Notes from Pete Carroll’s Thursday press conference

The Seahawks are back on the practice field preparing for Monday night’s game in Washington, and coming off the bye, they are a relatively healthy team.

Other than the players we know won’t be on the field—Zach Miller and Tharold Simon—it sounds like just about everyone on the 53-man roster should be available, though the biggest question mark right now is Bruce Irvin, who missed the Denver game with a rib injury.

“I think so,” Carroll said when asked if Irvin will play. “He’ll work today. He looked really good a couple days ago, so we think he’s going to be fine, but he’s got to get through the week to see if he’s right. It’s still just two weeks coming back from the strain that he had.”

“Otherwise we’re in pretty good shape. We’re coming off the bye very healthy otherwise.”

Simon, who is recovering from knee surgery, is progressing, “Very well,” Carroll said, though he won’t be practicing this week: “It still looks like it’s a couple weeks though before he’ll be ready to go. But it’s not because he can’t do a lot of stuff, we just want to make sure that he’s well—we don’t want to rush this thing back. We want to get him at full speed and very securely bring him back into the rotations. He looks good, he’s making great progress, but it’s still a couple of weeks before we’d be ready to even think about throwing him out there.”

—Carroll said rookie DB Eric Pinkins, who is on the physically unable to perform list with a foot injury, is running and has a chance to make it back when he’s eligible to come off of that list (after Week 6). Though considering he’s a rookie who struggled at times in camp and was bouncing between safety and cornerback, it’s safe to say Pinkins may not be activated even when he’s healthy.

—Asked about the play of rookie receiver Kevin Norwood, who has been inactive the last two games after coming back from a foot injury, Carroll said they’re happy with Norwood’s play, but that’s simply a numbers game.

“He’s in great shape,” Carroll said. “We’ve just had trouble getting him on the roster just because he was kind of the last guy added to the competition of it, but not for any other reason. He’s a fine competitor. We’d love to have them all out there playing.”

Carroll said he’d like the see the league reconsider the rule that requires teams to deactivate seven players on game-day, even if everyone’s healthy.

“It’s just everybody’s healthy,” Carroll said. “The roster limits that we have don’t let these guys play. I’d like to talk about that when we get a chance to talk about 46-man rosters. We’ve got 53 guys practicing, we’ve got some great players who are sitting down every week. I wish more guys had a chance to play, I don’t know why they don’t. Because these guys are legitimate candidates to be playing in the game and they could do stuff to help themselves and help our team, and they just don’t get the chance. It’s unfortunate.”