After almost 2 years recovering from injury, Seahawks’ Ben Burr-Kirven embraces ‘surreal’ return

RENTON, Wash. – When it seemed like maybe Ben Burr-Kirven should start exploring a Plan B for his life, he didn’t consider the thought.

After missing the 2021 season due to a knee injury suffered in the preseason and needing two more operations the following year to fix nerve damage while being told he’d likely never play football again, Burr-Kirven kept a singular focus.

He would, he decided, play football again – somehow, someway.

“I didn’t do anything but football,” he said Thursday of his journey over the past 23 months following a left knee injury suffered in a preseason game against the Denver Broncos on Aug. 21, 2021. “I never stopped.”

And what the one-time University of Washington standout called “a crazy road” to recovery led him this week to a workout at the Seahawks training facility in Renton to show his former team that maybe he could still play.

“Just even getting in the building and doing a workout, that felt like a win,” Burr-Kirven said.

A bigger one came later in the day when the team said he’d passed the test and offered him a contract for the 2023 season.

Burr-Kirven happily signed and joined the roster Thursday, taking part in a morning walk-through and a practice in the afternoon.

Burr-Kirven talked to reporters just before heading out on the field and said of what would be his first real football activity of any kind in 23 months, “It’s gonna be pretty surreal.”

Burr-Kirven said that he didn’t know how much action he might get and that he expected the team might ease him back in.

But while he didn’t get a ton of snaps, the team wasted no time getting him some 11-on-11 plays.

At one point, Burr-Kirven found himself in coverage against former UW teammate Will Dissly, making a somewhat playful tag after a catch.

“It was dope seeing him back out there just knowing the road he’s been through the last two years,” safety Quandre Diggs said. “I’m excited for him.”

Burr-Kirven’s detour began when he was injured on the opening kickoff against the Broncos, a play that looked harmless when the boot by Denver’s Brandon McManus sailed into the end zone for a touchback.

At the time, Burr-Kirven was beginning his third season with the Seahawks after being a fourth-round pick in 2019 after leading the nation with 176 tackles in his final year at UW.

He’d played just 14 snaps on defense his first two seasons while backing up Bobby Wagner and K.J. Wright, but almost 600 on special teams, second most on the team.

He’d hoped a strong training camp and preseason in 2021 might finally earn him some regular playing time on defense, especially with the team having not re-signed Wright.

But those hopes all vanished in a split second .

“It was a touchback,” Burr-Kirven said. “Heard the whistle, just relaxed for a second, got pushed. Trying to keep (my) balance just stepped too far over the knee and straight out the back door.”

But if Burr-Kirven knew it was bad in the moment, the news got worse when he realized there was nerve damage that meant “it wasn’t a traditional ACL” injury.

There was the hope that an initial surgery might do the trick.

But the nerve damage lingered, resulting in what Burr-Kirven said was drop foot syndrome and two additional surgeries in 2022.

What Burr-Kirven called a “nerve transfer” surgery conducted by Mitchel Seryua at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles eventually helped turn the tide. Burr-Kirven said he settled on the surgery after doing a lot of research, including looking into how players who had suffered similar injuries, such as Jaylon Smith of the Dallas Cowboys, had recovered.

Still, the surgery was no sure thing – Burr-Kirven said the specific procedure he had has not been done on a professional athlete but had worked for some high-school athletes and some nonathletes who just wanted to regain normal knee function.

Burr-Kirven said he wondered, “Is this a crazy thing we shouldn’t be doing?”

But he relied on a big team of doctors, trainers and others for guidance. One he said was with him every step of the way was Seahawks assistant athletic trainer C.J. Neumann.

Neumann told Burr-Kirven early in the process, “ ‘Look man, I’ll take this with you as far as we can go.’ ”

He admits, though, that “obviously there were dark days” having to miss two straight seasons and being told it could take one to two years for his knee to get back to normal.

After spending the 2022 season on the injured reserve, Burr-Kirven was waived by Seattle last March, a move that might have been easy to interpret as the end of his career.

But Burr-Kirven said he understood the team’s need at the time to open a roster spot – he was due to be a free agent anyway.

Coach Pete Carroll said in January that Burr-Kirven was in an “experimental mode” with his recovery and indicated it was unclear if he could play again.

But he also said Burr-Kirven was “planning on getting back out there. So, we are going to give him every chance. If he can do it, this is going to be the place that he does it.”

Burr-Kirven essentially decided to hold Carroll to his word, saying he told the team after his release, “(I’m) going to give you a call when (I’m) ready and if you want to bring me in, that would be great.”

Burr-Kirven then kept working out, including spending much of the summer in Chicago with Seahawk Nick Bellore and his trainer.

If the days at times might seemed like drudgery, Burr-Kirven said he never lacked for motivation.

“I just love football, man,” Burr-Kirven, 25, said. “I’ve been playing football since I was 10 years old and you never wanted to stop. To have it taken away so early, it seemed like, and for a while it was like, ‘Man, am I going to be able to do this again?’ – you miss it.

“And all of the sudden I kind of saw what it’s like when football ends, for two years not being able to suit up.

“[But] the hunger just never went away. And so as long as I was waking up and wanted to still do this it was easy to keep coming up and showing up.”

That there were plenty of small steps in the right direction along the way that helped, he said. So, too, did the support of all of his trainers, doctors and teammates.

“The further we got into it, the more I started to believe,” he said. “… You just have to trust that it’s going to pay off. And you know, the fact that I get to go out and play football today is that payoff.””