Entering Seahawks’ Ring of Honor, Matt Hasselbeck thanks Mike Holmgren — and Pete Carroll
Most know of the lifetime bond Matt Hasselbeck has with Mike Holmgren.
Hasselbeck will forever appreciate his coach for trading with Green Bay to make Brett Favre’s unproven backup, a guy who wasn’t even invited to the NFL combine out of college, Seattle’s first Super Bowl quarterback 20 years ago.
Monday night, at halftime of the Seahawks’ home game against the New Orleans Saints, Hasselbeck will be inducted into the team’s Ring of Honor. Holmgren will join him with his Ring of Honor ceremony next week, at Seattle’s next home game with Jacksonville on Oct. 31.
“It is a huge, huge honor for me just even that Mike Holmgren is being inducted. I take so much pride in that because I know what he meant to my career,” Hasselbeck, now 46 and an ESPN NFL commentator, said via video call this past week. “When he was in Green Bay coaching Brett Favre, it never felt like he was coaching me. I felt like he was coaching Brett and I was allowed to be there.
“I learned first-hand of what I saw, how hard it is to be coached by him. The standard that he set was so high and such a challenge that when you get to game day, the opponent isn’t really the toughest part of your week. The toughest part of your week is the Wednesday, Thursday, Friday practice with Mike Holmgren when the football is literally not allowed to touch the ground.
“I’m just incredibly grateful that number one, Mike Holmgren drafted me and I went to such an incredible quarterback coach as a head coach, and number two, that he then chose to trade for me when I hadn’t really done anything in the NFL.”
But few realize Hasselbeck’s bond with Pete Carroll.
Carroll was the last act of Hasselbeck’s 10 years with the Seahawks, from the 2001 through ‘10 seasons. Carroll arrived in January 2010 to completely overhaul Seattle’s franchise. The Seahawks had sunk to 4-12 in Holmgren’s final season of 2008 and 5-11 in Jim Mora’s only year coaching them, in 2009.
Carroll arrived with his music-blaring, Will Ferrell-and-Snoop Dogg-on-the-sidelines, players-first spirit from winning national championships at USC.
The one piece — just about the only piece, really — he wanted to keep from the Holmgren era was Hasselbeck.
Hasselbeck was a three-time Pro Bowl quarterback then. He had played in Seattle’s only Super Bowl, at the end of the 2005 season for Holmgren, the Bill Walsh disciple and league’s ultimate quarterback guru.
Hasselbeck wasn’t exactly fired up to deal with Carroll starting over in Seattle at age 35, or with the coach’s complete franchise makeover. And certainly not Carroll’s all-sunny, college vibe during the first months of his new coach’s tenure in the offseason of early 2010.
“I loved it,” Hasselbeck said, “and I didn’t want to love it.
“I was about to be 35 years old, that’s all we were talking about: 35 years old. We’ve got this coach coming in from college. Everything was very upbeat, peppy, rah-rah.”
The first day of his Seahawks coaching career in front of his new players, Carroll showed a team video. It had highlights of Hasselbeck’s and Holmgren’s greatest moments from what up to then had been the best era ever of NFL football in Seattle.
“He said, ‘All right. That’s great. It’s in the past. I don’t ever want to talk about it again,’” Hasselbeck said last week. “’We honor it. We love it. We just spent 25 minutes watching it. We’re moving on. We’re painting every wall. We’re taking down every picture.’”
The first minute of the first practice day on the field that offseason, Carroll had Hasselbeck and every offensive player, starter and backup, veteran and rookie alike, running a bag drill. It was shuffling and high-stepping through blocking backs laying on the grass. Coaches jumped up and down screaming and whooping like the field was on fire and the players were kids at recess.
“’Quarterbacks, linemen, receivers, to start every practice we’re going to do bag drills. We’re going to sprint,’ It was all this kind of stuff.” Hasselbeck said.
“I really, at the time, expected to not like it.
“I absolutely loved it.”
Carroll knew he had to connect with — really, convert — Hasselbeck to get the entire team to buy into the USC, rah-rah act he was selling to NFL players. It was a job almost everyone in the league expected to fail, as Carroll had failed in shorter, earlier stints coaching the New York Jets and New England Patriots in the 1990s.
Hasselbeck was, to Carroll, a resister.
“Honestly, I’ve learned this over the years: whenever you come into a new program, there’s always resisters. There’s a resistance, because of the change,” Carroll said Saturday. “People are comfortable with how things were. It’s really important to identify the resisters and figure that out. If they’re the who-sayers, then you better connect with them and make some sense with them.”
Hasselbeck was the largest who-sayer on the 2010 Seahawks, the one with the most tenure and clout, the one remaining player along with then-30-year-old Marcus Trufant who had played in the Super Bowl for Seattle.
“He was really important to me,” Carroll said of Hasselbeck. “I was talking to him a lot through the meetings and stuff because I needed him to come along with us.”
He likened it to when he became the new defensive coordinator for the 1995 San Francisco 49ers coming off their Super Bowl win.
“There was a time when I went to San Francisco and Kenny (Seahawks defensive coordinator Ken Norton Jr.) was one of the captains and Gary Plummer and Tim McDonald and all those great players, Merton Hanks. I had to win them over,” Carroll said “They had just won a world championship. That’s a great challenge in those meetings rooms and the work.
“I take a lot of pride in going after it and competing to get that done, because the sooner you get it done, the better. Kenny was a real pain in the butt, to tell you the truth.”
Hasselbeck? Not as much.
“I loved playing for Pete. I learned so much,” the Boston-area native said. “The mindset that he brought to our team was really something unique and special.
“I remember the first team meeting where he showed a video. The very first time he showed a video was of Kobe Bryant. I grew up a Celtics fan. The last thing I wanted to do was hear from a Laker. But he just talked about mindset, and he talked about being a competitor and over trying. All of this stuff, and I’m not sure if the whole room got it, but when I listened to it, he made perfect sense.
“It actually gave me clarity with our Super Bowl, Super Bowl 40 that we lost (with Holmgren, to Pittsburgh in February 2006). I still hadn’t really processed it at that point, and it just clicked. I understood it. It was just things like that.”
Carroll got Hasselbeck to buy in, and those 2010 Seahawks somehow won the NFC West for the first time since 2007 — with a 7-9 record.
“I really appreciated the competitiveness of everything that he did,” Hasselbeck said of Carroll. “Was it always smooth and perfect? No. Did I nail it right away? No.
“Pete’s number-one rule was: it’s all about the football. We don’t turn the ball over, we win.
“I started turning the ball over more than I had ever turned the ball over in my entire life.”
Carroll was on his way to the best decade of Seahawks football, Seattle’s first Super Bowl title three years later and an ongoing run of eight playoff appearances in nine years. After Hasselbeck’s final season in Seattle of 2010, Carroll had Tarvaris Jackson as quarterback for the 2011 season.
Then he drafted Russell Wilson in the spring of 2012.
“I go back, we owe so much to that first team because we did, kind of in remarkable fashion, win the division then got rolling in the playoffs,” Carroll said.
“It was a pretty exciting time.”
It was franchise-defining.
In the 2010 Seahawks’ first playoff game, in the wild-card round against New Orleans at what was then called Qwest Field in Seattle, Marshawn Lynch went on his wild, famous “Beast Quake” touchdown run, and the Seahawks upset the defending Super Bowl-champion Saints.
One of the first teammates to celebrate with Lynch in the end zone after that iconic run was his lead blocker way down the field on the famous play: Hasselbeck.
“People ask me what year are you most proud of in your career, I usually tell them that 2010 season,” said Hasselbeck, who retired following the 2015 season, following two years with Tennessee and three as a backup to Andrew Luck with Indianapolis after that last season with Seattle and Carroll. “That was such a challenge, and to finish strong the way that we did, to host that playoff game, to win it was just an incredible feeling. Our crowd was so huge in that game.
“If you were to ask my kids and my family of all their memories of our time in the NFL, I think that game would be the game that we would all mention. It was my last home game in Seattle. I did not know it was going to be my last home game in Seattle, but it ended up being that. My kids had never been on the field right after a game like that. That was just never something we did, and it was actually one of my teammates’ wives probably listened to talk radio and was like, ‘Oh this is probably going to be his last time here in Seattle.’”
So there was Sarah Hasselbeck with her kids on Qwest Field, celebrating their dad the night Seattle shook through Hasselbeck’s final playoff win.
“She took my kids down to the railing, found a police officer who put the kids out on the field,” Hasselbeck said. “And the end result ended up being in my last home game in Seattle, I got to walk off with my kids, with my son on my shoulders, holding my girls’ hands. Taking in the amazing atmosphere and waving to the crowd, waving to my wife in the stands.
“You just really couldn’t dream it up any better. That was incredibly special, and I didn’t even know it at the time.”
This story was originally published October 24, 2021 at 12:26 PM.
