Minicamp will be a little more miniature this week.
Seattle Seahawks players and coaches will get together for meetings for three days this week, but the 2015 version of mandatory minicamp will consist of just one on-field practice, which will take place Thursday afternoon.
If you're wondering why the Seahawks are on the field just one day while teams around the league hold three-day minicamps, the answer goes back to last year's mandatory minicamp. The Seahawks lost two minicamp practices, which would have taken place Tuesday and Wednesday, for players engaging in, as a statement from the league described it, "excessive levels of on-field physical contact during the team's 2014 mandatory minicamp for veteran players."
While Seahawks coach Pete Carroll would have preferred to have more practice time this week, he is trying to use past issues as teaching moments for himself, his coaching staff and his players going forward. Throughout this year's Organized Team Activities, which wrapped up last week, players have gone through all if not most of practice without helmets, which Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said was part of the team's effort to practice within the rules laid out in the 2011 collective bargaining agreement.
"We made a big effort the last couple of weeks here to understand better—we can all get better—about the OTA tempo and all that we've had some issues with in the past," Carroll said.
Carroll references "issues in the past" because the Seahawks also lost two OTA practices in 2012 for a similar violation.
"I'm really disappointed, because we don't want to be doing things wrong, we want to do things right, and I'd like to show exactly how to do it," Carroll said last year when the league's punishment was announced. "When you're competing like we do—we're trying to do things the best you can possibly do it, so unfortunately this decision makes it look otherwise."
Carroll noted that the Seahawks had Jon Ferrari from the NFL's management council go over video with coaches to help them, "get our tempo right… We want to do this exactly the way it's supposed to be done. We push; sometimes we practice so hard here that we missed the tempo a couple of times."
