Seahawks releasing Tre Flowers ends a remarkable, unsuccessful Pete Carroll project
The most impressive moment of Tre Flowers’ season, maybe of his disappointing Seahawks career, didn’t happen on any field.
It happened inside a concrete tunnel in Minneapolis.
The Vikings had just shredded Flowers and his defense with 453 yards and 23 unanswered points in the Seahawks’ 30-17 loss in Minnesota. Three reporters from Seattle stood outside the visiting locker room beneath U.S. Bank Stadium seeking answers to a mess. Multiple senior Seahawks leaders declined requests to answer why Vikings receivers were so wide open so often that Sunday. They walked on, to the team bus.
Flowers did not walk away.
For more than 5 minutes the targeted cornerback stood tall and answered every question. He talked candidly about “a gray area” between showing the initiative to make plays and adhering to coach Pete Carroll’s and defensive coordinator Ken Norton Jr.’s assigned scheme, particularly in pillow-soft zone coverages and when Seattle blitzes.
“It’s a schematic thing, I feel like. I’ve got my own questions to ask,” Flowers said. “I’m going to fix it. ...It’s a little gray area right now amongst a couple people. I’ll fix it, or somebody else will fix it. We don’t know yet.
“Like I said, I’ve got a couple questions myself.”
That couldn’t have endeared him to his coaches.
He also spoke that day of a shadow he never shook in Seattle.
Asked what he needs to do to make the aggressive plays on the ball that will change the results, Flowers said: “More film. More film study. More...
“Sadly, y’all want me to be Sherman.”
Flowers will not become Richard Sherman.
Not in Seattle.
Wednesday, the Seahawks waived their fourth-year veteran cornerback who started for the team as a rookie in 2018, again in 2019 then in parts of 2020 and ‘21.
NFL Network’s Ian Rapoport reported Tuesday Flowers asked for his release, citing a league source, and that the Seahawks were granting it.
Wednesday, coach Pete Carroll said Flowers did not ask to be released.
“Not to me,” Carroll said.
“It was time for a change, for him.”
This is the final year of Flowers’ rookie contract, paying him $2.18 million in 2021. The Seahawks were unlikely to re-sign him beyond the end of the season.
His release coincides with the return of rookie cornerback Tre Brown. The Seahawks still don’t know what they have in their second of three draft choices this spring. Brown is coming back from injured reserve to practice to, the team hopes, challenge current starters D.J. Reed and Sidney Jones for a job.
Carroll glowed about Brown this summer and again Wednesday on how the rookie performed before getting injured. The coach wouldn’t reveal which side, Reed’s right or Jones’ left, Brown is working this week in closed practices.
Odds are it is on the left. Jones has not seized the job since moving into it and benching Flowers two games ago, at San Francisco. Seahawks coaches like Reed on the right side, where he shined at the end of last season.
The Seahawks also have former New York Jets starting cornerback Bless Austin, signed in early September. They’ve yet to play him on defense.
This ends Carroll’s project of converting the 6-foot-3 Flowers from a college safety at Oklahoma State into a long, tall cornerback in the Sherman, “Legion of Boom” mode in Seattle. That project began when Carroll made Flowers the team’s fifth-round draft choice in the spring of 2018.
These have been his first seasons as a cornerback in the native Texan’s football life.
His most costly failing for the Seahawks was on passes in the air. Flowers often gave too much room to receivers to make catches. Or, when he was in tight coverage, he often allowed catches anyway because he didn’t react quickly enough to the ball arriving.
Such as in the opening game of this season, at Indianapolis:
“I love that guy. I love the kid,” Carroll said, adding his hasn’t spent more time with any Seahawks player recently than in trying to develop Flowers.
Asked where it went wrong for Flowers in his scheme, Carroll said: “You have to finish the plays and make the plays, and then come back when you don’t.
“You just have to find success. You have to find successful plays to build on. And there wasn’t...it was just his time to go on. It really is.
“That’s enough to say.”
Flowers was generally a solid tackler, and Carroll called him a fine “technician” on the fundamentals of cornerback play. He had promising moments, such as in 2019 when he had the first three interceptions of his career.
But that season and his hold on a starting job ended with the Seahawks’ loss at Green Bay in the divisional round of the NFC playoffs in January 2020. On a night Marshawn Lynch re-retired, advising younger players to “take care y’all’s chicken,” Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers roasted Flowers.
Rodgers and Green Bay followed the league trend that season of mostly staying away from Seahawks Pro Bowl cornerback Shaquill Griffin; they picked on Flowers. It started with his first pass of the game. Davante Adams easily beat Flowers across the field on a sharp crossing route for a 14-yard gain. Three of Green Bay’s first five throws were at Flowers. The third of those throws was Rodgers’ easy, 20-yard touchdown pass to Adams. The Packers led 7-0 within the game’s first five snaps.
Flowers lost his job after that game. That offseason, Seattle traded with Washington for cornerback Quinton Dunbar to start in the 2020 season. But Dunbar had a chronic knee injury, and didn’t play much better than Flowers when he was on the field. Dunbar went on injured reserve late last season, and Flowers had his job back — briefly. He got hurt, too.
Reed was a waiver castoff signed from San Francisco in the summer the Seahawks put on layaway until he got healthy at the end of October. He flourished replacing Flowers and Dunbar. Reed was what Flowers often was not: aggressive and decisive breaking up passes, hitting receivers as passes arrived.
This spring, Griffin and Dunbar left Seattle in free agency, to Jacksonville and Detroit, respectively. The Seahawks drafted Brown, who at 5-10 is more like the shorter Reed than the Carroll-prototype Flowers. Seattle also signed Ahkello Witherspoon, the San Francisco 49ers’ starting cornerback, for one year and $4 million guaranteed.
Flowers went back to being a backup again.
This year’s training camp began with Reed and Witherspoon the starters. Then Reed got hurt, in August. Witherspoon was tall but he wasn’t good. Seattle eventually traded him to cornerback-needy Pittsburgh this summer. He’s played four defensive snaps all season for the Steelers, whom the Seahawks play in Pittsburgh Sunday night.
Flowers got his starting job back late in August.
“I’m really fired up for him to meet the competitive moment at this point,” Carroll said then. “And I hope that he can keep coming through and making stuff happen and can play.
“Because when he’s out there he’s a stud.”
Flowers intended to seize his chance this summer
“I want this, real bad,” he said. “I want to be good. I want to be great.
“I want to make the plays.”
Then he played as if between two minds: whether to attack, or stay back to not get beat deep, Carroll’s cardinal rule of cornerback play. Opponents such as the Vikings and last week the Rams ran seemingly endless crossing routes in front of the soft-playing coverage for third-down conversions, big pass plays and wins over Seattle.
Through it all, Flowers professed patience. He said fatherhood has taught him that.
“Good and bad. Ups and downs. Staying true to who I am,” Flowers said in mid-August
“And, you learn it in life,” he said, chuckling. “I have a baby, too. So, coming home, I can’t rush her, either.
“So, patience.”
His daughter Bailee is 4 years old now.
The baby girl of Flowers and girlfriend Breshae Monroe was 1 and Flowers was making her lunch one spring afternoon in 2018. That’s when Carroll and general manager John Schneider called to tell Flowers the Seahawks had drafted him, to change him from safety to cornerback, to be next in line for Sherman’s old job in Seattle.
As asking for his release suggests, Flowers believes he’s a better cornerback than the Seahawks do.
In that tunnel outside the locker room in Minneapolis a few weeks ago, Flowers was asked about his confidence. He said it was “high, high as hell.
“I mean, I don’t care what anybody says or — no offense to what anybody writes — I know I’m playing good.”
Jones. the former University of Washington standout, replaced him in the Seahawks’ starting lineup the next day.
Flowers hasn’t played since.
“Everybody can get better,” Flowers said. “If you want to point the finger at me, go ahead.”
This story was originally published October 12, 2021 at 9:14 PM.
