by a near unanimous vote, but if Sherman's account is accurate, then it begs the question how Manning didn't realize that the Seahawks were jumping all the Broncos routes or hear the secondary calling the play.
CBSSports.com suggested Sherman's claims might've been just talk but did note that the Seattle defense held the Broncos' record-breaking offense to just 122 yards after the catch on a Super Bowl record 34 receptions for an average of 3.6 yards after the catch on each reception.
And observers need only to have watched the game to see that the Seahawks were swarming to almost every throw Manning tried.
Whatever the case, it is a fact that Manning and the Broncos coaching staff failed to find any answers in the second half, which led to the continuation of the Seattle rout that ended up 43-8.
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