Playoff exit extra jolting to Tyler Lockett. Seahawks head home into COVID-19 ‘real world’
The Seahawks began the day celebrating and honoring the nurses and staff that tested them every day for the coronavirus for the last six months.
They ended their Saturday—and season—wishing they still had them.
Seattle’s 30-20 loss to the Los Angeles Rams in the NFC wild-card playoffs at Lumen Field means the only NFL team to not have a positive case of COVID-19 this season is going home. They are leaving what they called their “self-bubble” of testing early every morning. Of restrictions such as not going to restaurants. Of having their friends and family that wanted to visit them first getting tested in the parking lot of Seahawks headquarters in Renton and cleared before they could.
Those trailers are going vacant now. The relentlessly positive COVID-19 testing crew, the Seahawks “swab team” they honored by having them raise the 12 Flag just before kickoff Saturday, are like the players.
They are all going home.
For Tyler Lockett and many other Seahawks, that’s scary.
Last summer, five months into the pandemic, Lockett was 50-50 on whether to play at all this season. He considered opting out of this season because of COVID-19. He feared the risk of catching the virus and passing it to vulnerable, older family members.
“That’s what happens when you come to the playoffs, man. Win or go home,” the Seahawks’ record-setter with 100 reception this season said. “That hard part (this year) is, not only do you lose in a playoff game, we’ve got to go back to our homes and will be thinking about all the stuff we’ve been through this whole year, with just having to get tested every day. Having to try to stay away from as many people as we possibly can. Being careful with who you fly up here to be around.
“And now we, literally, have to go back to being at home, back into the real world. It’s hard being in a real world while we’ve been away from it for so long. And now we got to figure out, like where are we going to go? Who we’re going to see? Who we are not going to see?”
Lockett, 28, senses that because the players won’t be getting tested every day with nearly instant results anymore, it’s going to be difficult to stay as free from the virus. This new, upcoming time for the players calls for even more self-discipline to stay healthy than coach Pete Carroll and the Seahawks preached all season, to superlative results.
The players don’t know if the introduction of vaccines across the country will allow them by May to have offseason minicamps and workouts at team headquarters. They had none of those in 2020.
Lockett’s thinking it’s possible if not likely he and his teammates will be on their own across our pandemic country until the start of training camp in late July.
“I mean, that’s a lot, being at home all the way to the end of July, especially during COVID everything is shut down,” he said. “So, I mean, it’s one of those things where you just got to kind of rewire your mind and figure out how to adjust again.
“You got a lot of guys that sacrificed a lot, you got people who couldn’t be around family...this was just a whole different year in general, man.”
Carroll said he understands and appreciates what the players went through beyond the physical toll of playing 17 NFL football games, with their 60 or so inherent car crashes of bodies flying so fast into other bodies on every play.
The Seahawks also championed social justice and racial issues.
They canceled a practice in August to ensure every player and coach was registered to vote in November’s general election, to forge change they demanded as loudly as any in the NFL and in professional sports.
In one way, his 11th season as Seahawks coach was his best coaching yet. He successfully led the Seahawks through off the field dangers in a season like no other.
“This season has been such an extraordinary year in so many ways,” Carroll said. “So much around us and just all that has to do with life. And we’re really proud of these guys.
“Throughout the whole process of it being so strict and regimented to make it through this time as healthy as we did, we learned a lot. And they’ve grown a lot. ...
“And this football season was supposed to just keep going for us. That’s what we were planning.
“Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get it done.”
This story was originally published January 9, 2021 at 7:47 PM.
