Seahawks Get Comfortable as Underdog

DEARBORN, Mich., Jan. 29 -- The Seattle Seahawks arrived in town a day earlier than their Super Bowl opponent, the Pittsburgh Steelers, and did their best Sunday to embrace their role as this week's underdog.

The Seahawks were the NFL's highest-scoring team during the regular season and were the top seed in the NFC playoffs. The Steelers were only the sixth seed in the AFC playoffs. But the Steelers are the franchise with the rich tradition and the national following, and they are the favorite in next Sunday's Super Bowl at Ford Field after going on the road and beating the three top seeds in the AFC's postseason competition.

Coach Mike Holmgren and several of his players said Sunday evening at the Seahawks' hotel in this Detroit suburb that they didn't really object to that. Holmgren said his team is overlooked because it plays in a city tucked away in the northwest corner of the country, and he has told his players since the season began that they would have to earn any respect they intended to get.

"I think not a lot of people know what kind of football team we have," Holmgren said. "I told the players, 'That's okay' . . . I understand why we're the underdogs. . . . It's easy to talk about it. Let's let our record do our talking."

Said Seahawks tailback Shaun Alexander: "I don't care. We're here, and that's all I'm worried about."

The Seahawks arrived in Detroit on Sunday afternoon. The Steelers are not scheduled to make the short trip from Pittsburgh until Monday. The Seahawks may have had much farther to travel but at least they did it, as always, in style, settling into their plane provided by team owner and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen that has all first-class seats and monitors with satellite television and movies.

"Everybody pretty much just got in their first-class seats and fell asleep," Alexander said.

The one difference from a regular season trip, Alexander said, was that players brought along camcorders on the plane to begin chronicling their Super Bowl week. It is the first Super Bowl appearance in franchise history, but Holmgren said he found his players to be relatively loose and relaxed.

"The mood was just like it was all year," he said.

Holmgren coached the Green Bay Packers in two Super Bowls, and he is attempting to become the first coach to lead two teams to Super Bowl triumphs. He is applying the lessons learned from his previous experiences in the game to the Seahawks' preparations this week.

Holmgren said his club will go through a relatively light practice on Monday, just as it did each week during the regular season. He said he'll give his players Tuesday off, other than their media-day obligations, before having the week's heaviest practices on Wednesday and Thursday.

He once made his players practice on a Tuesday of Super Bowl week while with the Packers, he said, and didn't like the result.

"We're going to stay as close to our at-home schedule as possible," Holmgren said.

The Seahawks participated in a pep rally for their fans before departing Seattle. Quarterback Matt Hasselbeck said he tried to reassure the fans that the club would be bringing home a Super Bowl trophy, while attempting to avoid saying anything that the Steelers would find too inflammatory.

"The point I was trying to make is, 'We've got a great city. We really do. [But] we don't have a Lombardi trophy. When Boston got all its Lombardi trophies [with the New England Patriots' three Super Bowl titles in the previous four years], it got to be a cooler place to live,' " Hasselbeck said.