Seahawks Insider: Parsing Pete Carroll to understand why Kasen Williams was waived

Kasen Williams was a better special-teams contributor in August than he had been in the past.

That improvement wasn’t enough to earn him a spot on Seattle’s 53-man roster, though, despite leading the team in receiving yards during the preseason.

“Kasen had great games and did a beautiful job for us and did well,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said. “But other guys did really well in the rest of the process to add to it.

“We have to make decisions and see how it all fits and sometimes you lose guys that you just hate losing and that’s a great case of it.”

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OK. Wait a minute. What the heck does that mean? Let’s try to sift through that using 710 ESPN Seattle’s “Carroll-ese to English Dictionary” (Copyright pending), which has been developed over the course of eight years of rigorous decoding of the coach’s run-on sentences.

Q: What was the single biggest factor in the decision?

What Carroll actually said: “The mixture of the guys that we needed to put together in the position.”

What (we think) Carroll meant: The fourth receiver we keep active on game days is primarily a special-teams contributor. He’s certainly not going to be getting four lobs thrown to him down the sidelines in a regular-season game. So as good as Williams looked in that regard – and he was really good – that’s not the most valuable trait for the No. 4 receiver on game days.

Q: So was special teams a big factor?

What Carroll actually said: “It always is. Yeah. It’s always a big factor in these situations.”

What (we think) Carroll meant: Well, it’s a big enough factor that we kept Tanner McEvoy on the 53-man roster.

We conclude our translation by pointing out that it’s not that Williams was a liability on special teams.

“He had done well,” Carroll said. “He had done better than he had done in the past and we commended him for that.”

That improvement wasn’t enough to claim a roster spot.

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