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Battered Seahawks Face Dallas
"Well, they were supposed to be a rebuilding team last year. If you can go to the Super Bowl while rebuilding, I would suppose by the next year you'd be pretty set," said Seattle Coach Jack Patera, whose winless Seahawks meet the unbeaten Cowboys in a National Football League game Sunday in the Kingdome.
"Over-all they're the best team we've seen," said Patera, a member of the Cowboys' expansion club in 1960.
But Seattle's rookie head coach says his expansion team will approach the Dallas game like any other expecting to win.
"We have as much chance to beat Dallas as we had against the other three teams," Patera said with a wry smile.
Seattle, 0-3, is coming off a 37-21 loss to San Francisco, a game in which the Seahawk secondary was burned for three Jim Plunkett touchdown passes in the first half. In Dallas, Seattle will face red hot Roger Staubach, who had his best day as a Cowboy in last week's 30-27 victory over Baltimore, completing 22 of 28 passes for 339 yards and two touchdowns.
Staubach has completed nearly 72 percent of his passes in Dallas' first three games and has been intercepted only once.
"Even a quarterback who doesn't have a tendency to run will take off and run and hurt you occasionally," said Patera. "Roger is the type who will take off and run up the middle. But he's also a very fine passer, and if you don't put pressure on him he'll throw for 40 yards instead of run for 10."
Patera says he's not overly concerned by one of the Cowboys' favorite offensive formations, the shotgun.
"Actually you have a little bit of an edge in the shotgun," he said. "The quarterback has declared his intention to pass and they're limited to the type of running they can do. It's very nice to see the quarterback back there and the running backs out of the backfield."
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