Mike Holmgren

Mike Holmgren
Michael George Holmgrenis a former American football coach and executive, most recently serving as president of the Cleveland Browns of the National Football League. Holmgren began his NFL career as a quarterbacks' coach and later as an offensive coordinator with the San Francisco 49ers, where they won Super Bowl XXIII and XXIV. He served as the head coach of the Green Bay Packers from 1992 to 1998, appearing in two Super Bowls, and of the Seattle Seahawks from 1999 to...
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth15 June 1948
CitySan Francisco, CA
That was very distasteful to me, to retaliate so to speak like that (against the Vikings). I do believe the commissioner should look into these kind of clauses. We work so hard on trying to gain labor peace and a new collective bargaining agreement and then we as clubs allow agents to get cute and circumvent it. On the playing field there are rules and there are unwritten rules about how the game should be played in the spirit and the fairness of it all. It doesn't make sense to me that we had to lose such a fine football player this way. I was surprised by the ruling.
It happens, because now you're down to one game, and anything can happen in any one game. But I think if you look over percentages over the last however many years, most of the times the guys that are playing at home have the advantage. So we're choosing to look at it that way.
It was a sad thing what happened to Kenny. The good part is that he has healed up. What his football future is, I can't tell you right now. I'm somewhat optimistic about it. He will be there with us Sunday. He has had an emotional impact on this football team before he was hurt and certainly after the injury. My hope and prayer is that he will be able to continue playing football next year.
This game certainly is bigger. I think playing in this game at this nice facility juices everybody up a little bit, so you might get a little more out of them.
As I've told the team, ultimately you'll be judged by what happens and where you are at the end of the season. I understand why we are the underdogs, and there's really only one way to handle that. That's not by talking, it's by playing the game and seeing what happens.
It's like, OK, we're playing the game and those guys are upstairs doing whatever they are doing,
Carolina offered him just a phenomenal financial package, and he was gone. Ken had developed his skills. We drafted him, we liked him, he had gotten better and better and better, and now he's playing at a certain level. That was a good signing by Carolina.
It really is a team in the truest sense of the word. The sum of the parts is greater than the individual parts. This team is fairly unknown to most of the country.
As soon as they make some arrangements, he'll know and I'll know. We have to see. That's the first thing.
Steve Smith, for his size, is very, very strong -- physically a strong guy, has strong hands.
I said I was going to leave it up to him, but I have to pull rank. He's going upstairs.
At the league level -- and I sit on the committees that talk about this stuff -- they want to do everything that they can for the safety of the player, ... In warm weather, we really talk about it a lot.
The thing that bothers me as much as anything else was the penalties. You can't overcome those things.
The unusual part ... our team isn't a very penalized team, in general. In Super Bowls in general, they let the guys play. Put those two things together, and it was a little unusual, and they were very, very costly, obviously.