Step 1: Grab a fork.
Step 2: Cook a piece of meat of your choice — steak, pork chop, chicken breast, whatever — until it is very well done.
Step 3: Take said fork, and stick it in the well-done piece of meat. Is it done? You bet it is.
Congratulations, you now have, right there in your own kitchen, a visual representation of the Seahawks’ quarterback controversy.
It’s done. Finished.
Backup quarterback Charlie Whitehurst went to Cleveland with a golden opportunity to show what he could do; with a chance to show he deserved the shot he didn’t get in August to compete for the starting job. Instead, Whitehurst and the offense took a massive leap backwards from his solid showing in relief of an injured Tarvaris Jackson two weeks earlier.
Whitehurst was starting just the third game of his career, but if ever there was a time to prove himself, it was last weekend after having two weeks to prepare for the start. But two weeks after a strong performance against the Giants, Whitehurst couldn’t get the offense going, and the Seahawks managed just three points as he completed 10 of 32 passes for just 97 yards and a quarterback rating of 35.0.
And never has it been clearer this season that there is, in fact, a pretty sizable drop from QB 1 to QB 2 on the Seahawks’ depth chart. No, Tarvaris Jackson may not be the long-term answer at quarterback, but Sunday showed that he is pretty clearly the best answer for now.
So if Jackson gets back in time for Sunday’s home game, and should the offense struggle early on, don’t expect to hear any chants of “Charlie, Charlie, Charlie” echoing from the upper deck of CenturyLink Field. Or if you do, assume Lucy finally held the ball still and let Charlie Brown kick it, and that he drilled that sucker through the uprights.
“He was surprised that it was this difficult because he had played well before, he had done really well in the preseason and all the games he’s been in, he’s done quite well,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said of Whitehurst. “… He’ll grow from it, he’ll be a lot better because of it and I would think he wouldn’t think anything about that.”
And the Seahawks do need Whitehurst to learn from Sunday’s offensive debacle, because even if it is clear who Seattle should be starting at quarterback this season, Jackson’s health will still be a question mark when Seattle returns to the practice field today. Carroll said Monday that he still isn’t sure when Jackson, who has a pectoral strain, will return to practice, so ugly outing or not, Whitehurst needs to be ready to make another start.
“If Charlie’s starting this week, I’d like him to be more comfortable on game day and just be in control of the stuff we try to do and not try to do too much and not try too hard,” Carroll said. “Charlie’s got a good conservative nature about him to take care of the football, and for the most part and that’s good, but we need him to just get comfortable and start playing and whip the ball around a little more than we did.”
Should Whitehurst get the start, he likely will play better than he did last weekend. He’ll be facing another tough defense against Cincinnati, but he’ll be at home, and likely will have more offensive weapons at his disposal than he did last weekend when three other offensive starters were sidelined by injuries. But what Whitehurst won’t do, not based on what we saw last week anyway, is rekindle any debate over who should be the Seahawks quarterback in 2011.
And none of this is to say Whitehurst can’t or won’t someday be a starter in the NFL. Despite having spent six years in the league, he has only made three starts and attempted a pass in four other games, so there is certainly room for growth. What there isn’t room for, not this season anyway, is a quarterback controversy.
Herald Writer John Boyle: jboyle@heraldnet.com. For more Seahawks coverage, check out the Seahawks blog at heraldnet.com/seahawksblog
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