SEATTLE – You thought he should have gone for it. I thought he should have gone for it. Mike Holmgren didn’t go for it.
So he’ll catch hell all week. Oh, the joy of being an NFL head coach. Oh, the joys of being a Monday Morning quarterback.
“Fourth-and-four. Fourth-and-four,” a fan chanted as the field cleared following the Seahawks’ 24-20 loss to the Miami Dolphins Sunday afternoon in Husky Stadium.
Holmgren was outnumbered – about 50,000 to one – because he opted to try a field goal with a fourth-and-four at the Miami 10 with two minutes remaining and his team behind by those four points.
So what was he thinking? He was thinking that the Dolphins had been applying a lot of pressure on quarterback Matt Hasselbeck, he was thinking that four yards are very hard to make when the defense is going to be sending everything it has, he was thinking that if he could get a field goal and the defense could hold with all three of his timeouts remaining, the Seahawks could get the ball back, drive down and kick another field goal to win the game.
“But to do that,” he said, “you have to kick the first field goal.”
When Rian Lindell couldn’t do that, Holmgren had one last hope: that his defense could stop the Dolphins, the Seahawks could get the ball back and score a touchdown. He was foiled again when quarterback Jay Fiedler got 16 yards on a third-and-16. And so, Holmgren provided the radio talk shows with enough material to keep the phone lines busy until the Seahawks tee it up again next Sunday.
It’s easy to make the “go for it” call. You figure if you don’t make it, you’ve still got the Dolphins deep in their own territory with all of your timeouts left. But then again, there’s no guarantee you’re going to stop them.
You’re damned if you go for it, you’re damned if you don’t.
Maybe with a veteran quarterback and experienced receivers, Holmgren goes for it. “If he had Brett Favre and Robert Brooks and Antonio Freeman, maybe he’d do one thing,” Hasselbeck said. “But I think … it was the best decision.”
He’d better think it was the best decision.
You could argue that had Holmgren opted to go for it, it would have given his young players a big dose of confidence if they’d made it. But what if they hadn’t made it? What would that have done to their self-esteem?
Does this mean that one questionable decision is going to send the Seahawks spiraling downward? Nah.
This team had played well in beating a couple of worthy opponents (Jacksonville and Denver) in its last two games. And it didn’t play badly against the Dolphins, another good team.
The big question was how would Hasselbeck do after struggling early in the season and sitting out the last two games with an injury, allowing Trent Dilfer opportunities to come in and direct the Hawks to victories.
Hasselbeck answered the question with a decent performance, making some very good plays and some not-so-good plays. He completed 16 of 28 passes for 230 yards and two touchdowns and no interceptions. Holmgren didn’t give him a glowing review. Nor did he give him a critical one.
Rather than make some remark he would later regret, the coach opted for discretion. “Because that is a very sensitive issue, we’ll talk about it tomorrow,” he said. “On the surface, he did OK. … He was flushed out of the pocket too much, in my way of thinking, but all in all I think he did OK.”
OK might not pump Hasselbeck up too much, but it won’t harm him. OK will also get him another start on Sunday against Washington. And if he continues to make the kind of improvement he showed against the Dolphins, he’ll elicit more than OKs from Holmgren in coming weeks.
This was more like the quarterback Holmgren envisioned, rather than the guy who performed feebly in getting the Seahawks off to a 1-2 start. Hasselbeck had heard chants of “Dil-fer, Dil-fer” in his second start, and he heard them again Sunday when he was wobbling in the second quarter.
“We have the kind of stadium where we’re not a sellout every week and you can hear those things,” he said. “But my focus is really on football and what’s going on on the field. People pay a lot of money to see these games, and they’re entitled to say whatever they want.”
Moments after he was disparaged, he was lustily cheered. Throwing a touchdown pass will do that for you.
The 15-yard toss to Itula Mili, who was on his backside in the front of the end zone, was a milestone for Hasselbeck: his first TD pass as a starter.
“I had been joking with my receivers all week,” he said. “The new Allen Iverson shoe came out on Friday and I said whoever catches a touchdown gets a pair.” So Mili and Darrell Jackson will be sporting new shoes, shoes that cost “more than I would pay (for myself),” the quarterback said.
Dilfer has been fully supportive of Hasselbeck, and he told him before Sunday’s game “don’t flinch,” whether he had five touchdowns or five interceptions. “(He said just to) go out there and play and have fun,” Hasselbeck said, “and that is what I tried to do.”
He made one pass that was simply dazzling. He threw a strike to rookie Koren Robinson on the sideline between two Dolphin defenders for a 15-yard gain to the Miami 20. Two plays later, 6-foot-4, 270-pound defensive end Adewale Ogunleye was hanging onto Hasselbeck’s shirt as the quarterback tried to get away. When he finally did, he hit Jackson for a 17-yard TD that gave the Seahawks a 14-10 lead and further quieted the pro-Dilfer camp.
Oh, and about that fourth-and-four near the end of the game. “That is the kind of play you dream about, bringing the team back in the fourth quarter to win a game,” Hasselbeck said. “But there were (other) opportunities. I had opportunities on second and third down and they stuffed it. They didn’t give us an inch. I guess I didn’t earn the right to have a fourth chance.”
Give him a couple of years.
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