Seattle Seahawks from the Emerald City in NFL Playoffs' Land of Oz

All you have to do is understand Seattle to understand the Seattle Seahawks and their fans.

Seattle is the Emerald City. Very green, just like in the Wizard of Oz—and very odd in many ways.

Stuck on the Northwest shores of the Pacific, farther north than Chicago and Fargo, North Dakota, Seattle shimmers green in the sun during those rare times that it shines. Centered in the Land of Oz replete with visitors seeking their hearts, brains and happy returns home.

That the Seahawks managed to win an NFC West championship is enough for the Land of Oz. It was fitting that the St. Louis Rams had to come to the Land of Oz to play their final game of the regular season to win their division. Teams in the NFC West had wandered all over the globe this year.

The San Francisco 49ers played in England, an entirely different country, and seemed to suffer jet lag the rest of the season. But it was the Seahawks who probably traveled the farthest of any NFL team in the United States, going all the way from Seattle to Tampa Bay. 

The game that made Seattle a winner was fittingly played in the Emerald City. Perhaps blinded by the bright lights of the city, the St. Louis Rams seemed to wander around the field in a daze, only wanting a happy return home.

Their $50 million quarterback was off kilter all night, and their defense looked befuddled by a quarterback whose best credentials were his own big contract with the Seahawks and the fact that he followed Matt Hasselbeck to start his biggest game in the same bright lights.

There was mystery in the game's results. Few guessed that the Seahawks would win, much less appear so dominant aside from the score.  

Will there be any mystery next week?

With Hasselbeck a likely starter in their first playoff game in years, one of the worst quarterbacks in the NFL will face the New Orleans Saints and their quarterback Drew Brees, one of the NFL's best. The Seahawks, the worst NFL playoff team in history, will play the Saints, a team whose record was bettered by only four other NFL teams—a mismatch of historic proportions.

Yet Brees will have to come to the Land of Oz, where 50-million-dollar men seem like mere mortals and teams appear very foggy from either jet lag or the latitudes. Far from the Doldrums, but with water, water everywhere, the Land of Oz can trip up most teams.

The Hawks are led by head coach Pete Carroll, whose style exemplified University of Southern California football merely a year ago—a coach who has been able to instill a winning attitude in a team from a city missing much of what it had only a year ago.

So, underemployed Seattle, you just might be entertained with an upset. After all, Josh Freeman and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers were all over the Saints and Brees in New Orleans' last game they played before having to make the trip west.

Sure, this is Land of Oz thinking. But what else do you expect when talking about a team from the Emerald City? Surely not rationality. That was thrown out the window when Seattle won an NFL division with a losing record.

So wait until next Saturday, when the announcers will be talking all about the Saints and their inevitable road to the NFC Championship Game. If, as with the St. Louis Rams, the Saints start acting weird with little apparent direction and end up with a halftime deficit, the Land of Oz will trip them up.

Just as certain as the fact that there is a little man with a big voice behind the curtain in the Emerald City, pulling strings and making the whole thing hum—in a very disorienting way.