Laying Doubts To Rest
Training camps, we know, are games of chance.
First chances and second chances. Last chances. Fat chances.
Monitoring the prevailing winds the past seven months, we might have suspected that at least one of those circumstances could apply to Mike Pritchard’s status with the Seattle Seahawks. Come to find out, the veteran wide receiver is taking no chances.
The approach is flawless, if not foolproof.
“They have to make decisions,” he said of the men who run Seattle’s football franchise, “and as a player, you just want to make the decision hard on them.”
And how does he do that?
“Don’t make mistakes,” he said. “Don’t screw up.”
Hey, it could work.
If nothing else, Pritchard is no longer the afterthought he had oddly become by the middle of the 1998 season - and an expensive afterthought, at that. He is more than holding his own in a battle with Sean Dawkins, whose acquisition in April set off the beeping that suggested Pritchard’s future with the Seahawks was running low on juice.
“I didn’t feel that way,” Pritchard shrugged, “but I think the media wrote me off a little bit.
“We did pick up a great receiver in Sean Dawkins and I think the media automatically assumed I was on my way out because I’m getting older. But I still feel good and I still feel I can be part of something special - and I still feel we’re on the verge of that here.”
National Football League depth charts are never etched in anything more solid than sand, but Pritchard is still Seattle’s No. 2 receiver behind the AWOL Joey Galloway. And whether he stays there or whether Dawkins’ considerable gifts move him ahead hardly matters.
In either case, the Seahawks are better served at the position.
Pritchard was No. 2 all last season, too, but it was a hollow distinction, as anonymous as B.B. King’s backup guitar. He caught 58 passes in that maddeningly mediocre 8-8 season, but felt anything but instrumental.
“In the off-season, you look back and ask yourself what you could have done that could have propelled us into the playoffs and that’s what you try to work on for next year,” he said.
And what did he come up with?
“I don’t know - maybe blocking,” he said. “I really wasn’t in a situation where they were throwing me the ball. I don’t know if they ever looked at me last year as a guy they wanted to throw the ball to.”
Of course, early on it didn’t seem as if the Seahawks wanted to throw to anyone - the in-house theory being that a power-running game was the on-ramp to the playoffs. In the first half of the season, Pritchard caught just 22 passes, and had only one game with more than 60 yards in receptions.
“We couldn’t get our identity straight,” Pritchard acknowledged.
Not that there won’t be hiccups this year, too, but the ad campaign featuring the determined mien of Mike Holmgren and the “It’s Now Time” tagline would suggest that identity is no longer much of an issue for the Seahawks.
And surely the “now” part must appeal to Pritchard.
Once one of the bright young talents of the NFL, he is pushing 30, his career at something of a crossroads. A first-round draft choice of Atlanta out of the University of Colorado in 1991, Pritchard had snagged 201 passes before he turned 25; only four other NFL receivers reached that milestone in three years. A draft-day trade in 1994 back to Denver seemed a perfect reward, but less than a month into the season he suffered a lacerated kidney falling on the point of the football in practice, and suddenly his life was turned upside down.
He missed the rest of the ‘94 season and fell out of favor with new coach Mike Shanahan in ‘95, when he was slowed by a knee injury. His $2 million salary became a liability. And his good-guy stature in the community took a hit when he was the driver involved in a car-pedestrian accident, and he was cited for driving while impaired.
Signed by Seattle in 1996, he played third fiddle for a year before moving ahead of Brian Blades on the depth chart in 1997. A 64-reception season followed - and then his star stalled. The signing of the 6-foot-4 Dawkins must have seemed like a bad flashback; Shanahan, too, preferred receivers taller than the 5-11 Pritchard. And you could almost see Holmgren thinking how he could better spend the $1.3 million Pritchard’s contract took up under the salary cap.
Still, through the spring and summer minicamps, Pritchard didn’t budge. The used-up Blades was cut in early June, and later that month erratic James McKnight was dealt to Dallas.
“When they picked up Sean, it wasn’t a letdown for me or a motivating factor,” Pritchard said. “I always compete. And I knew when the coaching change was made, I had to show them what I can do in order just to make the team. Didn’t really matter who I was competing against.
“You never want to spend much time trying to figure out where you stand. You just try to learn what they’re teaching you and get better. Anything to keep from making their decision easy.”
Because once you do, you don’t stand a chance.