SEATTLE – Simple is good. Look at Forrest Gump. He did all right.
Simple can also be good in football.
Ask Matt Hasselbeck.
One week he’s awful.
The next week he’s pretty good.
The week he’s bad his team loses a game it should win.
The week he’s good his team wins a game it should win.
And he celebrates by taking his daughters trick-or-treating.
One dresses as Cinderella. The other as Sleeping Beauty.
Presumably, he goes as Forrest Gump.
“Life is like a box of chocolates … you never know what you’re gonna get.”
The Seahawks can be that way, too.
You know, the team that was crowned Super Bowl champions by some before the season started.
They open fast, winning the first three games. “Order the plane tickets to Jacksonville, honey, we’re Super Bowl bound.”
Then they lose three in a row. “On second thought … “
Last week, Forrest, er, Hasselbeck, has the worst game of his career.
Coach Mike Holmgren thinks maybe it’s because they’re asking Hasselbeck to do too much. So he says they’re going to simplify the offense.
Sunday, Hasselbeck goes out and looks nothing like the guy who went 14-for-41 with four interceptions the week before.
He completes his first nine passes (his 10th is dropped), 13 of his first 15. His running back, Shaun Alexander, is racking up yardage. The Seahawks lead the Carolina Panthers 14-0 in the second quarter.
The crowd’s loving it. They’re cheering. They’re toasting the Hawks. They’re shouting that Alexander is great. And that Hasselbeck is the second coming of Brett Favre.
Life is like a chocolate sundae. Then … it begins to melt.
Carolina scores. Suddenly it’s 14-7.
This isn’t supposed to happen. These guys aren’t any good.
No need to panic. The Hawks soon are about to score again.
With the ball at the Carolina 7, Hasselbeck throws. The pass is completed … to Carolina’s Brian Allen.
And what’s this? Is that booing we hear?
What’s a guy got to do to keep the masses happy? Win, baby. Just win.
And, it wouldn’t hurt to be perfect.
Failing that, Hasselbeck is good enough to get the job done. Twenty-one pass completions in 30 attempts for 201 yards, one touchdown and that one pic.
That the Hawks win only by a touchdown – 23-17 – is fine with Holmgren.
“I’m going to go and have dinner with my family tonight and not be a jerk like I have the last three weeks and enjoy the win,” he said. “I enjoy it because it’s hard. It’s hard to win a game.”
As the Hawks are amply proving. Maybe the answer is simply to simplify.
Not because Hasselbeck is a dunce. He isn’t.
You can’t be a successful quarterback in the NFL and not be smart. But maybe he did have too much to think about.
Good golly, he has to know what every guy in his offensive unit’s job is. He has to read the defense. He has to sometimes change the play at the line of scrimmage. He has to listen to some guy on the other side of the line threatening to take his head off.
“We had piled his plate pretty full, as far as audibles and recognizing fronts, and this and that,” Holmgren said. “I thought it was affecting his play. It’s not a bad idea to do that, but keep in mind that he’s only played 20 starts or whatever it’s been (actually, it’s 45, including Sunday) and maybe we are doing him a disservice, and so I condensed everything. I took a lot of the responsibility of that stuff away from him.
“If you ask him, he’s kind of a cocky bugger, so he will probably say that it had no effect at all and that’s fine, but I know what I know.”
And what he knows is that Hasselbeck looked relaxed, he looked confident, he looked rhythmic. His passes, for the most part, were on target. They were catchable. Though three were dropped – two by Darrell Jackson.
Jackson also caught one pass and then fumbled it, the Hawks recovering.
Cocky, though, Hasselbeck was not. If anything, you might say he was humble. Well, moderately humble. He deferred to the old heads, Holmgren and quarterback coach Jim Zorn, for their knowledge. The plan was … “a good one because … these guys … know what they’re doing, they know what they’re talking about.”
He said Zorn told him to relax and have fun. He looked as if he did. Except for that interception. And the mishandling of the snap late in the fourth quarter which aborted a field goal attempt and gave Carolina a chance to go down and score, causing Holmgren to have heart palpitations.
That’s another job Hasselbeck has had to take over: Holding on field goal attempts with the regular holder, punter Tom Rouen, injured.
“It was a perfect snap, a good spiral, and had a lot of velocity on it,” Hasselbeck said. “I just dropped it, and I’m sure Jim Zorn is going to be coaching me up on how to hold because I know that he is the greatest holder in Seattle Seahawk history. I have already been alerted that we are going to be doing a lot of extra work, if I’m still holder.”
No, they shouldn’t have to simplify holding.
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