Holmgren gives team time off

KIRKLAND — The Seattle Seahawks came out of a two-week funk on Sunday, and now they’ll get two weeks to get funky.

With their annual bye coming this Sunday, the Seahawks will get to bask in the 33-6 win over the St. Louis Rams for an extra week.

“This is a great, great win, (and) a great time for a win,” fullback Leonard Weaver said after Sunday’s victory over the Rams. “It’s always better to win before you go into a bye.”

Adding to the celebration was Monday’s news that coach Mike Holmgren would give the players the entire week off. It’s the third year in a row that he gave them an extended vacation.

“Right now, they’ve been pushing pretty hard for seven weeks — longer than that — and it’s OK to get away and kind of refresh, recharge the batteries,” Holmgren said. “Around the league, more teams are (taking time off) than they used to do it.”

Holmgren added that the week off was not necessarily a reward for Sunday’s victory, and he’s not going to let the emotion wipe out some of the concerns that plagued this team for much of the regular season.

Through the first seven weeks of 2007, the Seahawks (4-3) have been both good and bad — depending on the Sunday. And that, more than anything, is what Holmgren is trying to fix.

“You look at the film, any one game, you’ll see some really good things,” he said, “(and) some things that you scratch your head on because I think they are things we should do better, and we’re not.

“And then you see some really things that have hurt us, badly.”

Among the other areas of concern:

n The running game: On Monday, Holmgren cautioned against putting too much blame on the shoulders of running back Shaun Alexander. The offensive line has not been giving the former Pro Bowler enough running room, and the lack of a running game has made it hard to sustain drives.

Alexander might be part of the problem, but Holmgren maintains that he is only a small part of it.

n Defensive letdowns: The inconsistency of the defense has been most maddening to Holmgren.

“They’ve shown flashes of being very good,” Holmgren said, “and then sometimes where we can’t do much on third downs, things like that.”

Holmgren pinpointed the pass rush as the core of the problem. When Seattle is putting pressure on opposing quarterbacks, as it did in Sunday’s win over St. Louis, the defense is hitting on all cylinders. When there’s no pass rush, teams have burned the Seahawks’ D.

n Short-yardage game: The Seahawks have had so much trouble converting in short-yardage situations that they took Alexander out on two separate occasions during Sunday’s first half. The loss of fullback Mack Strong, and the overall struggles in run blocking, have made this an area of concern.

Seattle has failed to convert 18 times this season when needing three yards or less. In the past four games, the Seahawks are just 7 of 19 in those situations.

But Holmgren is not overly discouraged by the struggles over the first seven weeks.

“I really believe our best football, particularly on offense, is ahead of us,” he said on Monday.

The Seahawks expect to get starting receivers Deion Branch and D.J. Hackett back from injury after the bye week, and the mistakes that plagued the special teams unit early in the year seem to be a thing of the past.

The most important statistic, of course, involves where the Seahawks are positioned in the NFC West. Despite some rocky games and obvious problems, Seattle is still sitting in a familiar spot atop the division.

“I felt our record should be a little bit better than it is now,” Holmgren said. “My good friend, Bill Parcells, once said, ‘you are what you are.’ And our record is what it is.

“The fact is, we are leading the division.”

The Seahawks return to the practice field next Monday, while they travel to Cleveland the following weekend for a Nov. 4 game against the Browns.

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