Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren's vacation home in the Valley has a fresh coat of paint and some new shrubs planted, so it's sure to look spiffy when Holmgren and his wife Kathy arrive soon after the season ends.
With his injury-riddled team 2-7, Holmgren couldn't be blamed if he wanted to accelerate his plans to take a "sabbatical"
from coaching after this season. This isn't, after all, the Harley ride into the sunset that he desired.
"Yeah, it has been disappointing,"
Holmgren said in a conference call this week. "I'm not going to say discouraging, but it's been disappointing. I had a vision of my last year going a little differently. I think everyone here did as well, because we had a good football team on paper coming into the season and sometimes in this business, crazy stuff happens. And we got bit by a very unusual set of circumstances."
Receivers Nate Burleson, Ben Obomanu and Logan Payne are on injured reserve. Receiver Deion Branch has played in only game but is expected back for Sunday's contest against the Cardinals. Defensive end Patrick Kerney is out after having shoulder surgery. Quarterback Matt Hasselbeck is expected to return after missing five games because of knee and back problems.
Several other starters have missed games here and there. As a result, the Seahawks, who have won the NFC West four straight years, find themselves four games behind the 6-3 Cardinals.
It's been a season of transition for the Seahawks. Holmgren announced last January that 2008 would be his last in Seattle, and a month later assistant head coach Jim Mora was named his successor. A few assistants, most notably quarterbacks coach Jim Zorn, left. In the middle of training camp, the Seahawks moved into a new 200,000 square foot training facility on the shores of Lake Washington.
"There has been a lot of change and some of it has nothing to do with how we play on the football field,"
Hasselbeck said.
To compensate for the losses at receiver, the Seahawks first turned to the run, but opponents quickly started stacking the line of scrimmage. Lately, they haven't been able to mount much of anything on offense, and the pass defense has been susceptible to big plays.
But Holmgren sounded optimistic, not discouraged this week. He's at least getting some key players back, and with seven games remaining, he's not quite ready to move to sunnier climes.
"We kind of got hit by the perfect storm, unfortunately,"
Holmgren said. "They're pros, though, and I have a good group of men playing on this team and I told them, 'You don't have to worry about me. I'm going until the last game, the last play. I'm going to be coaching the same way so let's all have some fun down the stretch.' "
That's the philosophy Holmgren has tried to impart upon his players. At one point, he's compared this season to his days as a high school coach when his teams were overmatched. At another juncture, he told players about the construction job he hated as a teenager, but that he didn't quit because he didn't want to disappoint his father. The message was to work through disappointment and unhappiness.
Holmgren, who has taken three teams to the Super Bowl, isn't bemoaning the imperfections of his last season in Seattle.
"You know what? I've been very, very fortunate to do what I've done, and coached the game I loved and all that good stuff,"
he said. "I don't have any regrets. I made the right decision, the correct decision, for me and my family, and I feel bad for the organization that we couldn't have done better in the first half of the season."
