Pete Carroll reflects on the mistakes – and highlights – of Seahawks’ loss to Rams

With just 26 seconds remaining in regulation, the Seahawks’ chance to win their Week 10 game over the heavily-favored Los Angeles Rams came to an end when a pass from quarterback Russell Wilson sailed over the hands of wide receiver Tyler Lockett on 4th and 10.

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The Rams took over possession on downs, marking Seattle’s fifth loss of the season. Seattle hasn’t lost by more than a one-score margin this year.

“The common thread is that we’re coming up short,” Pete Carroll told Brock Huard and Mike Salk during his weekly Monday morning show on 710 ESPN Seattle. “But what I would hope we could do is we could learn and grow from it.

“It’s on everybody… but I think experience does help you in those situations. And guys coming through and settling into the opportunities and making the most of them… We were ready to go and unfortunately we didn’t come away with a win.”

In his more than 20 minute interview, Seattle’s head coach talked about what he saw when he re-watched the Rams tape, the breakout performance of rookie running back Rashaad Penny, and how the team is faring with injuries heading into a short week.

Here are a few highlights. You can hear the full interview in the audio embedded above.

Is there anything that was enlightening when you watched the game tape Sunday night? “I’m disappointed that we let them run the ball like we did. (We had) a little bit different plan this week to change up from the last time we played them and we didn’t hold them as we needed to. So it allows for their rhythm to come out, the play actions and that stuff. You could see we had to adjust back and we did in the second half, did a nice job of stopping them and figuring it out. But we thought we would be able to get some things done that didn’t work out as well as we wanted to.”

Rookie running back Rashaad Penny rushed for more than 100 yards. What did you make of his performance? “It was great to see. This is the guy that we’ve been counting on, and he just busted out and it was obvious. He’s a really good player. And we’ve known that, that’s what he looked like earlier on. And we’ve been on him, we’ve been on him hard about just coming out. He’s not fighting us at all, he’s just learning. He needed to have some success and he found it and you can see that he’s going to be a big factor. We’re really excited to see him come through like that.”

How close were right guard D.J. Fluker (calf) and running back Chris Carson (hip) to playing Sunday and how close are they to being available four days from now? “You have to separate from the competitiveness of the moment and the opportunity sometimes and make good decisions. We tried Chris last week and he didn’t make it through the game, he just tightened back up. We didn’t think he was far enough away from that that we could guarantee that he would be able to make it through and so (we felt like), ‘What are we doing?’ So we thought we’d hold him back. Fluke couldn’t practice during the week. He could’ve gone out there but the docs didn’t think that he would make it through the game either… the fact that it’s a Thursday game leaves us a 10-day window between the next game as well, so anybody that’s on the bubble right there we think if we hold them back we can get two games from these guys and then they can get back to it full-flight.”

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