Inept Seahawks fit right in

SEATTLE – At least your weekends are your own again.

No deluding yourselves that Sundays will salvage the football Armageddon that has become Saturday afternoon in our corner of the world. No going to work Monday hoarse and hung over – not when you can start sleeping it off midway through the second quarter.

No need to live and breathe it when all the teams you follow have officially flat-lined.

The last, slim hope that the Seattle Seahawks had anything to offer us this season died with a dropped pass on third down a few plays into the second quarter on Sunday afternoon, though it’s likely that a catch would have only postponed the inevitable 26-7 licking laid on by the Philadelphia Eagles, dropping Seattle to 2-6 this NFL season.

“Half the season left,” running back Julius Jones said. “Ten-and-six sounds real good to me.”

Well, yes it does.

A winning lotto ticket, a year on a Caribbean beach, slimeball CEOs getting jail instead of bailouts and an unlimited tab at your favorite saloon all sound real good, too – and all of them are likely to happen before the Seahawks finish this year 10-6.

Hurt, under-explosive and over-exposed, the Seahawks had one bullet in the gun Sunday, fired it on their first offensive play and hit the bull’s eye – then spent the rest of the day trying to make Philadelphia think there was more where that came from.

And there wasn’t. Not then, not now and not for the rest of the season.

“It breaks my heart,” said Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren – and he said it more than once.

His specific reference point was a defense that bellied up without two All-Pro players – end Patrick Kerney and linebacker Lofa Tatupu – and with but two exceptions managed to keep the Eagles out of the end zone. But eventually, every defense will have to gamble with a blitz or two, and if the gamble goes bad then good defensive backs will be made to look vulnerable.

“And we can’t score enough points to help them enough,” Holmgren said.

That was pretty obvious when, after the pass Koren Robinson turned into a club-record 90-yard touchdown with the game 109 seconds old, the Seahawks went three-and-out on five of their other six first-half possessions. On the other, tight end John Carlson flubbed a third-down pass that conceivably could have led to a double-digit Seattle lead.

The passing attack remains the NFL’s worst. The running game that was supposed to mitigate that problem has totaled 125 yards the past two games.

Oh, maybe against a really stinko team like San Francisco, last week’s victim in a fool’s gold win, the Seattle offense can make it happen. But not against teams even as modestly accomplished as the Eagles, who have failed to make the playoffs two of the past three seasons and entered the day last in the NFC East.

And certainly not by taking cues in inefficiency from the calamities going on across town and across the state.

Some of this is inevitable. Backup quarterback Seneca Wallace isn’t going to be able to manage a game in the same manner as Matt Hasselbeck – not with the Value Village receiving corps the Seahawks now field. Still, flipping a shovel pass 15 feet in the air like a wedding garter while running for his life is a sure sign of frantic, if not panic.

So is taking a timeout after an incompletion, or spiking the ball on third down.

But it wasn’t just Wallace. Down 10 points in the third quarter, the Seahawks got to the Eagles 34-yard line before stalling. Apparently, 51 yards was out of kicker Orlindo Mare’s range this day, so Holmgren decided to go for it on fourth-and-10. But then guard Mike Wahle – whose season has been defined by the untimely penalty – flinched for a false start. Then Jordan Kent didn’t get on the field with the punt team and the Seahawks took another 5-yarder.

“It looked bad,” Holmgren admitted. “Even when you are a little short-handed, I wanted things to work right. I want to do things correctly. That was as big a frustration to me as anything today. There were a couple of times where we looked sloppy and that I can’t tolerate.

“There were a couple of instances today where it looked like, heck, if I was sitting in the stands I would ask, ‘What the heck are they doing?’ That leaves a bad taste in my mouth.”

Well, it’s a bad taste sort of season all the way around. This weekend, the state’s three major football programs – college and pro – were outscored 140-7. The Seahawks maintain the illusion of being competitive, but with a caveat: They can’t waste a single chance, or it’s curtains.

“It’s tough to play the game that way, because no one is perfect,” Holmgren said, “and you are counting on a group to be as perfect as they can be. And football usually doesn’t work that way.”

In our state, football doesn’t work at all this year.