The most calculating marketing-and-finance major ever to play quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks threw a $20,000 pass last Saturday in the opening game of the National Football League playoffs.

With 6:06 left in the second half, Matt Hasselbeck hit wide receiver D.J. Hackett behind the Washington Redskins' secondary for a 20-yard touchdown that gave the Seahawks a 19-14 lead. Seattle went ahead by seven on Hasselbeck's two-point conversion pass to tight end Marcus Pollard, and it would only get worse from there for the Skins.
    
Twenty grand was Hasselbeck's share for helping his team to the first-round blowout. He could bank another $20,000 in Green Bay on Saturday; $37,500 more if the Seahawks prevail in the N.F.C. title game on January 20; and $78,000 if they win Super Bowl XLII on February 3.   

"You want to know the best perk of playing in the N.F.L.?" he asks. "We get paid way too much."
   
All that playoff loot may seem like pocket change to a 32-year-old veteran making $6,004,320 in his seventh season with Seattle. On the other hand, Super Bowl glory is priceless, especially for a guy whose postseason legacy until now has been passes picked off by the opposition.
   
It's been four years since Hasselbeck and the Seahawks traveled to Lambeau Field searching for their first playoff triumph in 20 seasons. Hasselbeck had been drafted by the Green Bay Packers in 1998 and thrown 29 passes over three seasons as an understudy to Brett Favre.
   
In overtime of that 2004 game, Hasselbeck threw a pass toward receiver Alex Bannister, who overran his route. Green Bay cornerback Al Harris intercepted the ball and sprinted 52 yards for the winning TD and an $18,000 winner's share. Hasselbeck returned home with $15,000. In last year's playoff defeat at Chicago, Hasselbeck threw another pivotal interception. His take-home pay: $19,000.
   
Hasselbeck can calculate all these figures in his head. He credits that talent to his father, Don, a tight end with the Boston Patriots (1977-83), Los Angeles Raiders (1983), Minnesota Vikings (1984), and New York Giants (1985). "The worst part of being the son of an N.F.L. player was having to move in the middle of the school year," he recalls. "I'd be learning multiplication in Boston, then move to Los Angeles, where the kids were being taught long division. It'd be like, Whoa, what's going on here?"
   
For the Seahawks' resident numbers freak, a refusal to accept limitations has become a sort of self-fulfilling destiny. "The truth is, being a quarterback in the N.F.L. is like getting to play point guard on a really good basketball team," he says. "Your job is just to pass the ball and let someone else score. It's important, but it's not that hard."
   
At Boston College, coach Tom Coughlin bypassed him for the starting QB job by saying, "If I was looking for a president, I'd pick you, but I'm looking for a general." Yet you get the distinct impression that Hasselbeck is extremely hardworking and capable of taking infinite pains to achieve precision.
   
"Hopefully, my greatest strength as a player is something you can't test for," he says. "Coming out of college, I wasn't invited to the N.F.L. combine. I was upset about that at the time. I'm over it now. I think."
   
Though Hasselbeck, as a high-school senior in Boston, had committed to U.C.L.A., Coughlin took him aside and said, "People out there aren't going to know if you're from Massachusetts or Maine. Here, you're a local kid. There, you may get confused with David Hasselhoff."
   
He met his wife, Sarah, during freshman orientation. "My goal was to sit next to the prettiest girl in the room and copy down her class schedule," he says. "I pulled it off but wound up taking philosophy, theology, English literature, and microeconomics. She graduated summa cum laude."

Hasselbeck did not.
   
According to Hasselbeck, Sarah's prettiest feature was her teeth. "I fell for them hard, so hard," Hasselbeck recalls. "I later found out her dad was a dentist." He courted her not so much for her pearly whites as for her wicked spiral. "My mom throws one, too," he says. "I always compared the girls I dated to her. If they could throw like Mom, they came from an acceptable gene pool."
   
His parents' pool produced a trio of balding boys. "I'll never wear hair plugs," he says flatly. "Not for me. I say embrace your baldness. With no hair, you get treated with much more respect in the locker room. Everybody thinks you're a smart, older veteran. In my second season, a rookie asked, ‘What year are you: seven, eight, nine?' I just smiled." Some of his teammates have receding hairlines too. "When we sit in a row, it looks like Cul De Sac Lane."
   
With baldness, he says, comes anonymity, which is kind of redundant in Seattle, where his name still won't get him a good table at a restaurant. "One of my college teammates, Pete Kendall, was drafted in the first round by the Seahawks, and that was the last I ever heard of him," Hasselbeck says. "It was like he'd entered the witness protection program. Seattle is that far away from the rest of the country."
   
What was the most worrisome thing he had heard about Seattle before getting traded to the Seahawks? "That I hadn't heard anything," he says.
   
If the definition of an educated person is someone who has some idea how ignorant he is, Hasselbeck may be the most educated guy in the N.F.L. "I can understand ballplayers who test positive for banned supplements and say, ‘I didn't know.' " he says. "When I go in a smoothie shop, I wonder, What's in an immunity booster? What's in a fat burner' I don't know. I stay away from Red Bull because I have no idea what taurine is."
   
He was, after all, just a marketing-and-finance major.