Time for some payback
ST. LOUIS – An NFL rivalry isn’t really a rivalry until one team prevails on the other’s home turf.
Seattle Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren made that proclamation long before the St. Louis Rams performed heart-removal surgery on his team at Qwest Field back in early October.
The Rams’ ability to transform a 27-10, fourth-quarter deficit into a 33-27 overtime victory remade a pretend rivalry into a budding one. The Seahawks can make the antipathy mutual by rubbing the Rams’ noses in the mess they’re making of this season.
Back-to-back losses have left the Rams one game behind Seattle in the NFC West division. For both teams, a loss today might prove more damaging than a victory would prove helpful.
“It’s a big game for a lot of reasons,” Holmgren said this week as Seattle’s annual trip to the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis awaited.
The Seahawks haven’t won in St. Louis since 1997, five years before NFL realignment forced the Rams and San Francisco 49ers to share their division with Seattle and Arizona.
The Seahawks’ latest chance to eradicate their St. Louis blues comes today, but make no mistake: This game’s backdrop dates back only 33 days, to the Rams’ raucous celebration in Seattle.
The score was 27-10 and only six minutes remained. The Seahawks seemed to start looking ahead to a date with then-unbeaten New England.
When their gaze returned to the task at hand, Rams quarterback Marc Bulger was throwing the winning touchdown pass to Shaun McDonald.
A month later, the loss still eats at Holmgren.
“Oh, yeah,” the coach said.
Does the loss make him wake up in the middle of the night?
“Screaming,” the coach answered.
The rivalry is on, even if the memo hasn’t necessarily reached the Rams. Starting with coach Mike Martz, who publicly ridiculed his team after St. Louis fell to 4-4 last Sunday, the Rams appear preoccupied with their own troubles.
“I’m more concerned about this team, and that’s no disrespect to the Seahawks,” Martz said. “We’re not good enough to say that we are playing for the division title right now.
“We have slid backwards and that’s what I’m upset about. We’ve got to get our guys back up to where I thought we were headed.”
The Seahawks endured a similar round of self-reflection after consecutive losses to the Rams, Patriots and Arizona Cardinals. They rebounded to trample NFL doormats Carolina and San Francisco, and no one needed a press guide to be sure of the next opponent.
“As soon as we lost that game, Nov. 14 was the date that was circled on the calendar,” quarterback Matt Hasselbeck said. “They deserve a lot of credit because they played an incredible game in terms of the way they came back and the plays that they made backed up against the wall on the road.
“But Nov. 14 is the day that we get a chance to basically get back a game that we let slip away.”
So much for the old just-another-game mantra. When a team’s 11-game home winning streak ends in historic fashion, the rematch can’t come soon enough.
“What loss?” running back Shaun Alexander said, jokingly. “No, you know what? We will never forget it because it is a great teaching tool.
“And I think that even playing in this game is going to be really, really good for us to kind of go back and finish what we didn’t finish.
“Not that they didn’t make plays. They made great plays to win the game. But if you’re up that many points, you’re supposed to finish the game, and we didn’t.”
Not that it was needed, but Holmgren brought up the Oct. 10 debacle when the team gathered Monday.
“The work week started officially at 1 o’clock (Monday), and that was the first time I talked about it,” Holmgren said. “I’ve been waiting until we played the Rams (again) to talk about that game.”