RENTON, Wash. — Seattle coach Pete Carroll was fined $200,000, the Seahawks have been fined $400,000 and will lose a fifth-round draft choice for violating the NFL’s work rules on contact in the off-season, the league announced on Monday.
The Seahawks will forfeit the draft pick in 2017 and also lose a week of organized team activities for allowing excessive contact in an OTA on June 6. That is prohibited by the labour agreement with the players’ union.
Seahawks players will be paid for the cancelled sessions in 2017.
The league cited Carroll as "responsible for maintaining appropriate control over practices and intervening if prohibited conduct occurs."
"We’re trying to do this really well and trying to be great at it, and I was really disappointed it came to this. But they’ve got to do what they’ve got to do," Carroll said. "We’re going to continue to work really hard to do this really well. We practice hard around here, we always have, and we have to do it right. We’ve made strong efforts to do that, but we’re still working at it."
The decision was made after the league and the NFL Players Association independently reviewed the on-field practice video for June 6. Both sides agreed the Seahawks violated the no live contact rule. Carroll said the incident in question happened when two younger players collided going after a ball during a drill and both were injured from the collision.
"They both got banged in the head pretty good," Carroll said.
This is the second time the Seahawks have been penalized by the league for violating off-season workout protocols. Seattle had two minicamp practices taken away in June 2015 for contact rules violations during the 2014 off-season. Seattle’s players were allowed to attend meetings, but were limited to just one day of on-field work.
Seattle made changes to how it went through organized team activities during the 2015 off-season, with the help of the NFL.
The Seahawks went as far as to have Jon Ferrari, the NFL’s manager of labour operations in the management council department, visit the team headquarters. He met with the coaching staff prior to the start of OTAs and went over instructional film to make sure the team was in compliance.
The bigger loss for Seattle may be the draft pick. The Seahawks have scored with later-round picks under Carroll and general manager John Schneider. Some of their fifth-round picks have included current starters Richard Sherman, Kam Chancellor and Luke Willson.
