Pete Carroll was so proud of the Seattle Seahawks at the start of their bye week that he decided to give the team a full week off. The Seahawks had just won back-to-back games against the Minnesota Vikings and New York Jets, improving their record to 6-4. Carroll thought that was worthy of a full week off before getting back to work, but he sounded like a man who regretted his decision after Sunday’s loss to the Miami Dolphins.
“We had all kinds of issues on both sides of the ball, making little mistakes on things that we normally do right,” Carroll said according to The Seattle Times. “I didn’t do this thing right on the week off. I didn’t handle it well and I screwed it up. That’s just the way it is. These guys played hard. They wanted to play right but we made too many mistakes.
“I gave them a bunch of time off. Maybe we’re too young to do that, I don’t know.”
There are a number of reasons the Seahawks lost, but it’s not as if they looked horrible and they did have to travel all the way to Miami. It was a game between teams that are fairly evenly matched, and those types of games typically go to the team that didn’t have to travel across the entire country.
Having said that, giving a team an entire week off during the bye and not even holding a walkthrough over a span of six days is slightly unorthodox. It’s certainly possible that the Seahawks would have been more prepared had they held some sort of organized team activity during the first week of the bye.
