More-ah on Hasselbeck

Coach interviewed on KJR today.  Like with a juice box, you get 5% real juice and 95% shtick.  You guess which 5% is real.

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Q.  What is the deal with Hasselbeck?  Is he this good?

A.  The number one thing about Matt is his decisionmaking.  He picks out the best option and picks it out very quickly. 

That's the number one thing that we coaches look for in any QB -- much more than arm, or physical gifts, what separates QB's are the choices they make.

In baseball, we might compare this to a hitter having the signs.  It's fine to talk about one hitter having a slightly faster launch than another, but after all, he uses that quickness to deal with unpredictable pitch speeds.  If he knows it's 92 or 79 mph before the pitch, that trumps everything else by many orders of magnitude.

If Seneca Wallace is going to throw right, with the strong safety closing fast, and Matt Hasselbeck is going to throw left, with no safety closing, then issues of accuracy fade into the background.  Like, the distant-horizon background.

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Q.  What do you mean, he gets the ball out early?

A.  Some other QB takes just a tick longer to decide, then by the time he throws into that 900-mph chaos, that's the difference between an incompletion, a completion, a run after the catch.

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Q.  So his reads cause him to pick the best target?

A.  More than that.  He understands defenses as well as he understands offenses.  He knows what they're trying to get done after the snap.  So he's always checking off to runs that nuke blitz packages.

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Q.  Physically?

A.  His arm is very accurate, and plenty strong for ... well, for most throws.

People think that because he comes off as cerebral, that he's not a tough man.  He's as tough as a Favre -- plays with serious injuries, commands respect from every man in the locker room.

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Q.  You put him with Peyton Manning and Brett Favre?

A.  (Don't ask Dr. D why these dudes keep asking, Peyton-and-Favre, rather than Peyton-Brees-and-Brady.)

Well, he's way up there.  If he's not in the top 5, he's right after that.

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Q.  How about the nemesis this week, Kurt Warner?  He's 38 and about done, right?

A.  We're shakin' in our shoes about this passing attack.

For some reason Warner has been controversial.  For example, you hear heated debates about Warner in the Hall of Fame, like it would be a joke for him to get there.

For me Warner is a HOF'er with room to spare, and he's got a Super Bowl to prove it.  He's got the stats, too.  With the receivers he's got I dunno how we're going to stop them.  We're just going to have to do our best.

....

We might add that Lawrence Jackson was on, also, and characterized Arizona as a legit Super Bowl team, "and they should have won it in my opinion".

So, quite a gunslingin' shootout this weekend.  Will be nice to have the 12th man rollin'.

Cheers,

Dr D


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