As you might imagine, a lot of Mike Munchak's Monday press conference revolved around who is going to play quarterback next week. Munch said that Matt Hasselbeck's injury is not as severe as the one that Kerry Collins suffered last season. He also said that Hasselbeck is the starter if he is healthy.
This does not surprise me at all. Their plan all along has been to give Jake Locker a year to learn under Hasselbeck. It looks like Locker has made the most of his time so far.
Click through the jump to read Munch's comments about Hasselbeck's health.
(on the health status of Matt Hasselbeck and the MRI results)He went over today and he is walking around pretty good. He is sore but like most injuries that we talk about it’s more or less wait and see how he is tomorrow and Wednesday. We haven’t heard anything yet but we are assuming it’s on the mild side whatever it is.
(on if Hasselbeck’s injury is similar to Kerry Collins’ last year)
I don’t think that Kerry (Collins) could have come back in the game like Matt (Hasselbeck) did when he had to for that one play. It looked like the way that it happened it wasn’t quite as severe as Kerry’s was. Preliminary looks are not as bad as Kerry’s.
(on if there is value to letting Jake Locker start one of the last three games even if Matt Hasselbeck can play)
No, we are looking at it like we are in the middle of a playoff run here and we have to win these three games. If Matt (Hasselbeck) is healthy then Matt will quarterback us. As far as Jake (Locker), he will have plenty of time to be our guy so we wouldn’t put him in there just to give him experience. We know that we can win with him in there and we feel real good about what we have seen in the two games that we have had a chance to play so we will just take it from there. We wouldn’t be doing it just to see, our thing is we have three huge games ahead of us and we have to take care of all three of those if we want to play anymore.
(on Matt Hasselbeck’s chances of playing on Sunday)
It’s hard to tell. I would assume because there is no reason not to be, but you just never know until you go out there and start moving around and doing things that the quarterback has to do, then we will know a lot more then.