Coming to you live from my daughter's hometown of Olympia, Washington, we've assembled a veritable dentist's waiting room of external Seahawks articles:
- Punter Tom Rouen, released by the Seahawks last week, has been signed by the San Francisco 49ers. A beautiful city, San Francisco. Lots of great restaurants, stunning parks, friendly citizens, fabulous indie art house theaters. Lots of things to do to take Tom's mind off the fact that he's playing with the Niners.
(Full disclosure: I grew up in Sacramento, reared as a Niner fan. Their current junior varsity status saddens me a little but... well, I'm not exactly wading through the Mad Max slums humming Kurt Weill tunes, cursing the sting of light, y'know?)
- One of the things I've learned after being on this job for ten days is that I will nurture a constant desire to write as well as the people on Seahawks.net. Ryan Davis recalls the career of anti-icon quarterback Dave "Mudbone" Krieg, and sneaks in a telling description of the peculiar masochism of being a Seahawks fan in the 80's and 90's.
- Also on Scout.com, Scott Eklund makes note of the diminishing market opportunities in the Hawks' search for a veteran backup QB. Not that the Hawks are dissatistfied with current backup Seneca Wallace. Far from it, in fact: Wallace, who played wide receiver at Iowa State, is often touted as the best overall athlete on the team. I'm still shaking my head in amazement over his out-of-nowhere 28-yard pass reception the NFC Championship game.
The Hawks want to exploit more of Seneca's talents, a yen which has hastened their search for a veteran backup in case they lose a link in their QB chain. Eklund reveals that Kerry Collins and Jay Fielder were on the chalkboard, but have signed with other teams or are about to be. So it looks at this point like last year's chain of Hasselbeck-Seneca-Greene will remain intact. We got some modest success out of that lineup in 2005, didn't we?
(Seneca Wallace is also from Sacramento. Seeing as how Sacramento's already gotten two mentions this week, I suppose I should send a shout-out. Here it is: Hello, Sacramento.)
(That's all. What, you wanted a floor show?)
- Not to spoil the feel-good purpose of this site, but Peter Callaghan of the Tacoma News-Tribune questions whether the Hawks' new training facility in Renton was truly privately funded, or whether owner Paul Allen pulled some accounting sleight of hand to disguise public funding. Here's a tangent:
Athletic directors tell university presidents, boosters and legislatures that they need "state-of-the-art" facilities in order to recruit the best players. So tens of millions of dollars are spent on training centers that serve to perpetuate the players' sense of superiority and further isolate them from real students.Mr. Callaghan has challenged Allen's books before (scroll to "Don?t forget the 13th Man...")
But colleges don't pay their players; pro football does. College recruits might succumb to bells and whistles, but I thought paying pro athletes millions of dollars and making them mostly exempt from the criminal code was enough to keep them happy. Now we're fed the line that to really succeed you need locker rooms so large you can't see from end to end because of the curvature of the Earth.
I got no comment. Freedom of the press. Let's move on:
- Oh, remember that ESPN Ultimate Depth Chart? They summed up the whole thing a few minutes ago on ESPN. Seattle's final overall ranking is... #2.
#1? Carolina Panthers. Figures. If you have followed the sports media of the last two months, then you have seen the apparent invulnerability and inevitability of the Panthers. They have, undoubtedly, won the 2006 Pundit Championship. My utmost congratulations. We'll see you in the fall when we throw balls around instead of Excel sheets.