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Brady HendersonESPN
RENTON, Wash. — Matt Hasselbeck remembers seeing it everywhere, hearing it everywhere: seven and nine.
It was the end of the 2010 regular season, coach Pete Carroll’s first with the Seattle Seahawks and Hasselbeck’s last as Seahawks quarterback. They had just beaten the St. Louis Rams in Week 17 to claim the NFC West title and become the first team in the Super Bowl era to win its division with a sub.-500 record.
To the dismay of many NFL observers, that meant a first-round meeting with the New Orleans Saints, who had earned a wild-card bid at 11-5 after winning the Super Bowl the previous season. Talking heads groaned that a 7-9 team didn’t deserve to win its division, let alone host a playoff game.
What’s more: the Saints had beaten the Seahawks by two touchdowns in New Orleans two months earlier.
“So we knew how good they were,” Hasselbeck, now an analyst at ESPN, recalled this week. “They were really good, and we knew we were 7-9.”
Until Carroll got them to believe they weren’t.
“Seven and nine was everywhere and Pete’s slogan was, ‘We are not 7-9. We are zero and zero. And guess what everyone else is? Zero and zero,'” said Hasselbeck, who will be inducted into the Seahawks’ Ring of Honor when they host New Orleans on Monday night (8:15 p.m. ET, ESPN) as 4.5-point underdogs.
“Whether we were naïve to believe it or not, we thought we were zero and zero. We were not 7-9. We were zero and zero, just like everyone else. We believed it. We were in. He had us so focused on it. Maybe we were suckers, but we loved it. We were in on it.”
Eleven years after his team pulled off one of the greatest playoff upsets in NFL history, Carroll has another improbable task in front of him. The Seahawks are 2-4, 4½ games behind the division-leading Arizona Cardinals and 3½ behind the second-place Los Angeles Rams. They have a suspect defense and a backup quarterback in Geno Smith for at least two more games, while Russell Wilson recovers from…
Source : espn
