KIRKLAND – One day after the season-ending loss at Chicago, fullback Mack Strong was more open to returning for a 15th season with the Seattle Seahawks.
“I have some football left in me,” he told reporters on Monday. “I still feel like I have passion for the game. … I would like to come back, (but) you don’t ever know how (the Seahawks) feel about that. They might want to move in another direction.”
Asked about Strong’s future on Monday, coach Mike Holmgren sounded like he wanted the old veteran back for another year.
“That’s totally up to Mack,” Holmgren said. “He’s so important to us. When we lost him (to a neck stinger) in the game (Sunday), it affected our game.”
After Sunday’s 27-24 loss, Strong was wavering about the possibility of retirement. He said he would “take some time” to think about his future, but apparently he needed less than 24 hours.
“When you have played as long as I have, you get those kinks out rather quickly,” Strong told reporters Monday when asked about his sudden change of direction. “You can’t put your life on hold forever. I will be ready to move forward in any direction, whether it is getting ready to play another season or whether it is getting ready to move on with the rest of my life.”
In case Strong is having any second thoughts about retirement, some of his teammates will be happy to encourage him to stick around.
“You can’t just jump in and talk to him about next year,” running back Shaun Alexander said. “What I’ll do is just say, ‘Hey, me and the wife and the kids want to take you, and your wife and kids out to dinner,’ – probably sometime in February. We’re just going to eat and have a good time.
“He knows that there will be several dinners and several manipulative statements I’ll make about how much I need him.”
Hasselbeck admits injury: Matt Hasselbeck acknowledged the worst-kept secret of the Seahawks’ 2006 season Monday, telling reporters for the first time that he played the final seven weeks with two broken fingers on his non-throwing hand.
Hasselbeck and Holmgren initially played down the injury when the quarterback got hurt in a Nov. 27 win over Green Bay. Back then, Holmgren classified the injury as a bruise and chided the media for “Watergate-type” journalism. Hasselbeck shrugged off the injury even though it was serious enough to require him to wear a glove for protection.
On Monday, one day after the Seahawks’ season officially came to an end, Hasselbeck came clean.
“It wasn’t fun,” Hasselbeck said of the injury. “I had two broken fingers. You appreciate what your teammates go through. I know we had guys on our team that had that same injury that didn’t get the same attention that I got.”
Hasselbeck said the injury would not require surgery. He was non-committal about the possibility of having minor surgery to repair the ligament damage he suffered in his right knee in October.
Disappointing finish: Of the many viewers that had a tough time swallowing Sunday’s loss, cornerback Marcus Trufant might have been the most frustrated.
The injured cornerback had a chance to play in the NFC Championship game, had the Seahawks advanced to play again this weekend.
“That’s what I was shooting for,” Trufant said. “It’s not 100 percent that I would have played, but it would have been real close. I probably would have been out there. I would have tried hard to get out there.”
Trufant suffered a high ankle sprain in the Dec. 24 loss to San Diego and missed the last three games.
Still hurting: Trufant wasn’t the only Seahawk still mourning on Monday.
Defensive end Bryce Fisher said the 27-24 loss to Chicago is “going to probably stick with me longer than the Super Bowl did.”
Linebacker Julian Peterson said he was “heartbroken because I know, as a whole, we dominated the whole game.”
Oops: Holmgren confirmed that the mistimed snap from center helped foil a key fourth-down play in the fourth quarter of Sunday’s loss.
Center Chris Spencer did not hear the snap count and reacted only after his teammates moved, but no false-start penalty was called. The result was a bobbled snap and a running play that saw Alexander get dropped behind the line of scrimmage.
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