News came down last night that two of the Seahawks’ most important players, cornerbacks Brandon Browner and Richard Sherman, are facing four-game suspensions by the NFL for violating league policy on performance enhancing drugs.
Neither player was available for comment today (though Sherman proclaimed his innocence via Twitter last night) and Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said he couldn’t say anything about it.
“Really, we can’t comment on that at all,” Carroll said. “That is a situation between the players and the league, and we have no position to comment in any way about it.”
According to multiple reports, the players will appeal, and as long as the appeal is ongoing, they will be eligible to play. Asked if he is planning on having Sherman and Browner available for this week’s game in Chicago, Carroll said he did.
“As of right now, yeah, I’m planning on those guys playing,” He said.
When asked if he was concerned about this seeing as the Seahawks have had three other players suspended for PEDs dating back to last season (John Moffitt, Allen Barbre and Winston Guy), Carroll reiterated that he couldn’t talk about the topic.
“Let me do it this way, because it’s so important that we do this properly,” he said. “I’m not going to comment about it. That’s the best way to do this. This is a league issue and at this point I’m just going to keep it there, and I hope you can respect that that’s the way we have to do that. We’ll talk about it later on in a general, broader sense when we can.”
OK, so if you can’t talk about the suspension, what do you think about your depth at the position in general terms?
“We have a very solid young bunch of guys who have been with us a long time, and also Marcus has been there for a long while,” Carroll said. “Jeremy Lane has been doing things for us that we’re excited about, and he’s a very exciting football player. Maxwell has done a great job for us on special teams, and when he gets his chances he does good stuff, so we’d expect him to be a contributor whenever we call on him. These guys are ready to go. We have Walter Thurmond ready to go, that’s a really cool deal to have him ready to play. We’ve had him prepared for weeks, so all of those guys are on call. It’s a pretty strong position for us in general.”
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