Kaepernick or Griffin: What Pete Carroll Really Said Today

Did Carroll really create breaking news on 710 ESPN Seattle today?

Let me be straightforward here: we live in a modern age where everything is instantly overreacted to. Few news items deserve such outrageous attention. For those sports fans who have been sleeping since before John Schneider and Pete Carroll became cogs of the Seahawks administration, what Carroll said today about looking at certain players for backup quarterback was not in a new way for him. That he mentioned Colin Kaepernick and Robert Griffin III (because he was asked about them) seems to have set off much inanities among Twitterdom.

Tweets grabbed the most minimal and banal part of what Carroll truly was saying. Tweets like this from Adam Schefter

And this one

While both are these tweets are not untrue (George Orwell will hate this sentence), they are a little intentionally misleading. For the record I do not have in my whole being the talent Schefter has in a newly-cut fingernail. He is Lawrence Olivier. I am some schlub trying to play in the chorus of his local community theatre’s production of How to Succeed in Business…

Our friends at Field Gulls had much better phrasing and closer to what Carroll actually said in their tweet

What Carroll said was what the Seahawks have always said

Carroll was asked specifically on 710 ESPN Seattle’s Brock and Salk show about bringing in Kaepernick or Griffin. He said, “We’re looking at everybody, we really are. We’ve been tracking everything that’s going on.” And, “But quite frankly, yes, we are looking at all those guys.”

I am no genius. I am a Seahawks fan. And all Seahawks fans know by this time that what Carroll was saying is exactly what he actually said. The Seahawks look at everybody and are open to anything. Remember the Richard Sherman trade talk this offseason? That was simply because the Seahawks were open to listening.

The truth is that Kaepernick or Griffin would have to be willing to not get paid a whole lot if they join Seattle. The Seahawks are not going to cut players that they want to keep to make space for a backup quarterback. As Carroll also said today, “We’ve got cap and roster issues…that we’re still trying to manage properly.”

(By the way, I personally am hoping of the two the Seahawks sign Kaepernick. Should Russell Wilson be lost to injury, they could ill-afford to bring in a backup, like Griffin, who is so injury prone himself. My feeling is that neither Griffin or Kaepernick end up in Seattle; they cost too much.)