Seahawks ‘hoping’ more than knowing when Russell Wilson will get pin out and play again
Even after his team’s first win in almost a full month, Pete Carroll mentioned how much he longs for the return of Russell Wilson.
“We’ve missed Russ, too, in this three-week span. He’s a pretty good player,” Carroll deadpanned Sunday after the Seahawks finally won without their $140 million quarterback, 31-7 over Jacksonville.
They may be missing Wilson a while longer.
The biggest question of this bye week for Seattle is going to remain unanswered well into its next game week, before the Seahawks next play at Green Bay Nov. 14:
When will Wilson play again?
“I don’t know that,” Carroll said Monday.
The first issue is a pin. A surgeon put one into Wilson’s finger, to stabilize it in surgery Oct. 8 to repair a torn tendon and dislocation on the middle finger of his throwing hand. The pin must come out before Wilson can bend his finger, let alone throw a football.
“I don’t know when it’s coming out,” Carroll said.
“That’s part of the process that’s been coming. It’s how he works after that’s out and how he starts developing. It’s more that.”
Step two eventually will be at least a “couple days” of healing from getting the pin out before Wilson can practice.
“Picture it: he’s got a hole in his finger there that’s got to heal up,” Carroll said. “Real technical stuff right there. Sorry.
“Then they just start in (on the field again).”
That’s step three, Wilson practicing to play.
That assumes the pin removal, the tendon healing and workouts all go well.
“There’s a pretty clear-cut time frame. They think that it’s going to take a couple days after that is removed, and then it’s just how he can progress,” Carroll said.
“It will be the first time he can bend his finger, you know. So we’ve got to see how that works out.”
So, no, 24 days since his surgery and after three games out, there remains no clarity on when Wilson will play again.
“I don’t have any updates for you,” Carroll said.
“Really, we are just kind of hoping for the best in terms of his return, that everything is handled really well as we get him in mode where he starts to use his hand and his finger with the football and all that.
“We’ve just got to do a good job and see what happens. There’s no updates as of now.”
The Packers game Nov. 14 is the first when Wilson is eligible to come off injured reserve. IR players must miss at least three games, per NFL rules. Seattle’s win Sunday over Jacksonville was the third game Wilson missed.
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 Geno 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.”
Smith has played the last four games and made his first three NFL starts in four years since Wilson got hurt. Seattle has won one of those four games, Sunday 31-7 over the 1-6 Jaguars. That was Smith’s first victory as a starter since December 2014, his final start for the New York Jets in the initial years of his career.
Carroll said Smith again “ate the football” a couple times Sunday, holding onto it too long instead of throwing it away to avoid sacks. Jacksonville sacked Smith three times. That’s 13 sacks of Smith in his three starts filling in for Wilson.
At least once, Smith did throw the ball away while in field goal range. It ended his 14 consecutive completions to begin Sunday’s game, a high in the NFL this season. The 15th pass, his throwaway out of the end zone on third down, avoided a sack and kept Jason Myers’ field goal at 31 yards. He made it, for a 17-0 Seattle lead in the second quarter.
The game before, a home loss to the Saints, Smith twice held onto the ball and took big sacks that pushed Myers to the edge of realistic field goals on a rainy, windy night in Seattle. Myers missed two field goals, one from 53 yards after Smith’s sack, in the Seahawks’ three-point loss Oct. 25.
“That’s something that I need to improve on from last week. I took some sacks in some critical situations,” Smith said after his 20-for-24 passing day against the Jaguars. “I had to get the ball away. So that was an emphasis last week, throwing the ball away if I get in trouble.
“I was able to do that a few times.”
