So after two fairly lackluster, but successful, home pre-season games, Jeri and I went to the first Seahawks regular-season game on Sunday. Seattle won, after a very slow start, 20-6, over Tampa Bay. Tampa has had a rough time since they won a Super Bowl a few years back, and they seemed pretty mediocre on both sides of the ball, particularly on defense.

The Seahawks, meantime, were really sluggish on offense for about the first quarter and a half, and then seemed to get it together. The defense looked awesome, hitting very hard, and in particular Lofa Tatupu and Julian Peterson were flying around like madmen, laying the hurt on anyone they made contact with in orange and pewter.

Surprising to me was the wholesale grumbling from the home crowd, mostly directed at Shaun Alexander, who started very slowly but ended up with over 100 yards and a touchdown. Shaun does seem to avoid hits on occasion, in one case, facing a mere defensive back, instead of running the guy over he fell down. That stuff gets the crowd unhappy. Still, it’s the first game, and he definitely is not as strong after the injury he had last year – yet.

Also fun: for the first time I’ve ever seen, the referee called a “do-over”. During a Tampa punt, when a “loud whistle” (per the ref) from the stands faked the punter into believing the play had been blown dead by the officials (so he stopped and got wrapped up on the spot), the ref let Tampa re-do the play. This provoked a whole lot of jokes for the remainder of the game about loud (or large) whistles from the group of fans around our seats.

Next up: the Mighty Blue Men head to Arizona to play the Cardinals; once again, as with every year of that team’s mostly miserable existence, supposedly “much improved”. However, as my favorite NFL columnist Gregg Easterbrook of ESPN.com calls them, they remain the “Arizona (Caution: may contain a football-like substance) Cardinals”, having lost Monday night to San Francisco.