Hasselbeck
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- May 2, 2009
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The whole interview as a whole is pretty good, but this really stuck out to me...
For the full interview - go here:
http://www.fieldgulls.com/interviews/20 ... -interview
A lot of fans remain bitter from the calls in Super Bowl 40, did you feel they cost you the game or would you attribute it more to getting beaten by the Steelers?
I'll give you a pretty straight answer and it's an informed answer. With Mike Holmgren, and I was on his staff for seven years, one of the things that my responsibility was to always send in the video in question of questionable calls -- either that we felt like this should have been a call, we felt like this wasn't a call, that we felt like it shouldn't have been called, or we would say: interpret this for me -- we don't understand this situation.
Well, after the Super Bowl, I sent in 15 questionable calls of that nature. We felt this was wrong, we felt this should have been called, we felt this shouldn't have been called, interpret this.
You send it into the league office and then the league responds to you with all your questions. The league office will say: you were wrong here, this was the right call. Or, they're honest and they will say you're right and this should have been called this way.
Well, out of those 15 questionable calls, the league office agreed on seven of them. Almost 50% of the questionable calls made in that game were incorrect. Had those calls been made correctly, I absolutely believe we would have won the Super Bowl.
You said there were 15 questionable calls after the Super Bowl. For a typical, standard NFL game, how many questionable calls would you send to the league office?
Probably I'd send in -- because you go offensive, defensive, and special times -- I could send in, on offense, five to seven. That would be a major deal for me. Usually, I'll send in an average of three on offense. Every week would be different. One week it would be three; the next week it would be two. Or I don't have any this week. There would even be times when you didn't even have any.
Just on offense, it would turn out to be three to five. And then, you would get some more on defense and a few on special teams. I think the officials, they try to do a very good job -- they're not out there to do a poor job and every year they're trying to be as consistent as they can be. It's just a difficult game and it's hard to interpret the way that rules are sometimes written. It's a hard game.
I'm not trying to make an excuse that we did not earn the win because we ended up losing -- and we can say all we want with excuses about the officials.
Did you know that the official actually came back to Seattle at some point a couple years later and actually apologized? He came to speak for somebody and actually apologized on behalf of him and their staff -- apologizing to the Seahawks.
Even though it sounds like I'm whining and pining for an excuse to say, 'yeah we should have won it,' there's something to that in the fact that an official from the league would come and speak during an offseason speaking engagement and apologize to the Seahawks fans.
For the full interview - go here:
http://www.fieldgulls.com/interviews/20 ... -interview
