He was planning to play that first week after suffering the rib injury until he was simply too sore and another batch of tests found a second crack. The man plays through quite a bit. Remember 2006? There was a knee injury that cost him four games, but he played through a finger injury on his non-throwing hand that made every snap painful and an injury to his non-throwing shoulder so severe he had surgery in the offseason.

That Hasselbeck played wasn't a surprise. That he played that well was, and we may have seen shades of things to come when the Seahawks went to a hurry-up offense in the second quarter. The result was a 17-point flurry in the final 8 minutes of the second quarter, and demonstrated Hasselbeck's importance to this team.

Jacksonville was one of two teams never to have played at Qwest Field, but you'd have thought word would have reached Florida that the stadium is loud. Well, Garrard had to hear it to believe it as he wondered whether Seattle was really going to be that loud in a story posted on Scout.com Saturday. "It's really hard for me to believe that this place is going to be louder than Indianapolis' old stadium," Garrard said. "If we get there and it is extremely loud and my ears are bleeding, then we'll have to go to a silent cadence."

Now, it wasn't quite as inflammatory as the Giants' 2006 allegation noise was piped into Qwest Field, but the Qwest Field crowd is kind of like Happy Fun Ball. It's best not to taunt it.

Defensive linemen tend to have a one-track mind when it comes to hitting the quarterback. For Redding, that meant disregarding the general rule to head toward the sidelines. He cut directly toward quarterback David Garrard on his fumble return in the third quarter, and while he got to run over the Jags passer, he blew a chance to score a touchdown.

Now, Hasselbeck looked good, but the Jaguars pass defense is unambiguously awful. The Jaguars came into the game tied for 31st in passing yards allowed and they had a league-low three sacks. Well, Jacksonville sacked Hasselbeck once and gave up 236 yards passing.

We knew he would rush the passer. He made the Seahawks' 53-man roster with 4.5 sacks in four exhibition games. It's one thing to make a difference in the second half of exhibition games when it's a battle between players struggling to make roster spots. It's another thing to beat a 12-year veteran like left tackle Tra Thomas with a spin move that allowed him to get to Thomas' inside shoulder. Reed had one sack and returned a fumble 79 yards for a touchdown.

Plenty of people will point to the fact that this is also the first game Patrick Kerney missed, which isn't entirely fair. The reason Seattle's pass rush thrived wasn't the absence of Kerney, but the emergence of Darryl Tapp, who had his best game since a four-sack performance against St. Louis his second year. To borrow a baseball analogy, this was a game that was in the wheelhouse of the Seahawks defense. Seattle staked out a lead, and in the second half the defense was unleashed and that played to the Seahawks' strength, which is speed.