Seahawks finally will have their day in the sun

DETROIT -- Jerramy Stevens grew up an hour outside of Seattle. He played his college ball in Seattle. And, like some Seattle-ites, he never bothered to root for the Seahawks.

That is, until they drafted him in 2002.

"I was always a Raiders fan -- silver and black," the tight end said. "I didn't become a Seahawks fan until four years ago."

No wonder his team didn't attract a lot of attention outside the Pacific Northwest for most of 30 seasons spent somewhere within a game or two of .500.

Sunday's Super Bowl between the Seahawks and the Pittsburgh Steelers couldn't present a starker contrast in franchise histories.

Pittsburgh's is long and rich -- 73 years long and four Super Bowl victories rich. The Steelers have 16 Hall of Famers, 10 from the teams that won four Super Bowls in six seasons from 1974 to 1979.

The Seahawks, in their first Super Bowl, have one Hall of Famer: Steve Largent, the star wide receiver on a few good Seattle teams of the 1980s and later a congressman from Oklahoma.

In fact, the Seahawks have fewer people in their own Ring of Honor than the Steelers have in the Hall -- 10, including the late Pete Gross, the team's radio play-by-play man for its first 17 seasons.

"People dog the Seahawks because there's not history here, but there is," Seattle quarterback Matt Hasselbeck said recently. "Obviously, it doesn't go back as far as the Redskins or Packers or teams like that, but there's history here."

The Seahawks' chances of getting much national recognition -- even negative recognition -- were doomed from the start.

They entered the NFL as an expansion team in 1976 at the same time as the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

No contest. While the Seahawks were winning a respectable seven in their first two seasons, the Bucs lost their first 26 and became a national joke.

That's Seattle's history: never good enough to grab the headlines, never bad enough to become the butt of the jokes reserved for teams such as the Bucs, Bengals, Cardinals and most recently the Lions.

In the 22 seasons between 1983 and 2004, the Seahawks won between seven and nine games 15 times, the perfect definition of mediocrity in a 16-game schedule. Their win over the Washington Redskins this season was their first in the postseason in 21 years.

Another example: When the NFL realigned in 2002 and one team had to move from the AFC to the NFC to balance the conferences, the Seahawks were the logical choice.

They were the outsiders in an AFC West that included old AFL rivals Oakland, Denver, Kansas City and San Diego.

Even now, after winning 11 straight games and finishing as the top-seeded team in the NFC, they find themselves an underdog to the Steelers, a team that was the sixth seed in the AFC.

"We haven't gotten any recognition all year," cornerback Marcus Trufant said this week. "So why should we expect any now?"

All year? How about for 30 years?

Part of it is geographic.

While Seattle is a cosmopolitan city, one of the business hubs of the Pacific Rim, it is tucked away in the upper left corner of the U.S. map, away from the big media markets.

Never mind that for the better part of 75 years that it's been a center of the aircraft industry and is now known for coffee and computers.

Even with fans who are loyal, dedicated and very noisy at home games, the city itself has been quite reserved during the playoffs -- the Seahawks banners less evident than in other playoff cities and the "Go Seahawks!" buzz hardly audible.

Not in the early days.

"It was just a matter that we had a pro team and how fantastic it was," said Jim Zorn, the quarterback on those early Seattle teams and now the Seahawks' quarterback coach. "We didn't have to put a lot of wins on the board for people to get excited."

During the telecast of their regular-season game with the New York Giants, the Los Angeles-based Fox producers and announcers went out of their way to demonstrate Seattle's remoteness. At one point, they superimposed a map on the screen, using pointers like grade-school teachers to show viewers exactly where the city was located.

"It's been a long, funny ride," says Zorn, who combined with Largent to be the leaders of the early Seahawks,

"In the beginning, I think we got a reputation as a team that improvised a lot, that did things on the fly. That was my style and it worked and we won some games, and I guess they showed a lot of highlights of me running around a lot. I guess that got us some attention."

Glory years? At the Kingdome?

In 1983, they lost the AFC Championship game to the Raiders. Dave Krieg had replaced Zorn by then and most of the 10 players in the Seahawks' Ring of Honor were on that 1984 squad -- Krieg, Zorn, Curt Warner, Jacob Green, Largent and the late Dave Brown and Kenny Easley, the NFL's defensive player of year that season.

There was one other name of note on that squad: Franco Harris, picked up after being cut by the Steelers.

Harris is a Hall of Famer, but certainly not as a Seahawks player. He's one of those 16 Steelers.

That's all that really has to be said of the team histories.