Broken nose leaves a mark on Seahawks punter Jon Ryan

RENTON – Seahawks punter Jon Ryan found out there was at least one possible benefit to the subzero temperatures in which Seattle and Minnesota played Sunday. The extreme cold may have helped numb his broken nose.

“To be honest with you it really didn’t hurt,” Ryan said Wednesday, with the bruises still visible under both of his eyes. “It probably helped that it was frozen for four hours, but it honestly didn’t hurt or doesn’t hurt now.”

But it sure did look painful when Ryan did a face plant onto the turf at TCF Bank Stadium, having taken off running following a bad snap on Seattle’s first possession. Ryan had to go to a knee to field it, and when he stood back up he determined that the ball would have been blocked had he tried to punt it. So he followed his instincts, running up the middle and trying to jump over a defender to get to the first-down marker.

“My instincts were just to run it up the middle, and then when it closed off I did my best hurdling attempt,” he said. “Maybe run left, run right would have worked better, but as I tell all the Monday morning quarterbacks, this isn’t ‘Madden,’ I couldn’t just press L2 and jump outside. I’m a middle-aged white guy. It doesn’t quite work that way.”

Ryan, 34, figures that when he landed face-first, the bridge of his nose was pushed into the top bar on his facemask.

“It broke pretty good,” Ryan said of his nose. “They say it usually just cracks but I broke the bone pretty clean in half and they just kinda set it back in there.”

Ryan said his first concern was returning to the game, which he did. He also wanted to make sure his fiancée, who was sitting in the stands, knew that he was OK.

“And then I was like, ‘Man, I’m going to look like hell in the wedding pictures, so I’ve got to get this things cleaned up,’ ” he said.

Ryan is engaged to be married in July to Sarah Colonna, a standup comedian and author. He said she jokingly offered to break her own nose in a show of solidarity.

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