SEATTLE — Jim Mora was simply answering a question about his team’s center when he suddenly felt the need to touch on a much broader topic.
“As gloomy as I feel, I will say this to you,” Mora said. “The sky is not falling.”
And while the Seahawks coach is right — there are still far too many games left to write off this season, bad start or not — it’s probably not a great sign when a coach feels the need to reaffirm that the sky is still in fact airborne during a postgame press conference in September.
Welcome to Seahawks football 2009, which, as many have pointed out, feels much like Seahawks football 2008.
The Seahawks are 1-2, they’re beat up at key positions, and now they have to travel to Indianapolis for a dreaded 10 a.m. PTD kickoff against a 3-0 team.
After three games last season, the Seahawks were 1-2, having only beaten St. Louis, and spent the first weekend of October traveling east for what turned into a pummeling at the hand of the New York Giants. Three months later, Seattle was putting the wraps on a 4-12 season.
The Seahawks return home for two games before the bye, but then play four of their next five on the road.
So how does a team down several key starters, including possibly its starting quarterback, not look at the current plight as it prepares for the Colts and assume that it is in the early stages of another disastrous season?
“I won’t press the emergency button right now,” cornerback Ken Lucas said, noting the Seahawks have 13 games left.
“I’m taking on the attitude of our head coach,” receiver Nate Burleson said. “He’s obviously upset that we lost the game, just like we are, but at the same time, I’m not going to walk around here depressed, I’m not going to let this affect me. I have to start a new work week, so I’m not going to go hide in my bedroom and cry.”
And Burleson said he’s not allowing all of the negative talk get to him this week.
“We’re not concerned about what’s being said in the papers …” he said. “All we can do is kind of smile at the critics. It’s part of the game, you’re going to have people doubting you, but all we can do is utilize what we’ve got inside this locker room.”
What the Seahawks have to utilize is still in question given the number of injured players, but Mora and his team remain confident that the ship will eventually right itself and that the sky will stay safely overhead.
“We are about to get some really good football players back playing football for us,” Mora said, continuing his “sky is not falling” pep talk. “We’ve just got to weather the storm, and the way you do that is you hang in there together. You look at yourself first and you keep working, and that’s what we’ll do. It’s early in the season, we certainly don’t like the position we’re in at 1-2, that’s not where we want to be, but that’s where we are … We’ll start getting some wins. We’ll start getting some guys back and we’ll start winning some games.”
Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com. For more Seahawks coverage, check out the Seahawks blog at heraldnet.com/seahawksblog
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