Credit the Seahawks for open-field elusiveness: They are one of six NFL teams without a positive test so far for COVID-19 at "training camp," which for the first week was little about training and a lot about hiding out in quarantine.

"The first week was all but perfect for us," said coach Pete Carroll.

He was not nearly as pleased with the rest of the country.

READ MORE»

However controversial was his departure from the New York Jets, Jamal Adams was so eager for a good impression in Seattle Thursday that he made his bed. In his hotel room.

In today's world of Zoom, backgrounds leave a mark.

"I'm very particular as far as my details," he said. "I want to hit it on the nose."

READ MORE»

All NFL teams have officially begun their training camps, although drone cameras above the fields would show little evidence, except for more cars in the lots. For most of the first week, players and coaches are mostly inside, getting tested for COVID-19 and having meetings. The first contact practices aren't until mid-August, and the exhibition season has been cancelled.

READ MORE»

Two days after Seattle sports went Kraken, it beheld a football Krakatoa.

In giving up well-regarded SS Bradley McDougald and two first-round picks to the New York Jets Saturday, the Seahawks blew up a big chunk of their future for SS Jamal Adams, a truculent first-team All-Pro safety who could be gone in two years.

READ MORE»

Some issues remain undecided, but it seems as if players negotiating with the NFL about the start of the season have succeeded in leveraging the pandemic to eliminate a blight upon the heartland.

There will be no exhibition football games in 2020.

The public-health disaster and its subsequent restrictions preclude a proper national celebration. That doesn't mean you can't throw glitter and yell hosannas at someone six feet away.

READ MORE»

The coronavirus, always in the lead, is beginning to put distance between its relentless self and the local and national sports sensibilities.

The highlight event of the Seattle sports calendar in September, the visit of the Michigan Wolverines and coach Jim Harbaugh to Husky Stadium for a season-opening game Sept. 5 against Washington, was cancelled Thursday.

READ MORE»

Regarding the influence of the NFL in America's culture wars, Pete Carroll was as right as he was hyperbolic.

'The NFL is as powerful an institution as there is in the country," he said in an oral waterfall disguised as a Zoom conference Thursday with Seattle reporters. "This frickin’ league needs to stand up for the right stuff, and make things move where we can make things move.

READ MORE»

New Seahawks RB Carlos Hyde Monday suggested that the NFL could demonstrate its new-found belief that black lives matter by ending the de facto exile of Colin Kaepernick. He elbowed the NFL hard in the ribs in 2016 to draw attention to police brutality and social injustice. Lo and behold in 2020, the league and America appear to get it now, although Kaepernick hasn't played since.

READ MORE»

As fears grew about covid-19, the sports world wondered what kind of long-term  changes a pandemic would bring to its operations, conduct and finances.

Then came the public murder of George Floyd, a handcuffed black man under the knee of a white cop who looked as casual as if he were writing a parking ticket. The racial outrage, as you may have read, is causing a global cultural earthquake.

READ MORE»

When Russell Wilson was asked this week about his response to Drew Brees's video interview remark that he "will never agree with someone who disrespects the flag," the Seahawks quarterback said he'd just come from a meeting and didn't get to "watch the whole thing."

Actually, there wasn't much else in the interview with Yahoo! Finance to see, other than to observe the venerable New Orleans Saints quarterback fall figuratively into the cultural abyss.

READ MORE»

In the unyielding avalanche over several days of video, news and opinion about the rage against police, economic collapse, a failing U.S. administration and a pandemic that seems certain to rally back -- while we strain absurdly to re-start major American sports -- a single remark spoke to the gravity of the moment.

As he stood on the Minneapolis street Wednesday where four policemen casually murdered George Floyd last week, Tim Walz, the governor of Minnesota, offered CNN something trenchant.

READ MORE»

Bobby Wagner had to see for himself. So the Seahawks' second-most important player went to Seattle's riot downtown Saturday.

"I wanted to feel the energy, I wanted to see for myself what was being portrayed," he told a Zoom conference of Seattle reporters Monday. "A lot of focus is on the looting and stuff but we're not talking enough about what the black community is tired of.

READ MORE»

We interrupt this sports column to discuss what cannot be unseen even by the most ardent sports fan seeking shelter from the storm of bad news.

"At what point," said Seahawks DE L.J. Collier Friday morning, "do people have to continue to be killed, just for somebody to understand what being black is like?"

READ MORE»

If and when the NFL regular season begins, there's a decent chance LT Duane Brown will be the only one left from the Seahawks' offensive line that opened the 2019 season. And he's coming off knee and bicep injuries that limited him. He also has to help wise up the newbies without benefit of organized team activities, mini-camps, and just having lunch in the cafeteria to learn who are the introverts and who are the extroverts.

READ MORE»

If pro athletes need training camps before the re-start of sports, so do fans.

Here's a prep question for what I'm calling the new covid-based sports world (What? You thought the virus was going away, like a miracle?) to get your sports brain and heart going again:

Will you accept, with understanding, a decision by any of your favorite team's players to sit out games, and perhaps whatever passes for a season, for reasons of personal safety?

READ MORE»

The understandable fascination with the surprise return of Marshawn Lynch late last season tended to obscure the profound poverty of the Seahawks' running back situation. So the hire Friday of free agent RB Carlos Hyde by Seattle would seem to be a time for a reminder.

READ MORE»

When Bruce Irvin left the Seahawks after the club declined to take up his option for a fifth season, he wasn't happy about it. Despite having played in consecutive Super Bowls as part of one of the greatest defenses in NFL history, he complained upon joining the Oakland Raiders via free agency that the Seahawks were cramping his style.

READ MORE»

Seahawks CB Quinton Dunbar was released Sunday on a bond of $100,000 from Florida's Broward County Jail, according to the attorney defending him against felony charges of armed robbery.

The bond was $25,000 for each of the four charges that he participated in a robbery at Miramar, FL., party Wednesday night attended by 15 to 20 people at an illegal dice game, according to the police report.

READ MORE»

Clarity remains elusive in the South Florida saga of Seahawks CB Quinton Dunbar, who turned himself in Saturday after an attorney claimed Friday that affadavits signed by witnesses to an armed robbery at a residence Wednesday in Miramar, FL., establish his client's innocence.

READ MORE»

Wrap your head around his one:

If the Seahawks had been on a normal schedule, new CB Quinton Dunbar would have been working out with his new teammates in Renton, and away from his home area of South Florida, where an arrest warrant was issued Thursday charging him with four counts of armed robbery for an incident Wednesday straight out of the 1980s TV crime series, Miami Vice.

READ MORE»