Vince Grippi:Kam Chancellor’s holdout beginning to wear on Seahawks coach Carroll
Thursday: Pete Carroll is always positive, right? Which is why something he said yesterday caught my ear.
“Yeah, it’s an issue of concern.”
When Carroll says something like that in a press conference, it’s akin to a politician saying he admires a member of the opposing party. You never expect to hear it, so you figure it must be true.
In Carroll’s case, he was talking yesterday about Kam Chancellor’s holdout, a Don Quixote-like quest to have the Seahawks extend or rework a contract that still has three years.
Every day Chancellor isn’t in camp is a day in which the Hawks defense loses a chance to get more precise in running new coordinator Kris Richard’s revised schemes. And that’s starting to wear on Carroll.
“We have to keep moving,” is how Carroll put it, adding he believes the holdout has to be wearing on Chancellor as well. And here may be why: No matter how important Chancellor is to the defense right now, it’s more important in the long run for Seattle to keep in place its contract philosophy. The financial parameters Carroll and John Schneider have put in place are there to allow the Hawks to “win forever,” a stupid term that has an intelligent meaning.
The NFL is built to destroy success. It flat-out costs too much to win consistently, unless you can play the system better than everyone else.
Giving players raises when they have agreed to a long-term, cap-friendly contract destroys one of the pillars Seattle’s philosophy is built upon. It’s not Chancellor, per se. But if Schneider makes an exception for Chancellor and gives in, who is next? And will that next person be someone even more important?
So one of three things has to happen. Either Chancellor has to give up and return to camp, which would cause him to lose face and wouldn’t be a good thing for anyone, or he and the Hawks have to come up with some out-of-the-box compromise that allows Seattle to keep its philosophy in place while allowing Chancellor to say he won. I can’t for the life of me see what that compromise would be. Schneider is pretty smart so maybe he has something in mind.
The third one is too awful to contemplate. Chancellor digs in. Schneider and the Hawks dig in. Both believe they are right and both believe it’s too important to give in. So Chancellor ends up playing safety in Philadelphia or Jacksonville this season while the Hawks bank a high draft pick for next year.
We’ll call that the nuclear option and pray no one puts a finger on the red button.
Wednesday: No one should get mad at a 17- or 18-year-old kid for changing his mind. But no one should take every 17- or 18-year-old kid at his word either.
What does the word “commitment” mean to you? Webster’s definition includes the word promise. A person’s word. But it’s not binding in any way, which is why I despise the emphasis put on oral commitments in college recruiting.
Quarterback Ian Book, who committed to Washington State months ago, has changed his mind. Last night he announced he is going to Notre Dame. I wonder how many of the four wide receivers currently committed to WSU made their decision because Book helped recruit them? And how many of them feel a bit betrayed?
I’ve been told Chris Peterson at Washington tells recruits the scholarship offer is there and will be there until they make up their mind.
If they commit, it’s set in stone. The school is locked in if they are locked in. But if they commit and then take visits to other schools, the offer may be pulled.
UW will look elsewhere, because taking visits means the recruit isn’t really committed at all. So the Huskies don’t have to be. The idea the commitment is a true two-way street appeals to me.