Report: Seahawks released undrafted rookie after he tried to sneak a woman into team hotel
Pete Carroll’s number-one rule — ”protect the team” — is indeed taking on new, even bizarre meaning in this NFL COVID-19 season.
The Seahawks released undrafted rookie defensive back Kemah Siverand this week after their video surveillance captured him trying to sneak a woman into the team’s hotel near its training-camp headquarters. That’s according to a most unusual report Thursday from NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero, citing “sources.”
“The woman was wearing #Seahawks gear in an attempt to disguise her as a player, I’m told,” Pelissero posted on his Twitter page.
“It did not work.”
No, it absolutely did not.
Among the many questions here: Which Seahawks player could Siverand’s lady friend possibly have been disguised in a team hoodie to be? DK Metcalf?
Seattle released Siverand on Tuesday. The cornerback signed with the team after April’s draft as a rookie free agent. He played college football at Oklahoma State and Texas A&M.
This would be an offense under Carroll’s top team rule no matter the year.
But this year? With the Seahawks in what Carroll, Russell Wilson, Bobby Wagner and other team leaders have described as essentially a bubble? With them relying on self-discipline to do the right things off the field to limit interactions and reduce the chances of catching the COVID-19 virus?
Siverand’s act is so 2020 in its absurdity.
Asked about the stunt and the Seahawks then cutting Siverand for it by Dave Mahler of Seattle’s KJR-AM radio Thursday, Carroll said: “We do all that stuff here on the interior. No details for that.”
Carroll was not available to talk to the media covering the second practice of Seahawks training camp Thursday.
Almost as bizarre as the circumstance surrounding Siverand getting cut: that someone, apparently from inside Seahawks’ headquarters, would leak this to the league-owned media outlet. It’s one thing for Carroll to stand up in front of a team meeting and use Siverand as a literally cutting example of what not to do to protect the team and succeed in this coronavirus season. It’s another to effectively, publicly end Siverand’s chance to catch on with another NFL team this summer into fall.
It’s highly unlikely the player’s agent would leak that damaging information to a media member.
Last month the league sent a memorandum to all teams reminding them that training-camp hotel arrangements must adhere to the team travel protocol for 2020 that the NFL and its players’ union finalized. That memo asserts visits to team rooms in hotels are permitted only by members of a team’s official and limited traveling party — as if that wasn’t an obvious requirement already, given all our society has gone through in this pandemic since March.
The Seahawks set up players who do not have homes in the Seattle area, almost always first- or second-year players, in a team-designated and paid-for hotel during training camp. It’s near the team’s Virginia Mason Athletic Center in Renton.
That hotel is where Seahawks players have been particularly vigilant in policing themselves, to keep from getting COVID-19 and derailing their own and the team’s season. Wide receiver John Ursua was speaking from his room in the team hotel this week when he told his hometown KHON television in Honolulu about his initial positive COVID-19 test becoming a false positive, following two subsequent negative tests. Ursua said food is delivered to the hotel to keep guys from going out to a restaurant for even a take-out order.
“We’ve been living a pretty isolated life right now,” Ursua told KHON this week. “We are not exactly like ‘the bubble,’ but we treat everything as if it is, where our food is delivered to us, we only get to go to the facility and come back to the hotel. We do all our meetings here at the hotel, where they try to keep us out of restaurants, out of closed-off areas.
“So they are doing a great job.”
Last month, Wagner talked about the need for players being disciplined far more than usual away from the field this training camp and preseason.
“I think it’s extremely important to think that this year is going to be a year that we’ve never experienced before,” Wagner said.
“Especially for a rookie. A rookie doesn’t even know what to expect going in. It’s going to be nothing like any of us has seen before. So I think discipline is going to be the biggest thing, understanding that we aren’t really going to be able to do the things that we normally do. And we have to think about not just ourselves but our families, other people’s families, and understand that if we do something reckless or something that goes against what we are trying to do, that doesn’t just affect your family. That affects everybody else.
“So we’ve just got to be really smart about it. Understand the challenge at hand, the task at hand, and really think about others when it’s time to think about (what you do).”
So far, it’s working. Through the first 17 days of camp, through daily testing in the parking lot of the team facility, the Seahawks have had zero true positive tests for the coronavirus.
That is, it’s working for everyone except Siverand.
This story was originally published August 13, 2020 at 5:26 PM.
