One of the story lines heading into the Seahawks’ Week 4 game against the Detroit Lions is the return of receiver Golden Tate to Seattle. Tate spent his first four seasons with the Seahawks, catching 165 passes for 2,195 yards and 15 touchdowns as he helped Seattle win the Super Bowl in 2014. He signed as a free agent with the Lions following Seattle’s Super Bowl win, then had his best NFL season last year, catching 99 passes for 1,331 yards.
So Tate coming back to Seattle is a big deal. However, he was not made available to the Seattle media this week, and there’s a good chance that’s because of the comments he made earlier this week about Detroit’s offense being too predictable.
Tate said the following on his weekly radio interview Tuesday:
“I’ve had a couple occasions in literally each game, where they called out our play for one, and then afterwards been like, ‘Hey, we knew what you guys were doing.’ I don’t know how they know or which film they’re watching that we’re giving away, and that’s something we need to go back and watch our tendencies to figure out where we line up or how we line up or what formation — whatever it may be, we’ve got to figure it out because we’re clearly giving away. I mean if three weeks, a player’s come up to me and said, ‘We knew what you were going to do,’ that’s bad.”
This created a bit of a firestorm in Detroit, and the next day Tate had to clarify that his comments were not a shot at offensive coordinator Joe Lombardi.
Although Tate wasn’t put on the media conference call, both Lions coach Jim Caldwell and quarterback Matt Stafford were asked about the comments. Here’s what they had to say about the issue:
CALDWELL
“I’ve heard it thousands of times. Usually it’s on the winner’s side.”
“[Calling the issue overblown] is probably an accurate depiction because that’s why you study. That’s why you study film, that’s why you take a look at formations, that’s why you look at both sides of the ball and see if you can get an idea of what to anticipate. That’s also why you look at your own tendencies to make certain that you break them. It’s part of our culture.”
“Oftentimes people will carve something out of a conversation and get as much traction as you can. That’s how you sell papers.”
STAFFORD
“I can’t speculate on what other people know or what they don’t know, honestly. We just play week to week, go in, play football and try to play as sound as we possibly can. That was a story that was reported on last week, and last week was last week. We’re moving on.”
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