Seahawks have yet to talk to Chris Carson about his expiring contract. Here’s why.
Despite being the most valuable guy to one of the few remaining offenses that value the run —despite proving his worth for three years (literally) running—Chris Carson is getting crickets from his team.
So far.
Seattle’s lead running back since the first game of his rookie season of 2017 has gained 2,381 yards with 16 rushing touchdowns total the last two seasons. He is entering the final year of his contract.
He says the Seahawks have not talked to him about his future beyond 2020.
“Not really,” Carson said Tuesday. “No.”
Asked if he’d like to be in Seattle for as long as he can anticipate, Carson gave a noticeably muted, albeit realistic answer. It shows he understands the cold, what-have-you-done-for-us-lately business of the NFL. Particularly at running back.
“I mean, if everything plays out the right ways,” he said. “I guess we are going to have to see.”
Carson admits he is entering his fourth season while considering his contract and wondering—for now, anyway—where he will be beyond 2020.
“I mean, of course that’s something that’s in my head, on my mind. You see a lot of guys that are starting to get paid,” he said. “You see somebody get paid, your phone blows up. Everybody’s up in you like, ‘Oh, did you see so and so go paid, blah, blah, blah.’
“Like I said, man, I just try not to focus on it.”
Carson’s phone was poppin’ again Tuesday. Hours before Carson spoke on a remote Zoom call, the Cincinnati Bengals gave Joe Mixon a four-year contract extension worth $48 million.
Mixon went in the second round of the 2017 draft to Cincinnati. Carson went in the seventh and final round that year, to Seattle. He was the 249th of 253 choices in that draft
Mixon has averaged 66.6 yards rushing per game with 17 rushing touchdowns in his three-year career. Carson, 22 months older, has averaged 78.5 yards per game with 16 rushing touchdowns in his three-year career.
“I try not to let it distract me from the season, you know what I mean? Just try to push it away,” Carson said before the Seahawks’ 15th practice of training camp on Tuesday. “But like I said, it is something that is on my mind. But I try not to let it affect me.”
Carson appears to be in the one NFL place that would seemingly be willing to take care of him and his family financially, for generations. Coach Pete Carroll bases his offense on Carson and the running game as much as any team and offense in the NFL. “Establish the run” has become a joke, and a social-media hashtag, derisively used by the many who believe the Seahawks run too much at the expense of quarterback Russell Wilson’s exquisite throwing.
Carson is Carroll’s hero of “establish the run.” The coach has been glowing about Carson since the day 3 1/2 years ago Seattle drafted him as a part-time, punishing, but injured running back in his two years at Oklahoma State after coming from junior college.
Carroll loves Carson not just for his yards and scores, but for how he gains them. He doesn’t break tackles as much as he runs over tacklers. He hurdles them. He attacks them.
“He’s a stud of a player. He’s a great competitor. He’s got style and toughness and all that,” Carroll said last September.
That was the day Carson plowed for 145 yards in a win at Arizona to reward his coach’s faith in him through more fumbling the previous week in Seattle’s home loss to New Orleans.
“Really,” Carroll said, “I’d like to think it’s emblematic of the way we want to play.”
And pay. At least one would think.
So it came as something of a surprise to hear Carson say Carroll, general manager John Schneider and the Seahawks haven’t talked to Carson about a new deal yet. The franchise has typically paid its foundational players before or during the final years of their contracts, to keep them from feeling vulnerable about their future beyond the year they are playing.
The Seahawks’ silence with Carson so far shows how uniquely perilous running backs are to pay.
He’s certainly worthy. Carson is coming off back-to-back 1,000-yard rushing seasons. He’s the sixth rusher in Seahawks’ history to do that, after Curt Warner (1985-86), Chris Warren (1992-95), Ricky Watters (1998-2000), Shaun Alexander (2001-05) and Marshawn Lynch (2011-14).
Carson’s 1,151 yards in 2018 made him Seattle’s first 1,000-yard rusher since Lynch in 2014.
Only Ezekiel Elliott (14) has more 100-yard rushing games in the NFL the last two seasons than Carson (12).
But Carson has not proven to be durable.
He broke his leg four games into his rookie season and had season-ending surgery. In 2018 he missed two games and also played through an injured hip and groin. His 2019 season ended in December with a cracked and displaced hip.
Now, after not needing surgery for the hip and returning fully to training camp after missing most of it so far away following deaths in his family, Carson said Tuesday “I’m 100%.”
Carson has not had a full, injury-free season dating to his junior-college days at Butler Community College in Kansas. Those were in 2013 and ‘14. In 2012, he tore his anterior cruciate ligament in his knee during his senior season at Lilburn Parkview High School in Georgia. That changed his plans of playing football for the University of Georgia. He had a hand injury that cost him games in 2016, his final one at Oklahoma State.
He plays at the position with the highest rate of injuries in the NFL. His backup the last two seasons, Rashaad Penny, is rehabilitating following reconstructive knee surgery this past winter. Penny may miss the first six games of this season. He likely to go on the physically-unable-to-perform list for the start of the regular season on Saturday when NFL teams need to set their initial 53-man roster for the season.
That’s why the Seahawks last month signed Carlos Hyde, a 1,000-yard rusher for Houston in 2019, to a one-year contract possibly worth up to $4 million including incentives.
Carson is scheduled to earn $2.1 million this year.
Hyde, 29, the former lead back for San Francisco, knows he’s the insurance plan behind Carson.
“I think everybody knows who the starting running back is for Seattle,” Hyde said this spring, “and that’s Carson.”
The last time Carroll, Schneider and Seattle have re-upped a returning, lead running back for big bucks was for Carson’s predecessor. Marshawn Lynch got a $24 million, two-year extension in March 2015. That was six months before his contract season began, in which he was scheduled to earn $5 million.
It’s a bit of an apples-to-oranges comparison. That was Lynch’s third contract in the NFL, second with Seattle after his trade from Buffalo during the 2010 season. He had already been the soul of the Seahawks teams that won a Super Bowl and played in another.
Carson is coming up on the end of his first contract.
Plus, the Seahawks just watched what happened to their NFC West rivals giving a huge contract to a lead running back.
The Los Angeles Rams gave Todd Gurley a four-year, $57 million extension in July 2018. It seemed like a sure thing. Gurley was coming off being the NFL’s offensive player of the year. The 2017 and ‘18 All-Pro running back became the league’s highest-paid running back with his new contract after, like Carson, far outplaying the rookie deal he signed in 2015.
But by the end of the 2018 season, the Rams made the Super Bowl while having to preserve Gurley and his arthritic knee. Last season he had career lows in carries (223) and yards rushing (857). L.A.’s coaches again tried to preserve him and his knee. By March, while still only 25 years old and less than two years after they gave him the $57 million deal to become their franchise cornerstone, the Rams released Gurley. That saved them $10.5 million in guarantees they don’t have to pay him this year.
The Atlanta Falcons signed Gurley this spring to a one-year deal. It guarantees him $5.5 million — $16.45 million less than the guarantees in his last Rams deal. The Seahawks will play Gurley in the opener Sept. 13 in Atlanta, Carson’s hometown.
Carson is 44 days younger than Gurley, who also had an ACL tear. Gurley’s was coming out of the University of Georgia into the 2015 draft.
That makes this buyer beware for the Seahawks.
Asked if he thinks he’s in the one NFL place that will take care of a elite-producing running back, Carson grinned.
“I mean, yeah, but like I said I don’t want to...I don’t like to think about it,” he said. “You get your hopes up—and something goes south.
“So, just keep a level head with everything.”
Does he feel he still has something to prove this season?
“Something to prove? “I mean, just being a seventh-round draft pick you are always going to have that chip on your shoulder,” Carson said.
“But at this point in the game, I really don’t have nothing to prove. I feel like my game has spoken for itself the last three years.”
