RENTON — At the start of training camp this month, C.J. Prosise talked about the “completely different” training regimen he did this offseason, “to get my body to the point that I could play the whole game, that I could play a full season.”
Right now, it’s not working.
The dynamic running back for whom a special section of the Seattle Seahawks’ playbook is devoted spent Tuesday the same place he spent Monday: Inside the training room during the early part of practice, then on the sidelines to watch the end of it.
His status to play Friday night’s third preseason game, at home against Kansas City, is the same it’s been for much of his Seahawks career so far: In doubt.
Prosise’s latest in a string of injuries, dating back beyond three years ago when he was at Notre Dame, is a strained groin.
Assistant head coach and offensive line coach Tom Cable’s duties include being Seattle’s run-game coordinator. He was asked Tuesday if he is getting concerned with Prosise’s dependability after his injury-filled rookie season of 2016.
“I think we all are,” Cable said.
Message sent: Prosise is indeed gaining the label of fragile, not just outside team headquarters but inside the minds of Seahawks’ decision makers.
For all the talent he showed last season — more than 150 total yards in the November win at New England, the 72-yard romp for a score the following week at Philadelphia, the game in which he got a shoulder fracture that cost him the next two months — fears are forming that Prosise can’t stay on the field.
“We want to get everybody as healthy as we can as soon as we can so that they can be playing together,” Cable said. “I think as you know, that’s the key to good offensive football. We know we have a good offense. And for us to go from good to great and excellent to elite, then we need all of the pieces out there.
“So we’re working on that.”
Prosise felt tightness during pregame warmups Friday just before the second preseason game. That got him scratched from playing against Minnesota. After he missed practice Monday, he did some running with a trainer to test the groin. He did the same thing on the field following Tuesday’s practice.
“He just tightened up for the game in pregame. I watched it happen right before my eyes,” coach Pete Carroll said, describing a sight he’s had too many times in Prosise’s first 17 months with the Seahawks. “He was working. He was going hard, and you could see that he kind of felt it. So he hasn’t quite gotten rid of it.”
This latest injury is concerning enough that the team sent him to get a magnetic resonance imaging test last weekend.
“He’s had an MRI. And there’s no result from the MRI,” Carroll said, “so that’s a really good sign.”
Three weeks and one Prosise injury ago, Carroll said the third-down back and former Notre Dame wide receiver “has a great scope that he fills for us. He can come out of the backfield and he can run routes as a receiver. And he looked really good running the ball behind the line of scrimmage.”
But the overriding question with Prosise is the same now as it was at the start of camp: Not ability, durability.
Somewhat remade for the longer haul and back at Seahawks headquarters this spring, Prosise made it through organized team activities and minicamp without missing so much as a water break.
Carroll said “it was incredibly beneficial for us to see C.J. make it through the whole time. It was like, one day after another, nobody wanted to say anything, because he started to add up some days.
“Finally.”
After minicamp ended in mid-June, Prosise, from Petersburg, Virginia, went back his usual offseason workout gym in Knoxville, Tennessee. He did six more weeks of workouts there. He didn’t make his body bigger, but healthier and quicker.
He believed three weeks ago he’s more adaptable and resilient for 2017.
But now he’s on the sidelines instead of in the offense. Again.
“Now, we just have to get him loosened up and ready to go,” Carroll said Monday.
“We’d love to see him play this weekend.”
Wright returns — from wherever
K.J. Wright assures that no, he did not go to Switzerland to get his knee treatment.
“Nah, man,” the Pro Bowl linebacker said with a laugh following his return Tuesday to fully practicing.
Wright gets the reference.
He was in his third season with the Seahawks the last time Seattle had a veteran depart training camp for a mysterious treatment away from the team on an aching knee. That was the summer of 2013 when wide receiver Sidney Rice was hanging with the Swiss for plasma-rich platelet blood therapy in an attempt to accelerate healing.
All Carroll has said about the work done on Wright’s knee over the past week was that it was a “process,” it was not a surgery, and that it was done out of town.
Wright didn’t reveal much more upon his return to the starting defense three days before the Seahawks host Kansas City on Friday in the third preseason game. He did say it was no specific injury, that the knee had been bothering him since mid-June and that “things pop up, flare up and you have to take care of it.”
He wouldn’t say if he had the PRP therapy Rice had.
“Oh, we can’t talk about my knee,” the always-cordial Wright said with a grin on his face off the edge of the practice field.
“I don’t know what Sidney was on. But I was on some stuff that worked. Thank God for the doctors out here. They do an amazing job. I’m thankful that I’m back.
“But I’m good, though. I’ll be out there against Green Bay (in the opener Sept. 10), I promise you.”
He said his knee first began bothering him in organized team activities of June. But he practiced on, and played 13 snaps in the preseason opener Aug. 13 at the Los Angeles Chargers before seeking treatment.
“I’m a soldier. I pushed through it,” he said. “We just wanted to be smart, so I could be 100 percent for the season. This is the perfect time.”
“The knee is good. One-hundred percent,” the invaluable linebacker partner for All-Pro Bobby Wagner said. “You can see I’m running. How did I look out there?
“Yeah, I’m out there running, full speed, looking like the cheetah that I am.”
A Cheetah?
“More like a lion. Not like a cheetah,” he deadpanned. “Cheetahs are just too fast.
“I’m more like a lion.”
The Seahawks will just take the regular K.J. Wright.
They will absolutely take the return of the, until recently, under-appreciated but hugely important weakside linebacker. Wright never leaves the game, whether against the run or the pass, whether Seattle is in base, nickel, dime or any other variety of coin defense.
With his knee ailing against the Chargers and then without Wright last week in the preseason win over Minnesota, the Seahawks’ starters allowed 13-play scoring drives to begin each of their first two exhibitions.
“It’s OK. We can definitely be more dominant,” he said. “But that’s the beauty of preseason. That’s the beauty of practice.
“I just want to make sure we come out there this Friday and we put on that dominant performance that we are used to seeing, that the fans are used to seeing. We want the first defense to go out there and get a turnover, get some big stops.
“So it will definitely come in time.”
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