Russell Wilson: ‘No more pin. Time to win,’ chances rise he will return to Seahawks soon
The Seahawks’ Great Pin Mystery is solved.
About an hour after coach Pete Carroll said Monday the pin surgeons had put in Russell Wilson’s repaired middle finger was still in the quarterback’s throwing hand and he didn’t know when it was coming out, Wilson said it was out.
“No more pin. Time to win,” Wilson posted on his Twitter social-media account Monday afternoon.
So 24 days after his surgery. Wilson has taken the first step toward Wilson playing again soon.
Wilson had the pin put in to stabilize his finger in surgery Oct. 8 in Los Angeles. That was to repair a torn tendon and dislocation on the middle finger of his throwing hand.
Now that Wilson has the pin out, he can bend his finger. Now that he can bend his finger, he can take what Carroll said doctors told the team was “a couple days” during Seattle’s bye this week for the finger to heal before Wilson can throw a football.
“I don’t know when it’s coming out,” Carroll said an hour before Wilson announced it was out.
Either Carroll and the Seahawks and Wilson are not in lockstep on this key first stage to him getting back onto the field, or he had an appointment with his doctor Monday and unexpectedly got the pin out, to the surprise of everyone but perhaps Wilson.
Or the coach just left it up to Wilson to tell the world what’s up with his pin.
“I don’t have any updates for you,” Carroll said when asked about when Wilson was getting the pin out.
That was at about 1:15 p.m. Monday.
At 2:10, Wilson gave his update with his photo and message online that the pin was out.
At a minimum, it’s weird.
Aside from that oddity, the chances just went up of Wilson playing in Seattle’s next game, and for the first time since he got hurt Oct. 7 hitting his hand into the arm of Rams defensive lineman Aaron Donald on the follow-through to an incomplete pass.
Wilson has this entire Seahawks bye week, from Monday to next Monday, Nov. 8, to heal the finger from the pin being removed from it and leaving “a hole,” as Carroll described it. The Seahawks don’t play again until Nov. 14 at Green Bay.
That’s the first game Wilson is eligible to come off injured reserve. Per NFL rules, players on IR must miss a minimum of three games. Wilson’s third missed game was Seattle’s 31-7 win over Jacksonville on Sunday, when Geno Smith made his third consecutive fill-in start.
“There’s a pretty clear-cut time frame. They think that it’s going to take a couple days after that (pin) is removed, and then it’s just how he can progress,” Carroll said before Wilson announced the pin was out.
“It will be the first time he can bend his finger, you know. So we’ve got to see how that works out.”
Wilson again came out early for pregame warm-ups Sunday. For the third straight week he pantomimed plays, hand-offs and drop backs to pass. He did everything but throw a ball. He was wearing what appeared to be a new, black wrap on his hand, over both his repaired middle finger and the index finger on his right hand.
Last week he again was jogging on the side and cutting on the turf while Smith led the Seahawks offense into practices on the other end of the team’s indoor practice field.
“Russ has been doing everything he can do as far as making sure that his hand strength is there, and all of that,” Carroll said.
“But there is not a timeline that they said, ‘It going to take this many days before he throws. He has to throw this many balls,’ and that stuff. We don’t know that.
“It’s really kind of a hands-on process,” Carroll joked. “We haven’t quite got a grip on it yet.”
Carroll said he doesn’t know the process for removing the pin, how complicated that is. He joked that it will take “a pair of pliers, you know, and somebody is going to hold his hand and just jerk it out of there.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what they are doing.”
Obviously.
This story was originally published November 1, 2021 at 2:45 PM.
