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Roiling Seahawks
One of my freshest memories of the 2002 NFL season comes from sitting at a Clifton, N.J., sports bar with the family on the last Sunday of the regular season (Sports Illustrated had wrapped up a year-end double issue that week, so I had a rare in-season weekend at home), watching, of all games, the meaningless Seattle-San Diego finale. I hadn't seen either team live all season, and with the Packers-Jets outcome decided, I spent much of the second half spying two relatively unfamiliar teams.
And I kept thinking: What in the world has gotten into Matt Hasselbeck?
I mean, wow. He's pretty good. The thing that struck me about Hasselbeck that day was his accuracy, his ability to hit his Seahawks receivers in stride downfield, and to throw the ball (mostly) where only his guys could catch it. NFL Tickets
I looked up Hasselbeck's numbers from that Sunday (36-of-53 passing, 67.9 percent completion rate, 449 yards, two touchdowns, two interceptions against a pretty good Martyball Chargers defense, with only one ill-conceived pass, an interception, among the 35 or so balls I saw him throw). I just remember thinking: He looks good, confident. He looks like he's going to make it. Which, in midseason, was no lock. Mike Holmgren had traded a first-round pick to Green Bay to get his former Brett Favre understudy (actually, he swapped first-round picks, moving higher in the round), and over a year and half Hasselbeck had played pretty lousy. Then the explosion.
And so as the Seahawks
passing camp dawned last week, I thought it might be a good idea to check in
with Hasselbeck to see what in the world happened last year, and to see if he
thinks he can duplicate what he did over the last two months of the 2002 season,
when he threw for more yards than any passer in football.
"It's going to sound weird," he told me, "but at the end of the
season I wasn't doing anything wonderful. I was just doing what I was supposed
to be doing. I think a lot of this had to do with something that happened the
week before we played Kansas City [in November]. Mike came up to me and said
something that really ticked me off, even though he didn't know it. We were
talking about how I played the previous week, and he said, 'You didn't play
bad. You just didn't DO anything.' Then he said, 'This week, throw some interceptions.
I don't care. Just take some chances. Push the ball downfield.' NFL Tickets
"Now, we had Jeff George here. And you know what everybody says about him, about he's not a team guy. Well, Jeff was fantastic here. Awesome. And right then, at practice that day, he started telling the guys, 'Mike says he's putting it up! We're going downfield!' He kept saying [that] all the way up to the game. And so we entered the game, ready to make all the plays, and Mike kept calling them, all day. Deep ball, deep ball, deep ball."
Final score: Seattle 39, Kansas City 32. Hasselbeck's line: 25-36, 69.4 percent, 362 yards, three touchdowns, no picks.
"That game was sort of the defining moment for our revival," Hasselbeck said.
Smart move by Holmgren, because to that point, since being reunited in Seattle in 2001, he and nice-guy Hasselbeck had been mostly gritting their teeth about their relationship. Hasselbeck thought Holmgren was being too conservative and holding back his potential to throw it downfield. Holmgren didn't know if he could trust Hasselbeck to run the offense full-throttle. Why shouldn't Holmgren be skeptical? He hadn't seen the kid do it. He'd seen him make more mistakes than progress. But this unleashed a month to die for. In December, Hasselbeck threw for 1,700 yards in five games, strafing three playoff teams in the process. The week after the Kansas City explosion, at San Francisco, trailing big early, Holmgren said into his quarterback headset: "I need you to start taking shots."
That was then. This is now.
"We feel we'll win our division this year," Hasselbeck said. "I have no doubt Koren Robinson and Darrell Jackson will have huge years. I expect to play well, too."
"Any reason you can't put up Manning-type numbers again?" I asked. NFL Tickets
"No reason," he said. "It's what I expect now."
So the world is changing for the Seahawks, with a feisty new defensive coordinator, Ray Rhodes, making it hot where it used to be comfortable, and with a maturing offense. I don't think it's outrageous that Hasselbeck believes his team will win the division. The Niners and Rams, I think, still have an edge until Seattle proves it can play defense -- and until Hasselbeck plays this well for another few months -- but at least there's hope now, hope that the Holmgren program and his poor man's Favre can rip up some pretty good teams.
It's a different world in Seattle these days. "Hey," Hasselbeck said before he hung up, "I'm throwing out the first ball at the Mariners game Wednesday. Can you believe that?"
In the two starts he has made trying to win his 300th game, Roger Clemens is 0-1 with a 9.26 ERA. He is averaging 21 pitches thrown per inning in those games.