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Seahawks, Smith chasing another Super Bowl win
Youngstown native chasing
another title as
Seattle coach
By Joe Scalzo
If there’s one thing this week has shown, it’s that the only thing more difficult than tackling Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch is interviewing him.
His running backs coach, Youngstown native Sherman Smith, can sympathize.
Lynch made headlines this week by answering every question on Tuesday’s Super Bowl Media Day with the phrase “I’m just here so I don’t get fined.” He followed it up on Wednesday by saying, “You know why I’m here.”
“Believe me, I wonder what I would do if I was in the media’s position,” said Smith, a North High graduate who spoke by phone this week. “To me, I wouldn’t interview him. I wouldn’t stand for that. I would walk away.
“I wouldn’t give him the time of day.”
But, Smith said, Lynch is a lot different around his coaches and his teammates.
“If Marshawn was just a good football player and a bad guy, a bad teammate, his teammates wouldn’t love him the way they do,” said Smith, who has coached Lynch since he was traded to the Seahawks during the 2010 season. “They love the guy. He’s a good guy. There are things he doesn’t like doing and he’s not comfortable doing, but he’s a really good guy and a loyal teammate.
“What they see on Sunday is he’s playing his butt off. Every Sunday, you know what you’re gonna get from him.”
Smith was hired with the Seahawks before the 2010 season after a two-year stint as the Washington Redskins’ offensive coordinator. It was a homecoming for Smith, who was a second-round pick in the Seahawks’ first draft as an expansion team in 1976.
After playing quarterback in high school and at Miami (Ohio), he shifted to running back in Seattle and ran for 3,429 yards and 28 TDs in seven years with the team. He also caught 210 passes for 2,445 yards and 10 TDs before finishing his career with the Chargers in 1983.
While Seattle’s national reputation as a rabid football town is only a few years old, Smith said little has changed since his playing days.
“During the times I was playing the fans were crazy,” he said. “The Kingdome was always a great place to play and now CenturyLink [Field] is a hard place. But I always remember the fan support as being very good. When I became a coach in 2010, it was almost like I had remembered it as a player.”
The support has increased over the last few years, hitting a peak last season as the team rolled to its first Super Bowl title. It was the second Super Bowl appearance for Smith, who was the Tennessee Titans’ running backs coach when they were stopped inches short of the goal line on the last play of a Super Bowl loss to the St. Louis Rams in 2000.
“From a fan standpoint, that game was probably more exciting but it’s kind of cool to look at the scoreboard with a few minutes remaining and know you’re going to win,” he said. “To do it in such a convincing fashion made it nice.”
The Seahawks seemed poised to repeat this fall when they routed the Packers 36-16 in Week 1, but they lost back-to-back games in mid-October and didn’t start to resemble a championship contender until late November. Smith said some of the struggles were due to injuries, “but even at that point we weren’t playing as well as we had been and should have been.”
The turning point, he said, came when head coach Pete Carroll met with more than a dozen players after a Nov. 16 loss to the Kansas Chiefs. Since then, Seattle has won eight straight games.
“He discussed how he felt like when we had a good team last year, besides having some talent, the guys played for each other,” Smith said. “The tightness was lacking. Guys were distracted and it was more about individual awards and individual recognition. We had to get back to what made us champions, where it was all about the team.
“Ever since the Kansas City game, we’ve been climbing that hill and haven’t looked back.”
Outside of Lynch, the Seahawks have stayed pretty low-key over the past two weeks as the media focused on the Patriots’ role in “Deflategate.” But Smith doesn’t think the negative attention will faze New England.
“That team is so mature, I don’t think it’s much of a distraction,” he said. “It would shock me it did.
“They’re probably hoping that we’re hoping they’ll be distracted by it.”
Smith hasn’t lived in Youngstown since he was a teenager and hasn’t lived in Ohio since the early 1990s, when he was the running backs coach at Miami (Ohio). In 1995, he joined the Houston Oilers as the running backs coach and spent the next 13 years with the organization.
Smith said he still keeps in touch with his friends in the Valley and said he was excited when Youngstown State hired Jim Tressel (as president) and Bo Pelini (as football coach) in the last year.
“That’s something the city can be proud of,” he said. “Youngstown is just a special place. No matter where I’m at, even in the Pacific Northwest, people understand that football and Youngstown go together. People know about the city, know about the state and have a lot of respect for the players and coaches that the city has produced.”