Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll doesn’t know when the coronavirus circumstances will allow his team to convene and begin preparations for the 2020 season. Washington State has a stay-at-home order through the end of April and NFL teams’ offseason programs will begin virtually along with NFL Draft proceeding happening away from team facilities.
But as far as Carroll is concerned, the Seahawks need to plan as though they’ll get the green light to go any given week.
“Well everything is kind of in flux right now,” Carroll said on Sirius XM NFL Radio. “We’ve set back the time frame to start but we’re getting ready for virtual offseason and all of that. We’re all working real hard to do that to get organized so that we can do it really well. We just have to be patient, but in the meantime we just kind of keep grinding and stay with the mentality kind of like that they could tell us next week that we’re on. We’re attempting to be as prepared as possible. We’re not saying ‘OK, we’ve got three or four weeks to figure this thing out.’ We’re not doing that. We’re just going for it.”
It’s uncharted territory for Carroll and the NFL as a whole as every projection of when things could return to a closer sense of normality are still just educated guesses at best. Unlike the lockout year of 2011, coaches will eventually get the all clear to fully communicate with their players as the offseason progresses. They won’t completely be in the dark heading into the presumptive start of training camp in the summer. Nevertheless, there’s no guarantee training camp or the season itself will eventually be able to proceed.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” Carroll said. “We can’t communicate with the players about football or working out or any of that stuff. That’s not part of this this time of the year. It’s a dead period. So there’s a lot of uncertainty. We don’t know where anybody is. We don’t know what they’re doing. We’re keeping track but that’s all. So when we get the word here in a couple of weeks that we’re back on again, we’ll upscale all of the communication. We’re going to ask everyone to be flexible and everybody’s got to be kind of open to things not being like you know it.
“It’s no different than everybody is in the whole world right now. We’re all kind of in flux so I think the mentality and attitude is what’s most important. We’re going to figure it out and work through it and we’re going to be open to the change and willing to be adaptable and all of that so our mindset is real good about it and I think it goes kind of across the board for everybody. We’re all living that way right now.”