Coming into Cleveland Browns Stadium this afternoon stirred memories of the Seahawks' last trip here.

The thing that I remember most of that weekend was that I flew back out of Cleveland the following morning ... 9/10 2001. The morning after that, of course, many things changed.

It was a fairly new stadium back then. And it was more remarkable from a Seahawks' historical standpoint as Matt Hasselbeck's first NFL start.

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Seattle signed quarterback Ryan Leaf five years ago this week. "There is no risk involved here for the club," coach and then-GM Mike Holmgren said at the time. "He is a young man who wants to prove himself and prove to everyone that he can play football. He loves this area and we are willing to give him a shot at it."

Trent Dilfer was the Seahawks' starting QB at the time. Matt Hasselbeck was the No. 2 guy and coming off a difficult first season as a starter. Leaf, having been cast off by San Diego, Tampa Bay and Dallas, joined Seattle rookies Jeff Kelly and Ryan Van Dyke in the running for the third-string position. The competition lasted two months. Leaf, worn out mentally and battling a chronic wrist injury, retired that July.

Holmgren knew going in that the odds of developing Leaf were long. "There was a time that I thought I could coach anybody and everybody and I was the guy," Holmgren said. "That is not how it works."

The Seahawks signed another veteran backup, Mark Rypien, not long after Leaf retired. He didn't last long, either. Seattle has become more selective in adding veteran backups for the third spot. The team has tried to sign a few -- Brad Johnson and David Carr come to mind -- but those guys found better opportunities elsewhere.

The Seahawks had a tough time beating the 49ers in San Francisco last season. DT Rocky Bernard had two sacks and Seattle stuffed a two-point conversion try to prevail, 27-25. I'll include my game-in-review box from that game as a refresher.

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The Seattle Times has a fun story today about Mike Holmgren's early days in coaching. It provides a good opportunity to dredge up the stories we wrote when Holmgren first came to Seattle as Seahawks coach in 1999. I spent a couple months researching his past. We broke it out into a main story and stories about the 22-game losing streak one of his old teams endured, his sometimes well-hidden lighter side, his father's role in the formative years of Century 21 real estate, his maternal grandfather's esteemed military career and a few little sidebars with anecdotes and asides (1, 2, 3). We also provided a chart showing where some of the main characters wound up, circa 1999. The formatting isn't the greatest on these because the stories are not included in our online archives (not sure why), so I had to pull them from text files. The mug shot might have run most recently in the San Francisco Chronicle. We ran similar ones with our package, but they ran this story more recently (during Super Bowl week).

This Jordan Babineaux move reminded me of another one Seattle made several years ago, also after six games. Back when the Hawks gave up big plays out of habit (think 2000), coaches benched Reggie Tongue in favor of Kerry Joseph. The parallels are obvious to me. Tongue was a second-round pick (58th overall). Michael Boulware, the man Babineaux is replacing, was a second-rounder (53rd overall). Babineaux was an undrafted free agent from Division II Southern Arkansas. Joseph was an undrafted free agent from Division I-AA McNeese State. The similarities stop there. That 2000 Seattle defense went out the next week and allowed 498 yards during a loss to Indianapolis at Husky Stadium. This Seattle defense is much better all the way around. Those of you into pain can read my 2000 Joseph-for-Tongue story below. One other funny note: In addition to the Tongue benching, Holmgren also made a move on the offensive line that week. He benched RT Todd Weiner in favor of Chris McIntosh.

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Sometimes we can gain some perspective (and come up with an easy blog item) by looking at the present in relation to the past. And so, as the NFL's 53-man roster deadline approaches for 2006, we bring you a look at the roster as it was three years ago. The defense is clearly better now. Consider that the 2003 Hawks kept nine defensive linemen and the final cuts at the position featured only Joey Evans, Luis Almanzar and Norris McCleary. Now the Hawks could keep nine and still get rid of established players such as Chris Cooper, Joe Tafoya or Kemp Rasmussen. Anyway, the 2003 breakdown is below. ...

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Every so often I'll go through the archives to learn about the future through the past, or to just familiarize myself with things that might prove helpful down the line. We are fortunate in that John Clayton was my predecessor (1986-1998). He left, but his stories stayed. The online archives go back to 1993, so there are thousands of Seahawks/NFL stories from which to choose (I will generally have 400-500 bylines in a year).

Here's an example of what I'm talking about. This story from July 1996 examines free agency as it was developing a decade ago. The salary cap was about $40 million, compared to more than $100 million now. Many teams had yet to secure the publicly financed stadiums that have helped the league grow. The league's TV revenues were not what they have become. The league was strong, but nothing like it is today. Teams were starting to talk about the need for restraint in signing bonuses, but some never quite learned to walk the walk. That's why you still read variations of this story every offseason. Note: The following quotation was from the notes at the bottom of the story; I included it here because it seemed so out of place in today's mostly ultra-rich NFL, except the part about the build-us-a-stadium-or-we'll-move threat. Some things stay the same.

"Cash is so tight with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers that most of their draft choices have been asked to take deferred signing-bonus checks through the regular season. The Bucs have sold fewer than 25,000 season tickets and might move if voters don't pass a bill to build them a new stadium." -- The News Tribune in July 1996