Seahawks’ Kitna may get boot at end of season

By SCOTT M. JOHNSON

Herald Writer

KIRKLAND – It may have taken 32 NFL starts, but Seattle Seahawks fans are finally starting to get a case of Kitna fever.

Most of them, anyway.

The most visible Seahawks supporter, coach Mike Holmgren, is taking a wait-and-see approach to quarterback Jon Kitna’s future. Although the Central Washington University product has done everything in his power to endure himself to the coach recently, it might be too late to play his way back onto the team.

“Jon Kitna, it is true: he has played courageously in the last few ball games,” Holmgren said Monday, two days after Kitna engineered a comeback win over the AFC West-leading Oakland Raiders. “And that’s one of those decisions that we really have to look at, take some of the emotion out of it after the season is over.”

Not exactly a ringing endorsement for Kitna’s future with the Seahawks. Holmgren was careful not to count Kitna out of the team’s future plans altogether, but he gave no indication that the team’s most experienced quarterback had played his way back into the picture.

Holmgren was also careful not to get too caught up in the moment.

“After throwing the winning touchdown pass in the last 28 seconds, I’m very pleased with the quarterback at that point,” Holmgren said, referring to Saturday’s win. “I don’t take any of those decisions lightly, I really don’t. I know how important it is to Jon and his entire future. I’m just going to try and do what I think is best for the organization after an appropriate cooling off period at the end of the season.”

When asked Monday if he had already made a decision on Kitna, Holmgren gave a one-word reply: “No.”

Yet the chances of Kitna playing another game with the Seahawks beyond this Saturday’s season finale seem remote at best. In a perfect world, he wouldn’t even be playing right now. Holmgren benched him in favor of Brock Huard five weeks into the season, only to see Kitna play in nine of the next 10 games because of Huard’s ongoing injury problems.

Forced to go with Kitna down the stretch, Holmgren has been put in a precarious position: Lately Kitna has done just about everything right.

Since Week 11, Kitna has posted a quarterback rating of 86.0. To put that number in perspective, the highest career rating in Seahawks history is Dave Krieg’s 82.3. Kitna, a free agent at the end of the season, has the franchise’s fourth-best career rating at 76.5.

And Kitna is 7-6 as a starter this season, including four wins in his last six starts.

It leads to an interesting question: Is there anything Kitna can do to win a job with the team next season?

Holmgren isn’t saying. But he repeated a statement Monday that has been the theme of Seattle’s quarterback situation since opening day. When talking about Huard, Holmgren expressed frustration over not being able to evaluate his intangibles in game situations.

“I haven’t had the time with Brock to know those things,” Holmgren said. “I believe I know Jon pretty well.”

At the very least, Kitna has probably played his way into a pretty good contract next season – although it will likely be with another team. His recent success has pushed Kitna into a three-man class of quality free-agent quarterbacks that also includes Washington’s Brad Johnson and Baltimore’s Trent Dilfer.

Kitna, a Tacoma native and CWU product, has often talked about his desire to stay in Seattle, a prospect with odds that only Holmgren seems to know.

At this point, the Seahawks’ coach/general manager is trying not to think too much about the future. With the season finale against Buffalo on Saturday, Holmgren will wait at least one more week before the future begins to take shape.

“I think it’s important to have a plan and believe in your plan, and take some of the emotion out of it,” Holmgren said of the offseason moves. “If you based your decisions for the organization on how you felt after any particular game this year – whether you’re talking about personnel or whatever – you’d be making a big mistake. You can’t base decisions that way, in my opinion.

“We have a vision for where we want to go and how to get there. After the season is over, however the emotions are after our final game, it’s important then to kind of settle back down and look at it correctly. And that’s what we’re going to try to do.”