The Seattle Seahawks training room will be thinning day by day this week as the team prepares for Sunday’s game with the New York Jets. While he stopped short of saying he would return on Sunday for the Jets game head coach Pete Carroll was optimistic about several players including Tyler Lockett who could play on Sunday
“Well, if you watched the walkthrough, you wouldn’t even know if anything was going on. He just went through and did everything in the walkthrough. We’ll be careful with him in practice and make sure that we find out what his limits are, but he looked great. He was throwing, catching, and all of that stuff, so we will see. We are going to go one day at a time, and we aren’t going to let him work hard today at practice just because it seems crazy that we would go this quickly. We don’t need to, but the walkthrough was excellent, so it was a really good first sign.”
Lockett’s valuable is irreplaceable on every down but his inability to find spaces between defenders on third down was evident in the loss to the Chiefs. The Seahawks converted just 3 of 11 third-down conversions.
STATUS OF OTHER INJURED PLAYERS
The defensive line will get a boost Sunday with the return of Al Woods . The 12-year vet and mainstay of the Hawk’s defense line injured his heel in the loss to the Carolina Panthers on December 12th and has been inactive for the last two games.
“He’s really excited to be back. He was missed enormously and was good to see him out there clunking around with our guys and getting back into the rhythm of it.”
Carroll gave updates on the following players during the press conference:
Lucas left the Chiefs game after participating in less than half of the offensive snaps and was replaced by Stone Forsythe. Lucas did participate in Wednesday’s walkthrough as a precautionary measure.
“He wants to play, and he wants to go. What’s bothering him is something that he had before, so he knows what it is and he’s not worried about it.”
“No, we held him out. We are going to rest him early this week to make sure that we guarantee his return.”
Kenneth Walker III
Walker rushed for 107 yards on a career-high 26 carries and participated in half of the team’s offensive snaps without any injury concerns. The Chiefs game was the second consecutive game for Walker who was inactive for the Panthers game on December 11th due to an ankle injury.
“He will get rested today. He’s not going to get a bunch of work.”
“ He was really sore the next day, but he’s already bounced back, and he’s really excited about the fact that the soreness he felt in the postgame went away. So, he ran really well out there today.
Neal missed the Chiefs game and was replaced by Taz Tabor who had a decent game in pass coverage and run stoppage with two tackles. A healthy Neal would be a boost to the Seahawk’s secondary because of his ability to play the run and cover intermediate routes.
“He’s out there. He was out there. I don’t know if he did much, but he’s out there. He’s working at it.”
Wide receiver Marquise Goodwin did not practice on Wednesday and participated in 51 % of the offensive snaps with no receptions against the Chiefs
“He’s going to rest his way through this week, some of it, and he’s planning on playing. We’ll see what happens.”
Tight End Noah Fant (knee) and Nick Bellore ( sickness) showed up on the post-practice injury report. Fant is most likely a rest-day situation while Bellore will be a wait-and-see situation.
