As we continue to clean out the “to-do” list on a slow Saturday bring you the best and most compelling NFL news and information, here’s a recent item from Seattle regarding the unretirement of former Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren, who is now the captain of the Browns’ front office.
Quarterback Matt Hasselbeck wants a refund.
“We did buy him a motorcycle as a retirement gift,” Hasselbeck recently said, per SeattlePI.com, “so I don’t know if we could get him to sell that and give us our money back or what.”
Hasselbeck was kidding, of course. (We think.)
But he wasn’t kidding six years ago, when he played a postseason game at the site of Sunday’s contest against the Packers. On that occasion, Hasselbeck declared after winning the toss in sudden-death overtime, “We want the ball and we’re gonna score.”
Hasselbeck explained that he was just trying to stay loose when he offered up the phrase that will ultimately be engraved on the granite slab that marks his eternal resting place. (And if it’s not chiseled into the stone, it’ll likely eventually be spray-painted there by Packers fans.)
“The first time we’d played them early in the year I didn’t play well,” Hasselbeck said. “I was all tight and serious and wasn’t me. And the second time, the coach at the time said go have fun, relax. And that’s what I did and that’s what it was and we played well, but we still were at the point where we really hadn’t really turned that corner as a team and believed in ourselves. . . .
“I don’t regret anything. It was what it was, a bunch of grown men playing football and acting like kids.”
And the acting like kids extends to members of the Packers who were on the field that day, including quarterback Brett Favre. Per Hasselbeck, Favre “has said that to me at every coin toss I’ve seen him at.”
It remains to be seen whether Favre would characterize such exchanges as a “heated discussion.”