TEMPE, Ariz. – Following a game in which nearly every pass he threw was off target, Matt Hasselbeck stood in the Seattle Seahawks’ locker room late Sunday afternoon and finally hit his mark.
“I take almost all the blame,” the Pro Bowl quarterback said after a 25-17 loss to the Arizona Cardinals on Sunday. “You can put all the blame on me. It was just bad. I feel like I let my teammates down today.”
In the ultimate team game, where all 22 players often share equal blame and credit, Hasselbeck stood alone on an island after one of the worst performances of his NFL career.
The 9-for-24 performance in a 27-3 loss to Philadelphia during the second start of Hasselbeck’s career?
Yeah, Sunday was that bad.
The four-sack, three-interception game in a 2002 rematch with the Eagles the following season?
That looked like Heidi Klum compared to Sunday.
How about the time when Hasselbeck got sacked five times and threw two interceptions in a 2002 loss to Denver?
No, not even that performance could top – or, bottom, as it may be – the effort that Hasselbeck put up Sunday.
It wasn’t just that he threw four interceptions in a game for the first time in his NFL career, but that two of them came on key drives late in the game.
It wasn’t so much that he was off target for most of the game, but that Hasselbeck was even misfiring on screen passes.
By the time it was over, Hasselbeck stood in front of a swarm of microphones and couldn’t find an answer for his forgettable performance.
“I don’t have a reason why,” said Hasselbeck, whose quarterback rating of 18.9 Sunday helped drop his season rating from 82.3 to 69.8. “I really have no answers. I just couldn’t get it going today.”
Not that the performance was all on Hasselbeck. He had three passes dropped – two by Darrell Jackson and another by new acquisition Jerry Rice – and had at least three others that could have been caught if his receivers made necessary adjustments. But more often than not, the passes just weren’t where they were supposed to be.
Not even head coach Mike Holmgren, the quarterback guru, could put a finger on what went wrong with Hasselbeck.
“I have no idea about that,” he said. “But we’ll figure it out, and we will try to fix it.”
By the time the forgettable afternoon was over, Hasselbeck completed just 14 of 41 passes for 195 yards. Thirty of those yards came on a meaningless pass to Jackson on the final play of the first half. Twenty-five more came on a diving reception by Koren Robinson on Seattle’s last drive of the game.
That drive, which began with less than two minutes to go and the Seahawks trailing by eight points, saw Hasselbeck misfire badly on nearly every throw. Other than the completion to Robinson, which had nice touch, Hasselbeck’s three passes were closer to Arizona defenders than anyone wearing a white Seahawks uniform.
His deep pass to Rice nearly got intercepted by cornerback Robert Tate on first down, then Hasselbeck’s next throw bounced off the hands of linebacker Ray Thompson. He completed the third-down pass to Robinson to keep Seattle’s hopes alive, then tried to hit Robinson again but came up empty. The deep pass was behind Robinson, who never turned back, and gave David Macklin an easy opportunity for the game-clinching interception.
“There were a bunch of times I felt like we had a chance to turn it around,” Hasselbeck said of his performance. “Turnovers hurt us. Not capitalizing on third down hurt us. I hurt us.
“It’s really nobody’s fault but mine. I just didn’t get it done.”
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