Throughout this season, and even before when Marshawn Lynch was holding out at the start of training camp, there has been speculation and later reports that the running back wouldn’t be a Seahawk in 2015.
This week, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll has apparently decided it’s time to put an end to the speculation, or at least attempt to do so. A day after telling USA Today that Lynch is “our guy” and that “we’d love to have him back,” Carroll addressed the topic of Lynch’s future again with the media following Friday’s practice.
“We want him around here for as long as he can play, and there’s never been any hesitation, there’s never been another thought about that,” Carroll said. “That came totally from somewhere else. He’s under contract next year, we’ll be thrilled to have him playing for us next year. So we’ll do everything we can to get that done.”
Carroll prefaced that statement with “If you guys ever would have asked me, which you didn’t, if you ever would have asked, I would have said…”
Never mind that Carroll was asked on Oct. 27 about an ESPN report that said the Seahawks were tired of Lynch’s act and that he’d be gone in 2015 and responded, “I have nothing to say about that because there’s nothing to that. I have no idea where that came from. We have nothing to say about that. At this point I don’t think it behooves us to try and respond to all of these kinds of things in the locker room. Our players have told you how they feel, our coaches have told you how we feel about it and were in a really good place right now. It’s just not worth it so there’s nothing to that at all. I don’t know where that came from.”
What Carroll has or hasn’t been asked really doesn’t matter at this point, because there’s not a lot of answers he can give about a player under contract other than to say he wants that player back. Carroll saying that in November by no means guarantees Lynch’s return in 2015. For starters, even if the Seahawks did already have their minds made up on Lynch, which is unlikely at this point, is Carroll really going to say, “we love the guy, but he’s too expensive for us to keep next year,” when they still need him over the last six games of this season? And secondly, you could take a phrase like “We want him around here for as long as he can play,” and take that to mean that they’d consider not having Lynch around if his play falls off or he shows signs of breaking down (Lynch has only been able to practice one day in each of the past two weeks).
And finally, Carroll, like plenty of coaches, has expressed his desire to have a player around the following year, only to have the business side of the game force a different decision in the offseason. Carroll told reporters at the NFL scouting combine that they loved Sidney Rice and Zach Miller and hoped to have them back this season, then hours later Rice was released. Miller would have likely been released too had he not agreed to a restructured deal that decreased his pay significantly. At other times, Carroll also expressed a desire to keep Red Bryant and Chris Clemons around, but they too were salary cap casualties. I don’t point that out to call Carroll a liar; I believe if money were no object, most if not all of the above mentioned players would be here, but the realities of the salary cap means that liking a player now, even one who is under contract through the following season, doesn’t mean that player will for sure be back when those business decisions have to be made.
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