Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, general manager John Schneider and a handful of player were at the Cinerama in Seattle Monday night for the premier of “Super Bowl XLIII Champions Seattle Seahawks” which gave the media a few chances to sneak in football-related questions before the movie.
And speaking of the movie, you can purchase it on Blue-Ray and DVD starting today. If you’re a religious watcher of the NFL Network’s Sound FX program, some scenes in the movie will be familiar, but it’s still a great look back at the entire season from Week 1 through the Super Bowl. And some of the content is stuff you haven’t seen yet (or at least I hadn’t), including at rather humorous scene in which Marshawn Lynch explains his charitable Thanksgiving plans to Richard Sherman. The folks at NFL Films do a great job with just about everything they do, and this is no exception.
Anyway, back to the football news. Carroll was asked about the decisions to cut Red Bryant and Sidney Rice last week, and said, “Hopefully we don’t have a lot more, but we’ve had some difficult choices to make, and we’re going to move ahead. This is not because of this season, it’s every season that teams are faced with these kind of decisions. We’ve taken it under great advisement and we’ve done what we had to do at this point. There will be other tough decisions that will come up I’m sure, but the magnitude of these were really impacting for our football team, they’re guys that we’re going to miss.”
What was interesting was what came next, with Carroll offering, unprompted, “Maybe we have a chance to get them back, maybe we don’t. We’ll have to wait and see.”
Obviously getting either player back would mean doing so at a discounted rate if there isn’t much of a market for that player, something that seems less likely for Bryant than Rice, but the fact that Carroll brought it up means the Seahawks are at least open to the idea.
Here’s what Doug Baldwin had to say about the moves: “That’s part of the business. Unfortunately the NFL isn’t just pure football, it is a business. That’s just what it is, but we signed up for it, so we kind of expect it. But at the same time this football team is not just a football team, this is a family… So those guys, whether they’re with us or not, are still our family. Whether they go to other teams, they’re still going to be remembered for the effort and the sacrifice they put in this season and in seasons prior in order for us to get to this point.”
Baldwin said the team has faith in Carroll and Schneider’s ability to replace departing players, but added, “We’re going to miss Red Bryant’s speeches before games because they were so powerful. We’re going to miss Sidney Rice in the receiver meetings because he was a leader of our group, so that impact can’t be overstated.”
Kam Chancellor echoed Baldwin’s statements about the business side of the game: “It’s definitely tough. But it’s just something you have to adjust to. It’s the business side of it, you lose guys, you gain guys, but you have guys step in and you move forward. But definitely we miss guys like that, they laid the foundation down for us, and you appreciate guys like that.”
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