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Injury
Bud Clark’s Night Lasted Exactly One Defensive Snap
Seattle’s second-round pick broke his right ankle on the first defensive play of Sunday night’s 19-16 loss in Nashville and will be out multiple months, Mike Macdonald said afterward. Bud Clark left on a cart with an air cast on his right leg. The defense had barely finished lining up.
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Defensive snaps Bud Clark played Sunday night before his ankle broke.
“Bud has a broken ankle, to my knowledge,” Macdonald told reporters, per Field Gulls. “Severity, I’m not sure, but he’s going to be out multiple months.” Backup offensive lineman Mason Richman, who started at left guard, went down in the first half with what the team believes is its own long-term injury. Two players, one half, both gone for a while.
Clark was never the plan at safety. Ty Okada has been running with the ones since camp opened and Sunday did nothing to change that. But Clark was the insurance policy behind a room that already has Nick Emmanwori working back from ankle surgery, and insurance policies are only boring until the week you need one.
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Insurance policies are only boring until the week you need one.
Macdonald’s follow-up is the part I keep chewing on: “We’re going to have to re-evaluate with where we’re at. We saw some good things out of A.J. and D’Anthony, but we’ll have to evaluate.” A.J. Finley and D’Anthony Bell just got promoted by circumstance, six days before cutdown day, on a defending champion’s roster where the safety group was supposed to be the settled part.
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Quarterbacks
Drew Lock Carved Up Tennessee’s Starters. Then the Second Half Happened.
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Lock also got away with one, a wobbler toward Cody White that a flag erased. “It literally was the same feeling, ‘I’m moving left, there’s Cody, throw it,’” he said, per Seahawks.com. “It just rolled off the hand pretty bad. Chalk it up as a bad, bad ball, but thank you zebras.” That is the most honest thing anyone said all weekend.
Then Jalen Milroe took over and Seattle stopped scoring. Six-of-11, 52 yards, two interceptions, two sacks, one of them on fourth down. The second pick came on the first snap after the defense had just stopped Tennessee on fourth down inside its own 10. Seattle led by 13 and lost by three.
27.7
Jalen Milroe’s passer rating Sunday night. Lock’s was 121.1.
Milroe is QB3 and QB3 is a developmental job, so nobody should be lighting anything on fire in August. But the gap between the two halves was the whole evening, and Lock keeps making the backup conversation shorter every time he plays.
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AROUND THE COOP
Around the Coop
Jadarian Price is not playing a single preseason snap. He dressed Sunday and stood on the sideline in pads, which is the football equivalent of being invited to the party and told to hold the coats. The first live carry of his NFL career will come in a game that counts, against New England, with a banner going up. Field Gulls
The receivers competing for the last chairs had a rough audition. Cody White muffed a punt and caught one ball for eight yards, Montorie Foster Jr. dropped a touchdown and added a false start, and Ricky White III’s offensive pass interference wiped out a 30-yard gain. With Jake Bobo on IR, there were jobs available. Nobody took one. MyNorthwest
Chazz Surratt ran down Cam Ward and stripped the ball out of his hands. Surratt showed up at North Carolina as a quarterback and got converted, and he has spent every August since playing like a man who remembers what it feels like to be told he isn’t good enough at something. Special teams tackles are how he made this roster. That play is how he keeps it. Seahawks.com
NFC WEST SCHADENFREUDE REPORT
NINERS
San Francisco signed edge rusher Xavier Thomas on August 12 to patch a defensive line held together by rehab schedules. Ten days later they waived him with an injury designation and spent the roster spot re-signing a tight end to a three-year deal. Ten days. My gym membership lasted longer than that, and I never went either.
CARDINALS
Arizona’s headline development of the week is that cornerback Garrett Williams came off the PUP list eight months after tearing an Achilles, and Mike LaFleur says the plan is to play him inside at nickel, a job Sean Murphy-Bunting had been holding all camp. Genuinely good for Williams. Less good that in Arizona, a guy being cleared to practice qualifies as the most exciting thing that happened in August.
SEACHICKENS TRIVIA
On the final play of a November 1990 game at Arrowhead Stadium, Dave Krieg escaped what would have been Derrick Thomas’s eighth sack of the afternoon and threw a 25-yard touchdown as time expired in a 17-16 Seattle win. Which receiver caught it?
Tap to Reveal the Answer
Paul Skansi. Thomas had already set an NFL record with seven sacks that day, and Skansi went up in a crowd in the middle of the end zone to erase all of it. Norm Johnson’s extra point finished the job.
THE GOLDEN EGG
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The final score says Seattle lost, and Seattle did lose, and the second half was a mess. None of that erases what happened in the first quarter, when a group of Seahawks who mostly will not be on this roster in a week lined up against Tennessee’s actual starting offense and strangled it.
Three series against Cam Ward and the Titans’ first team. Eighteen plays, 77 yards, and the only real damage came when two Seattle defenders ran into each other and sprung Tony Pollard for 33. Otherwise it was a fourth-and-one stuffed for no gain, a strip-sack, and a lot of very expensive Tennessee starters going back to the bench annoyed.
This is what a well-built defense looks like in August. The stars sat in ball caps and the replacements still made a starting NFL offense look ordinary. Somebody in that group is about to get cut and land somewhere else and start. The egg goes to all of them.
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Plays vs. Titans starters
77
Yards allowed
3
Series
Yell Into the Void, We’ll Answer
Got a question about the safety room, the cutdown math, or why we watch preseason football at all? Send it in. The Rooster answers one a day, badly, with feeling.
Six days to cutdown. Hold the good news close. — The Rooster