Doug Baldwin on his penalized TD celebration and on Darrell Bevell’s criticism of Ricardo Lockette

Locker clean-out day was understandable somber in the Seattle Seahawks locker room a two days after a devastating loss. Many players said little or nothing at all to the crowd of media in the room—and I hardly can blame them—so Doug Baldwin deserves some credit for standing there and fielding questions for more than 14 minutes, keeping a lot of his teammates from having to do so.

I’ll get to more of what he said about the mood of the team, etc. later, but two topics that came up were Baldwin’s touchdown celebration, which cost his team 15 yards, and the remarks made by offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell after the game. On the touchdown celebration (more details and video here) Baldwin said he had no regrets about it two days later.

“No,” Baldwin said. “I was just out there having fun playing the game of football. There’s no explanation. You play this game for so long, you go out there and you have fun. I can get criticized for it, that’s fine, everybody has their opinion, but in the moment I was just having fun. My teammates know that.”

“Ultimately the only the people I have to apologize to are my teammates and coaches, if that was the case, but my teammates and coaches, they know. They didn’t say anything. That’s not even an issue. We lost the game, there are so many other things to be concerned with that something stupid like that.

As for his thoughts on offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell’s postgame comments, which included twice mentioning that Ricardo Lockette could have fought harder for the final intercepted pass, Baldwin said, “I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother us, but he’s the coach, so you take that criticism and look in the mirror and figure out what you could have done with it. It’s harsh, but in reality of it, it’s in the heat of the moment, right after game, people may say things or do things that would have changed or would have liked to be interpreted differently, however at the end of the day, we’re going to stick together and move forward, so none of that matters now.”