Michael Bennett: ‘Dirty plays’ have led to fights in Seahawks practice
Aug 22, 2016, 1:04 PM | Updated: 4:01 pm
RENTON – A day after the latest – and most heated – of several fights he’s been involved in since the start of training camp, Seahawks defensive lineman Michael Bennett got to tell his side of the story. The way he sees it, there’s a code in the NFL, one that some of the new members of Seattle’s offensive line haven’t been adhering to in practice.
Bennett said there’s a “fine line” between what’s acceptable and what’s over the line. “Dirty plays,” as he called them, fall into the latter category.
“For me, I don’t really treat the game like a game,” Bennett said Monday. “I treat it as like a job and it’s for feeding my family. So if I feel like somebody is doing something to injure (me), I feel like he’s taking food out my daughter’s mouth or my wife’s. So I take that to heart. That drives me insane, especially if we’re on the same team. It’s different if it’s another team, but if we’re on the same team, I feel like we should respect each other … where we aren’t trying to hurt each other.”
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Left tackle Bradley Sowell became the latest offensive linemen with whom Bennett has fought in the last few weeks when the two went at it during a one-on-one pass-rush drill on Sunday. Bennett swung at Sowell while the two were on the ground, then again a few minutes later, after it seemed like the dust had settled from their initial encounter.
The two patched things up before the end of practice, even walking off the field together while appearing to speak amicably. Sowell said they later sat next to each other while eating lunch.
“I respect him,” Bennett said of Sowell. “I would never do anything like that to him, so I think after I approached him and let him know my mindset to how I play the game, how I approach the game, he understands why he shouldn’t do that kind of stuff.”
Sowell described his fight with Bennett this way: “Just two people competing. Those are two personalities that when they go against each other, it can be very vicious. We both like to win and it’s honestly an honor to go against someone like Michael Bennett. It’s going to make me so much better. It just got a little heated, but at the end of the day, I love Mike. He’s one of my favorite players in the NFL. I’ve enjoyed watching him over the years. We talked it out really quick and we were sitting there having lunch together, so it was nothing big.”
Fights are not uncommon in NFL practices, at least not as one-off instances. Bennett, though, has been at the center of at least three of them since the start of training camp, all with a different member of Seattle’s offensive line. Bennett pointed to the turnover in that group from last season while saying that the newcomers don’t have a sense of what crosses the line.
“It’s a new group of guys. There’s a whole new offensive line,” he said. “Before, it was guys you’ve played with for a long time – three, four years. You hang with these guys, you know them. It’s a whole bunch of new guys and there’s just a code in the NFL. There’s a lot of problems with the NFL when it comes to injuries, concussions and stuff like that. But I feel like a lot of the time, it’s the players that can really control what happens to each other … We aren’t trying to injure each other but we are trying to win the game. So at the end of the day, you always have to find that line.”