I was barely half-focused on the game, if that, but it sure seemed like the 'hawks won all the individual battles, right?
Like Welker and the Thomases never seemed to be open, the running game got shut down, the O-line could never produce a completely clean pocket (even if Manning didn't get hit, Seattle was disrupting passing lanes and forcing him to get rid of the ball quicker). The case for the Seahawks before the game was that they would just be more physical and outmuscle Denver, and it certainly seems to have played out that way.
That said, there were a number of key plays that all went Seattle's way and a lot were a matter of inches, or split-second reactions. The kickoff return, the batted balls, the fumbles. Those are the plays that Bill Barnwell and other NFL geeks stress as being pretty random: fumbles vary a lot from year to year with the same teams and players. So maybe if you replay this game 100 times, it only turns into a massacre 5 or 10 of those times. But still, it really felt like a more athletic team just beating up on, and then demoralizing, its opponent.
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