All right, Q&A time.

The No Respect train has officially gone off the tracks. In this morning's paper, Seahawks tight end Jerramy Stevens decided that the reason his team hasn't been embraced by the football world is that dreaded, ever-present, evil-to-the-core East Coast bias. "There's a lot more media on the East Coast than the West Coast. We're up in the northwest corner of the country and they don't get to see us,'' he blathered.

Do we have to go through this again? Are Seahawks games starting at 11 p.m. Eastern time and ending too late to make the papers or the late newscasts? Is there some logical reason a game involving the Seahawks would be shown in an East Coast market during a regional broadcast? Are there not 24-hour TV sports networks in operation today? Did Shaun Alexander win a media vote as the NFL's Most Valuable Player? Did SEVEN of their players get selected to the Pro Bowl?

Plus ... does anyone remember a pretty decent team from a few decades ago featuring Joe Montana, Jerry Rice and Steve Young, coached by Bill Walsh - and can anyone tell us what time zone they played in? How about this basketball player who's putting up a bunch of points for some West Coast team - is he struggling to get attention? How about that college football team that went unbeaten for about three years in a row, turned out three Heisman winners in four years, won two national championships and played for another last month? Ring a bell? Their games started kind of late, too, and they really got overlooked, didn't they?

In the interest of full disclosure, I acknowledge that in my nine years working in San Francisco, I gave this topic a lot of thought, and observed the legitimacy of the complaints pretty intensely, albeit as a native East Coaster. My conclusion: People fall back on it when it's convenient. When the 49ers and Raiders and Chargers were good, no one overlooked them. Same for the Lakers and, yes, the Sacramento Kings. Same for UCLA, Arizona and Stanford basketball. Same for USC football, or Washington or Stanford. Same for the Sonics (from, you know, Seattle) the year they went to the NBA Finals - unfortunately for them, the same year Michael Jordan came back and led the Bulls to 72 wins. Same for the Utah Jazz when they had Karl Malone and John Stockton, and the Portland Trail Blazers when the entire country knew of them as the Jail Blazers. Yet if some team or player needed a cheap motivational tool, or if they were clearly outmatched by some opponent, they pulled out the ol' reliable: we're three hours behind New York, and that's why no one "respects'' us.

The moral of this tale: shut up and play.

Which brings me to Question 1: Now that we know this Super Bowl matchup isn't grabbing America's attention the way most do, would it be a lot different if the Colts were in it?

We know the replay official from the Colts-Steelers game thought it would. (Hey, don't fine me. If you didn't fine Joey Porter, you can't fine me.) But that makes it even more interesting: if Mike VanderShank hadn't missed that final kick, had the Colts sent that game to overtime and won, would this whole week be jam-packed with hype off the scale? Even without that particular controversy, would the Colts have brought a full package of plotlines to the game that the Steelers and Seahawks combined couldn't match?

That one was gift-wrapped especially for Baltimore fans, but anyone else can join in.

Now, for the D.C.-area readers, Question 2: It's being reported in various venues (but apparently primarily by Peter King, in Sports Illustrated and on HBO's Inside the NFL) that the Redskins are interested in Terrell Owens.

Good or bad?

Discuss.