Pete Carroll on disputed no-call: Contact between Richard Sherman, Julio Jones was ‘pretty incidental’

Asked Monday morning on “Brock and Salk” about the disputed no-call at the end of the Seahawks’ win over Atlanta, when cornerback Richard Sherman had a hold of Falcons receiver Julio Jones’ right arm as the ball was in the air, coach Pete Carroll said it’s common for officials to allow that amount of contact.

“It was a jump ball. Sherm’s hand was on his arm. That happens all the time,” Carroll said. “Every play there’s stuff going on. Imagine what it’s like on a Hail Mary play when there’s five guys on defense back there and there’s three or four guys on offense. There’s all kinds of bumping and shoving and stuff, and (officials) have to determine it. So that’s not a big deal at all …

“Could they have called it? Yeah, they could. They don’t call those calls at any other time, either. So, pretty incidental.”

Not everyone agrees. Falcons coach Dan Quinn was irate on the sideline immediately following the play when officials didn’t flag Sherman for pass interference – which would have given Atlanta the ball around Seattle’s 40-yard line with about 90 seconds left – though he declined to protest the non-call in his postgame press conference. Jones did, saying it was a missed call.

Asked if pass-interference tends to be called any differently in jump-ball situations like the one between Sherman and Jones versus plays on which a receiver is tracking the ball in stride, Carroll said, “Not really.”

“If it impedes the guy’s chance to catch the ball, then there’s question,” he said. “And that’s – there’s a lot of leeway here. So these guys have to make these calls and it’s hard to do it and they don’t do it exactly the same all the time, and they don’t always see what puts the guy in the position. There was a little bit of that there, and you can say that. But that happens all the time on plays. There’s an arm kind of battle that they allow, as long as it’s away from the body and you don’t grab the guy and hold onto him and pull him away. That’s what they’re looking for. It has to be really obvious, and even then they’re not calling all those. So they’re working at it. It’s very, very difficult. It’s always going to be difficult.”

Asked after the game about the no-call, Sherman said, “I thought there was interference on our offense on a few plays and they didn’t get it, so it was just one of those games where they let us play.”

Did he think he got away with one?

“No,” he said. “I felt like we won the ballgame.”