Hasselbeck may well be NFL’s best QB

Published 9:00 pm Sunday, November 30, 2003

SEATTLE – Matt Hasselbeck didn’t feel too hot.

His non-throwing shoulder ached from the Baltimore game a week ago. A flu bug had sapped him of some of his energy.

At mid-week, he had to have an IV to make it through practice. Late in the week, he felt as if he were about 60 percent back to normal.

On Sunday, he played a football game.

Luckily for the Cleveland Browns, he wasn’t completely healthy. But at this stage of an NFL season, if a quarterback isn’t hurting, he isn’t playing.

And Matt Hasselbeck is playing. Playing better than anyone in the league, in the opinion of one man.

“Right now,” said Seahawks backup quarterback Trent Dilfer, “he’s the best player in football.”

Roll that one around in your noodle for a minute.

Not just the best quarterback. The best player.

Imagine that. Two years ago, you couldn’t have.

Not when he looked like exactly what he was: a young, inexperienced quarterback. A player who drew the ire of boo-birds and the wrath of the talk-show callers.

Mike Holmgren’s pitting his future on this guy? Boy, did he ever blow it.

You heard that time and again.

Matt Hasselbeck will never be a big time quarterback.

You heard that, too.

If he was listening, Hasselbeck also heard it. And if he heard it, he is one strong dude.

Because, baby, look at him now.

He’s making plays. Flinging touchdown passes. Making wise decisions. Throwing the ball away when there’s no play to be made.

He’s leading.

Look at him out there on the playing field. Just the way he carries himself, he has that air of confidence that all good quarterbacks have. You can see it in their faces, you can see it in their body language, you can see it in the way their teammates conduct their business.

Swagger? Yes, there’s some of that.

More than that, the good quarterbacks just look like they’re in command. Matt Hasselbeck looks every inch the commander of this Seahawks offense.

Even when he messes up, you get the feeling that he’ll bounce back. As he did in the Seahawks’ 34-7 victory over Cleveland on a cold, sunny Sunday afternoon.

Just before the half, he throws an interception with the Hawks inside the Browns’ 30 and leading 17-0.

Another touchdown then, and it’s looking pretty good, though we said that a week ago when the Seahawks had a 17-point lead over Baltimore early in the fourth quarter.

The old Matt Hasselbeck might have taken that bad throw with him to the locker room and let it affect him when he came back out for the second half. The new older, wiser and more resilient Matt Hasselbeck simply shrugged it off and completed 12 of 14 passes for 150 yards and one touchdown in the final 30 minutes. That gave him 26 completions on 35 attempts for the afternoon, good for 306 yards and three touchdowns.

If you’re counting, that’s eight TD passes in the past two weeks, though his masterful performance in Baltimore was wasted in that 44-41 overtime loss.

What we’re seeing now is the Seahawks cranking up the offense as they did down the stretch a year ago. They need to because the defense is so iffy, one week giving up a mountain of points, the next giving the opponents’ offense a good working over, as happened Sunday. The stop-unit laid some welts on the Browns, knocking out one quarterback and holding them to 214 total yards and no points (the touchdown came on a blocked punt).

Go figure.

Figure the Browns lucked out.

Before the game, he swigged coffee to energize himself. “And I’m not really even a coffee drinker,” he said.

This was one of those games that could have been a grinder, a not-very-good Cleveland team against a Seahawks team perhaps still feeling the after-effects of last week’s dreadful loss.

If there was a play that perked up the Hawks, it came on the first possession. Hasselbeck had been sacked the first time he touched the ball and then threw an incompletion. On third-and-17 at his own 19, with the play looking as if it might collapse as receivers failed to get open, Hasselbeck found Mack Strong all alone on the right flat and the big fullback powered for a 32-yard gain.

That’s what Dilfer was talking about after the game. “The best thing Matt does,” he said, “is when there’s a play to be made, he makes it.”

He would make three more plays on this drive, converting another third down, this one also to Strong for 10 yards, and then hitting Koren Robinson for 32 yards to the Cleveland 2, from where Itula Mili scored on a pass from Hasselbeck.

As well as he went on and played, Hasselbeck wasn’t altogether satisfied with his performance, leading right back to something else Dilfer said about him: He’s a perfectionist.

“Sometimes when something wasn’t there, I was too quick to throw it away,” Hasselbeck said. “I think maybe I was a little too jittery. Maybe it was too much coffee.”

Maybe the best player in the league right now is just too hard on himself.