One-play wonders

SEATTLE – Maybe it qualifies as news only to the Seattle Seahawks, but Donovan McNabb is a pretty fair quarterback.

After all, they hadn’t seen him for seven years.

The refresher was painful – a 26-7 victory Sunday for the Philadelphia Eagles at Qwest Field in which the 10-year National Football League veteran went from pretty ordinary to ridiculously good almost as fast as the Seahawks offense went from 90-yard touchdown plays to nada.

“Man, he leads that team,” Seattle cornerback Marcus Trufant said, “and he leads it in a good way.”

On Sunday, he led it back from a 7-0 deficit – after the Seahawks had scored on 90-yard pass from Seneca Wallace to Koren Robinson on their first play from scrimmage – with a 10-of-10 passing performance in the second quarter. Two of those passes went for touchdowns – one to Todd Herremans on a tackle-eligible play that was the first touchdown by an Eagles offensive lineman in 74 years.

Four second-half field goals by David Akers were almost incidental to the damage as the Seahawks slipped to 2-6 with a performance that featured offense both toothless – seven of Jon Ryan’s 11 punts followed three-and-out possessions – and sloppy.

“I can tolerate a young man maybe not winning because he is going against another pretty good player,” Seattle coach Mike Holmgren said, “but let’s play smart. Let’s do what we’re supposed to do – coaches and players.”

It briefly appeared that the Seahawks were going to do just that.

Loading up on blitzes, they put tremendous early pressure on McNabb even without injured All-Pro players Patrick Kerney and Lofa Tatupu, forcing the Eagles quarterback to misfire on his first seven passes. Even after he managed to string together three completions, McNabb was intercepted in the end zone by Deon Grant while trying to hit double-covered DeSean Jackson.

Meanwhile, the Seahawks struck in fashion that stunned everyone in the Qwest crowd of 68,055. Split left, Robinson got Lito Sheppard to bite on a double move and the cornerback fell down. Safety Brian Dawkins, late to the party, missed his shot at Robinson, and Seahawks receiver Bobby Engram blew up a recovering Sheppard to allow Robinson to complete a club-record 90-yard touchdown play.

“Actually, that was one of our second calls,” Wallace said. “We had a reverse set up for the first play of the game, but we had bad field position so we didn’t want to call that.”

But Wallace, still filling in as Matt Hasselbeck’s injury kept him out for a fourth straight game, would throw for only 79 more yards, and outside of a 28-yard burst up the middle by Mo Morris in the third quarter there was no running game to speak of.

“We didn’t make any plays to help out our defense,” tackle Walter Jones said. “We kind of changed the tempo of the game with that first play but then we couldn’t generate anything.”

McNabb could – and did.

He found an unlikely go-to guy in backup tight end Brent Celek, who set an Eagles record for a tight end with 131 yards on six catches. One of those, a 27-yarder, was the big gainer in the second-quarter drive that knotted the game at 7-7 – Trufant missing tackles on the final two passes, including the 22-yard score to Reggie Brown.

After another Seattle three-and-out, McNabb marched the Eagles 55 yards. A fourth-down sneak – that Holmgren challenged as having not been whistled dead before McNabb fumbled – kept it alive, and McNabb added some levity to the proceedings by finding Herremans for the go-ahead score.

“Linemen don’t catch many touchdowns,” said Celek, who got his chance because L.J. Smith was out with a concussion. “I was afraid that he’d throw the ball at me rather than spiking it.”

McNabb would finish with 28 completions in 43 attempts – after a 3-of-13 start – for 349 yards. Injuries had kept him out of Seattle’s last two victories over the Eagles in 2007 and 2005, as well as a 2002 win. The last time he faced the Seahawks he threw for 283 yards and two scores at Husky Stadium in 2001.

“He’s a strong man,” Holmgren said. “We had him a couple of times and he shrugged people off and made throws in the second half.

“What has to happen for us is that if we commit to the blitz and we take a free safety out of the hole and we are singled up, then we have to get home. Otherwise we put our defensive backs in a very vulnerable position and they are taken advantage of.”