Pete Carroll: ‘There’s not much going on right now’ between Seahawks, Kam Chancellor
Sep 14, 2015, 10:58 AM | Updated: 11:22 am
(AP)
The obvious question to come out of the Seahawks’ season-opening loss is whether it will have any impact on the situation with strong safety Kam Chancellor, whose absence was obvious on one play in particular against St. Louis.
It won’t, according to coach Pete Carroll. He has said before that the team’s stance on Chancellor’s holdout wouldn’t change one way or another based on how the first few weeks of the season went. He reiterated that during his visit with “Brock and Salk” on Monday.
The question: Will the Seahawks’ play without Chancellor affect the way the team handles any conversations with him?
Carroll’s answer: “No. No. There’s not much going on right now. It’s pretty quiet.”
Second-year strong safety Dion Bailey started Sunday in place of Chancellor and was involved in one of the game’s most significant plays when he tripped and fell in coverage, allowing St. Louis to score a fourth-quarter touchdown that forced overtime.
Bailey was matched up one-on-one with Rams tight end Lance Kendricks, which Carroll said was “not a situation that he’s supposed to be featured in.” Carroll said Bailey was too aggressive in his coverage, squatting on the route when his priority should have been to stay over the top and prevent Kendricks from getting behind him.
“Other than that, he played an OK football game and got through it,” Carroll said of Bailey, who was playing in the first regular-season game of his career. “But that was a big play. It was a crusher for him. It was a hard one for him to take because he wanted to give his team all of that.”
Carroll was asked whether Chancellor’s absence is talked about among Seattle’s players considering how prevalent a topic it is in the media.
“No, I don’t see the players talking about it at all,” he said. “It’s pretty obvious. He’s a terrific football player and a big part of our team, but it’s the facts. We don’t have him, so we just have to go with it. But I don’t think that goes away. I think that that’s an obvious media opportunity so they’re going to keep going to it.”