Pete Carroll: DeShawn Shead’s knee injury is ‘really significant,’ Richard Sherman played hurt

Seahawks coach Pete Carroll shared two pieces of significant injury news during his weekly appearance on “Brock and Salk” Monday, saying that DeShawn Shead faces an extensive recovery period after hurting his knee on Saturday and revealing that fellow cornerback Richard Sherman played through a knee injury of his own in the second half of the season.

An NFL Network report on Monday stated that Shead will have surgery for a torn ACL, which was feared after he went down in the second half of Seattle’s playoff loss in Atlanta on Saturday. Carroll, appearing on “Brock and Salk” shortly before that report surfaced, said this when asked if Shead’s injury is a torn ACL: “He got a really significant injury, yeah. It’s going to take him a long time. These are, I don’t want to put months on it, but it’s a long time.”

Given how ACL injuries and the surgery that’s required to repair them typically entail a recovery period of eight or nine months, Shead may not and probably will not be ready by the start of next season. He’s scheduled to become a restricted free agent after taking over as Seattle’s starting right cornerback this season.

It wasn’t known publicly that Sherman was dealing with a knee injury until Carroll revealed it. He played in every game this season, and while he often got one day off each week, his absence was usually listed on Seattle’s practice report as being not related to an injury.

Carroll said the injury was to Sherman’s MCL, the same ligament that quarterback Russell Wilson injured in Week 3. Carroll said it was a factor in “some of the stuff he had to deal with,” seemingly a reference to his sideline outburst in Week 15 and the ensuing fallout and possibly the one from Week 6, though that may have been before his injury.

“I had a big meeting with Richard going out,” Carroll said. “He has some regrets that this season didn’t go the way we wanted it to go. You don’t know that he dealt with a significant knee the whole second half of the season and it was stressful to him to try to get out there. He had an MCL problem that he could play with, like Russell did. He had the same problem that Russell did and he made it through it, the same problem that Tyler (Lockett) had. You guys didn’t even realize how hurt Tyler was early in the year. They just made it through it, and it was remarkable that those guys did.

“But that weighs on you, particularly when you’re out there on the edge and you know you’re not quite 100 percent, and it fed into some of the stuff that he had to deal with. I don’t mean to be revealing everything, but I admire how hard he worked at this thing and how he tried to handle it and also when he made his mistakes, he was burdened by that and had to work his way through it. He’s a good man and he’s trying to get everything right.”

A few more highlights:

• Carroll’s comments continued to give a strong impression that the Seahawks don’t plan on making sweeping changes to their offensive line and will instead count on improvement from the younger players in that group – George Fant, Mark Glowinski, Germain Ifedi and backup Rees Odhiambo in particular. Glowinski is a second-year player who made one start in 2015 while the other three are rookies. Garry Gilliam is a restricted free agent while Bradley Sowell is restricted. Justin Britt has a year remaining on his rookie deal. Carroll also confirmed that offensive-line coach Tom Cable interviewed for the 49ers’ head-coaching vacancy and said the Seahawks are prepared to search for a replacement if they need to.

• Carroll talked at length about how the Seahawks haven’t handled losing as well as they should and took responsibility for that. The end of the Atlanta game on Saturday was the latest instance while Super Bowl XLIX and the Green Bay game earlier this year are other examples of how the Seahawks have lost their poise in the closing moments of losses. Carroll: “That’s not the way we want to show who we are, what we are. However, it is what we did, it is what we showed, and so there’s some areas to get better at and to fix and to be restraining when we can. But I don’t think we’re very good at that and I’m taking credit for that and I gotta do better.”

• Asked if Seattle wants to get back to more of an even run-pass balance next season, Carroll said “Oh yeah. Oh yeah.” The Seahawks threw the ball on 58.45 percent of their offensive plays this season, a fairly drastic shift for what had been one of the league’s most run-heavy offenses. “That wasn’t the way we want to play,” Carroll said.