Instead of being mad at Christine Michael, feel bad for him

LOS ANGELES – For three years, Christine Michael has been the guy who can’t get it right.

That’s part of the reason it was so sad to see it go wrong for him Sunday when he fumbled on the Seahawks’ final offensive play.

This wasn’t a lack of maturity or being focused on the wrong thing or any of the other litany of issues that threatened to derail Michael’s NFL career. This was a guy who earned the opportunity to have the ball in his hands in the final minute of Sunday’s game trying to make a play and then making a very human mistake at a most crucial moment.

“Ball just came out as I was going down,” Michael said after walking out of Seattle’s locker room following the team’s 9-3 loss. “He got a good hat on it, I’ll say that.”

There were no excuses. No qualifiers. No attempts to minimize what had happened. He was head up, staring eye-to-eye with what happened.

Michael caught a third-down pass from Russell Wilson and in trying to run toward the first down had the ball knocked loose as he was hit by two Rams defenders.

Michael pointed toward the ground after Los Angeles recovered, hoping as much as arguing that he had been down before losing control of the ball. He sat on the bench, towel over his head after the Rams’ offense took the field to close out the game.

“As a professional – and with this group – I just got to do a better job holding onto the ball,” Michael said, “especially in those situations.”

This isn’t the first time he’s fumbled. In fact, it was a recurring theme in the preseason during his first stint with Seattle, and on Monday morning, coach Pete Carroll told “Brock and Salk” that the Seahawks have coached Michael to get his shoulder under the tackler to protect the ball. But the fact that Michael has had an issue with it in the past only made me feel worse for a guy who just hasn’t been able to get it right even when he was trying his best.

Look, there was plenty of room to criticize Michael during his first two seasons in Seattle. He was the guy who’d clap his hands in frustration if he was in the backfield and the quarterback audibled away from a run. The one who stomped toward the sidelines, waving his hand dismissively at the line of scrimmage after a botched snap in Carolina kept him from getting the ball on a flip play in 2014.

He was a second-round pick who acted as if he thought he’d arrived, which helped explain why Seattle traded him away last September to Dallas for a seventh-round pick. From there, he was cut by the Cowboys and then let go from Washington’s practice squad only to return to Seattle for what has been a decidedly unlikely resuscitation of his NFL career.

He was more than serviceable and bordering on good while filling in at the end of last season. He was simply Seattle’s best running back in training camp as Thomas Rawls worked his way back from injury.

Yet the season began with another chapter in the “Knucklehead Chronicles” when Michael let a pass bounce off him during Seattle’s game-winning drive in Week 1. He was too busy staring down the player he had blocked to pay attention to what was going on.

What happened Sunday in Los Angeles was different.

This wasn’t about a lack of concentration or focus. It wasn’t about immaturity or anything other than a guy making a mistake while trying his hardest to make a play.

“He’s competing,” Carroll said of Michael. “He’s playing ball.”

And this time, the ball bounced away from him, and that’s really too bad.

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