Good enough to win
SEATTLE – It was better, but clearly left room for improvement.
The Seattle Seahawks didn’t take long to suggest they wouldn’t repeat last week’s disaster against the Green Bay Packers. But it also was plain that Seattle is no obvious Super Bowl contender at this point in the preseason.
Of course, it doesn’t have to be.
The Seahawks were good enough to pull out a 30-13 preseason victory Saturday night before a crowd announced at 66,723 at Qwest Field.
“You can’t always get locked into the score of a (preseason) game,” Seattle coach Mike Holmgren said. “But you do have to evaluate if you played better. I think we did that tonight.”
On the Seahawks’ plus side, Rocky Bernard recovered a Minnesota Vikings fumble on the game’s first play, which led to a Seahawks field goal.
On the next series, the Seattle defense turned back the Vikings on three plays. That set up Nate Burleson’s 53-yard punt return, which led to another field goal.
The Seahawks showed up for the game crisp and ready to roll. The first-unit offense and defense played the first half and mostly found success, as did special teams.
They needed to. No one wanted to relive last week’s practices.
Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren let his blistering annoyance with the Packer parody be known all week in practice. Had the Seahawks come up with a similarly weak effort, he might have been compelled to run goal posts until Wednesday.
“It was a good third game, hopefully for both teams,” Holmgren said.
As much improvement as Seattle showed, the Seahawks’ offense also showed it has some work to do before the regular-season opener Sept. 9 against Tampa Bay. It had trouble finishing drives with touchdowns and the running game wasn’t overpowering.
“We expect to be better than that,” Seahawks quarterback Matt Hasselbeck said. “We expect to get touchdowns.”
Hasselbeck was 12 for 17 passing for 129 yards, playing only the first half. But he threw a bad second-quarter interception to Antoine Winfield. Three plays later, the Vikings scored on a gimmick play in which receiver Bobby Wade hit Visanthe Shiancoe with a 6-yard pass to cut the Seahawk lead to 9-7.
“The interception was a poor decision,” Holmgren said. “(Hasselbeck) got kind of blocked off by the linebacker there. All in all, I thought he handled the game pretty well.”
Hasselbeck redeemed himself on the Seahawks’ next possession, a 9-play, 74-yard TD drive in which he was 5 for 5 passing for 53 yards. Three throws went to tight end Marcus Pollard for 36 yards. Shaun Alexander bulled over from a yard out to give Seattle a 16-7 advantage.
“That made me feel better about the day,” Hasselbeck said.
A late Vikings field goal cut the Seattle lead to 16-10 at the half.
The defense showed a few new wrinkles, mainly in the form of rookie corner Josh Wilson, who deftly made his way to Minnesota’s backfield regularly to put pressure on quarterback Tavaris Jackson. Wilson also had fine moments in pass coverage and on special teams, on which he downed a punt on the Minnesota 2-yard line and returned a kickoff 38 yards.
The secondary, though, got burned in the second quarter, when Jackson hit Wade with a 35-yard pass to the Seahawk 8, which led to Wade’s TD pass to Shiancoe. It also got a scare late in the half, when corner Marcus Trufant allowed a certain interception on a deep ball slip through his fingers and fall into the mitts of a prone Wade on the Seahawks 6.
A review, however, revealed Wade bobbled the ball to the turf and the pass was ruled incomplete.
A 57-yard scoring pass from Seneca Wallace to Ben Obomanu highlighted the second half for the Seahawks, who took a 23-13 lead on the play, with 13 seconds left in the third quarter.
Wallace was 5 for 7 passing for 77 yards and a touchdown pass.
Cornerback Kevin Hobbs returned an interception 39 yards for a touchdown in the fourth quarter.