Written by Tim Booth at YahooSports.com
Seattle coach Pete Carroll was fined $200,000, the Seahawks have been fined $400,000 and will lose a fifth-round draft choice for violating the NFL’s work rules on contact in the offseason, the league announced on Monday.
The Seahawks will forfeit the draft pick in 2017 and also lose a week of organized team activities for allowing excessive contact in an OTA on June 6. That is prohibited by the labor agreement with the players’ union.
Seahawks players will be paid for the canceled sessions in 2017.
The league cited Carroll as ”responsible for maintaining appropriate control over practices and intervening if prohibited conduct occurs.”
”We’re trying to do this really well and trying to be great at it, and I was really disappointed it came to this. But they’ve got to do what they’ve got to do,” Carroll said. ”We’re going to continue to work really hard to do this really well. We practice hard around here, we always have, and we have to do it right. We’ve made strong efforts to do that, but we’re still working at it.”
The decision was made after the league and the NFL Players Association independently reviewed the on-field practice video for June 6. Both sides agreed the Seahawks violated the no live contact rule. Carroll said the incident in question happened when two younger players collided going after a ball during a drill and both were injured from the collision.
”They both got banged in the head pretty good,” Carroll said.
This is the second time the Seahawks have been penalized by the league for violating offseason workout protocols. Seattle had two minicamp practices taken away in June 2015 for contact rules violations during the 2014 offseason. Seattle’s players were allowed to attend meetings, but were limited to just one day of on-field work.
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