PREGAME:  We'd written up Travesty as "being below Replacement Level."

POSTGAME:  I unsay the words.  Siiiiigggghhhhhh.  :- )  If there was anybody out there wondering about whether I was a football amateur, now you know we weren't just eating humble pie.

The main reason that we retract, based on a single game, was because ---- > the basis for my article was my belief that Jackson can't see an NFL secondary.

In this game, however, Jackson completed 5 passes to Doug Baldwin, 3 passes to Sidney Rice, 3 passes to Mike Williams, 3 passes to Zach Miller, and 3 passes to Ben Obamanu.  

On the second touchdown particularly, Jackson checked off a number of receivers before finding the open man.  And when he saw Mike Williams, he flicked the ball free with a speed-of-thought release.

John Madden used to judge a QB by a simple criterion:  "Bad QB's see a receiver and it's like, I see the WR, I raise my arm, I throw... good QB's see a receiver and they just get the ball there with any motion they need at the time."  Jackson looked good by this criterion, and he threw the ball down the field convincingly.

....

It's just one game, but it's a game in which TJ more-or-less demonstrated that many of my assumptions were wrong.  It's like my saying that Anthony Vasquez doesn't have MLB(TM) stuff, and then his coming out and throwing 94 mph for two innings.  They would be two innings that change the discussion.

I still am not a TJ fan.  But we're just saying.  It was a game I didn't think TJ capable of.

....

Again, we're not trying to go too far here on one game.  But it was always fair to assume that Pete Carroll saw things (in practice and on film) that you and I didn't.  He's the grandmaster here, we the patzers.

Nobody around the Seahawk blog-o-sphere ever liked the fact that Pete Carroll had trashed the Vikings for the way (he thought) they jerked around Tarvaris Jackson.  Kibitzers always assumed that this was (1) obviously untrue, and (2) never anything more than an attempt to change the discussion.

They also assumed, more reasonably, that (3) this strategy would backfire because --- > Carroll would become too married to Jackson ... preventing Carroll from making the Whitehurst switch when needed.

....

Logical, but another possibility emerges.

That Carroll actually believed this about Jackson.  That, like Kung Fu Panda in a kiddie cartoon, Tarvaris Jackson only needed somebody to believe in him and then, last 15 minutes of the cartoon, Panda would show everybody the talent that was always there.

I was raised on stories of Vince Lombardi renovating Bart Starr this way.  To me there is nothing inherently implausible about building a QB's confidence and then watching him blossom.

....

I still want Whitehurst, not Jackson, to start.  But the 30-28 Atlanta game mattered.  A lot.