Seahawks Face A Critical Test Veterans Must Step Forward And Drive Away Their Doubts

On an August afternoon still splashed with sunlight and anticipation, Seattle Seahawks offensive coordinator Bob Bratkowski looked into the season and worried about the darkness. Somewhere, he warned, his players would be tested. Somewhere, they would have to find their hearts.

He couldn’t have seen this day coming so soon. Nobody did. The thought was that the team with all the new free agents, with all the players who had been to Super Bowls and league championship games would not lose its first game 41-3 to the team that was the worst in the NFL last year. But it happened and here is where we learn about the Seahawks.

“There was going to be a time when things didn’t go right and our veterans were going to have to step up,” Bratkowski said. “We’re going to find out this week exactly who is going to have the pull on this team.”

Seattle spent millions this year, hoping it brought in the players who would make this team win. Now that the first wave of adversity has hit and the shock is settling in on the Seahawks, the first twinges of doubt are starting to appear. Part of the justification in signing so many players who had been to the playoffs was to make sure the feelings of losing didn’t linger.

After last Sunday’s loss, defensive end Michael Sinclair said “winning is contagious but so is losing.” And the last several seasons, it seems, the Seahawks have found just enough losing to fall short. This year was the one that was supposed to wipe away that feeling.

“This is a team that always seems to get close but can never get over the hump,” says new defensive end Dan Saleaumua, who played the Seahawks twice a season for eight years while with Kansas City.

“The big thing now is you’ve got a lot of older guys who have been on the other side of the mountain… . It’s nice over there. I’ve gotten to see it but I’ve never touched the grass. With the guys we’ve got, there’s no way we shouldn’t be there.”

Now is the time to see their will. Once again, Seattle’s season has started on the edge of an abyss. A loss today to the Denver Broncos could again topple this franchise into a hole that could be too deep to climb back out.

Here’s where we find out how the Seahawks respond. The coaches didn’t hold special meetings or throw things around the locker room. They’ve left the motivation to the players. This is their game, their team. It’s time to see who responds.

“You find out a lot about guys you’ve never played with before,” said new quarterback Warren Moon.

As the quarterback, he is the one the players will look to most. In some ways, they already have. He was the one who went to the veteran players on the team after an exhibition loss to San Francisco and mentioned concerns he had about the way the players were approaching games. It was an internal suggestion, a gentle attempt to push the players unaccustomed to winning in a different direction.

But even Moon, who played 10 years in Houston and three in Minnesota, is unsure just how far he can go in imposing himself on this team. He came in here as a backup to John Friesz, something he never had been before, and now he has been thrust into a starting role because of Friesz’s broken thumb. In many ways, Moon is doing things he never has done before.

“I’m learning this week all about this team,” he said. “I’m just starting to learn how it will bounce back. The only thing I have to compare (the Jet loss) to is the San Francisco game. But we actually came back in that game. Maybe if it was a regular-season game, the score would have been worse, because their first team was beating ours pretty good.”

This is the problem with bringing in so many players to change an attitude. They aren’t familiar enough with their teammates to understand how to address the bad times. That’s what this week has been about - learning how the mood of a locker room can darken, and trying to find ways to make the losing disappear.

The best advice Moon could give his new teammates after last Sunday was to look around the rest of the league and see which other teams were blown out and take comfort in knowing they weren’t the only ones. Then the healing could begin.

“In my four years in Pittsburgh, we only won one opening game,” said Chad Brown, the free-agent linebacker who played in the Super Bowl two seasons ago. “But we had a confidence in knowing you will be all right. We knew we’d be fine.”