GREEN BAY – Five seasons after their separation, neither Brett Favre nor Mike Holmgren has won another Super Bowl. Today, they may need each other as much as ever.
Favre, who said this Packers team is as good as any he has quarterbacked, could put to use all of young Seattle’s playoff inexperience (after Chad Brown and Randall Godfrey, the Seahawks have 60 playoff games among 51 players) for a get-the-defense-off-the-field kind of win that would reduce the advantage of rest Philadelphia or St. Louis will have next week.
Holmgren, who hasn’t been back to the playoffs since losing in the first round with his initial Seahawks team (1999), could use an upset victory today to be reconfirmed as the master Favre once helped him to be.
Ironically, Holmgren’s Super Bowl triumph with Green Bay makes him one of the very Lambeau ghosts his team must defeat. In this, his third trip back to his old haunts (a blowout win in his first Seattle season, a blowout loss this October), Holmgren naturally would like to rattle some old chains, as Michael Vick did a year ago on wild-card weekend, sending Green Bay to its first home playoff loss in history.
But there was a big difference in those Packers, running on fumes and damaged legs, and this one, running not only the NFL’s current top all-purpose back, Ahman Green (2,250 yards, a Packers record 20 touchdowns) but also Najeh Davenport and Tony Fisher.
Green, the former Seahawk whom Holmgren traded before drafting Shaun Alexander, went into that Falcons debacle badly beat up. He is fresher this time, thanks to the contributions of Davenport and Fisher, and so is the whole team.
“We were stressed,” coach Mike Sherman said about the 27-7 Atlanta upset that in retrospect wasn’t really one at all. “We limped into the playoffs and got booted out pretty quick. You get to the playoffs, you have to be mentally and physically fresh.”
With Favre playing brilliantly through the death of his father 14 days ago, a plus-12 December turnover chart was what the doctor ordered. As the Packers ran the table following a Thanksgiving Day loss in Detroit, the defense came around enough to make Green Bay an intriguing darkhorse Super Bowl pick, never mind it needed Minnesota’s miracle final-seconds collapse at Arizona to make the playoffs at 9-7.
But Holmgren, whose team won once on the road before a clutch comeback Week 17 victory in San Francisco, has the running game, too, to provide a body-puncher’s chance today on the tundra. And certainly Seattle’s emergent quarterback, Matt Hasselbeck, Favre’s and Holmgren’s backup here, has numbers through his first 38 career starts that beat Favre’s and plenty of motivation to play the ghost, too.
“I’m a little disappointed our record wasn’t better because I thought there were a couple of games where we should have won,” Holmgren said. “We played some good football on the road but came up short and the story became larger than life.
“It was the first time in 17 years the team had won 10 games. And the first Seahawk team to go undefeated at home. There were some firsts you can hold on to and build on. I am trying to build something similar to what they have at Lambeau.”
Therefore, there could be no more satisfying place for Holmgren to work on it.