Seahawks coach Pete Carroll acknowledges that cornerback Richard Sherman could have been flagged for unnecessary roughness after he jumped offside and drilled Bills kicker Dan Carpenter on Monday night. But Carroll isn’t convinced the hit was quite as bad as Carpenter made it look.
Carroll said today on 710 ESPN Seattle that Carpenter was acting like he was hurt to make the hit look worse than it was.
“He hams it up a little bit too, which makes it bad,” Carroll said.
Carroll may be right about that: Kickers often flop in an attempt to draw a roughing penalty, and Carpenter, who fell to the ground grabbing his leg, quickly got back up again when he wanted to line up for the subsequent play. It wouldn’t be surprising if Carpenter was trying to draw a flag, as players often do.
Still, the reality remains that Sherman committed a penalty for which he wasn’t called, and then the officials compounded that mistake by wrongly calling the Bills for delay of game. Carpenter missed the field goal after that sequence of events, contributing to the Seahawks’ win. Carpenter has a lot more to complain about than Carroll does.