By Gregg Bell
The News Tribune
Is DK OK?
The Seahawks begin their first game week of the preseason Monday, returning to practice following a players day off the field on Sunday. The main intrigue for this ninth practice of training camp: the status of rookie wide receiver DK Metcalf. He has a strained oblique muscle and other unspecified ailments.
The hyped star of Seattle’s spring and summer practices ran on the side Saturday. Then the second-round draft choice watched Seattle’s mock game in Bothell on the sideline while wearing a team bucket hat instead of a helmet.
“DK, the last play of practice (Friday), he got a little oblique strain,” coach Pete Carroll said, “and he’s been banged up on a couple things.
“We thought it was the right thing to just give him this break (Saturday) and (Sunday) and get him back next week.”
Asked if that means Metcalf will practice Monday, Carroll said: “I’m not sure about that, but we are shooting for that.”
Monday’s is the first of three practices this week before the Seahawks’ first preseason game, Thursday night against Denver at CenturyLink Field.
The 6-foot-4, 229-pound Metcalf has been quarterback Russell Wilson’s daily favorite target in position drills and scrimmages from organized team activities in the spring, a minicamp in June and last month in Los Angeles. Wilson hosted Metcalf and other Seahawks receivers for daily workouts at UCLA during the players’ six weeks off between June minicamp and the start of training camp at the end of July.
Every day, in every drill, Wilson makes a point to time the alternating of his turn among backup quarterbacks Geno Smith and Paxton Lynch at the same time it becomes Metcalf’s turn outside among the team’s 12 wide receivers in training camp.
“Even after practice, even after drills, I tell him what I saw,” Metcalf said. “And he tells me what he sees out there, just to continue with our chemistry.”
This is no accident. Wilson is trying to get as many reps with Metcalf as possible now, to accelerate their connection. It’s going to come in handy beginning Sept. 8. Metcalf has increasingly likely chance to start the opener that day against Cincinnati as Seattle’s “X” split end opposite the tight end on the line of scrimmage.
How impressed does Wilson continue to be with Metcalf?
“You know, I compare DK to Lebron (James),” Wilson said.
Whoa!
“He was talking all this trash,” Wilson said of Metcalf in L.A. last month. “And he looks like him, kind of, as big as he is.”
Each day it’s Wilson to Metcalf again—and again. In position drills. In red-zone scrimmaging. In hurry-up offense. In first-and-10s from the middle of the field.
If these were final exams, Wilson and Metcalf would be cramming—though the rookie’s latest injury has put that on pause.
Metcalf’s final college season at Mississippi ended last October because of a neck injury he got in the second game of the 2018 season. The Seahawks and just about every other NFL team assessed that before April’s draft. Seattle obviously was OK with his health when it traded up to get the last pick of round two and selected him.
He missed most of his freshman season at Ole Miss in 2016 with an injured foot.
Now, an oblique strain.
It’s the only thing so far that has slowed the Metcalf Hype Train that’s been zooming through his impressive first spring and summer as a Seahawk.
Wilson hasn’t exactly derailed it.
“I mean, obviously, DK Metcalf doesn’t look or get any better in terms of his talent level,” Wilson said. “He’s as smart as it gets, too. He wants to learn…
“DK, being the guy that he is and the position he got drafted in, there’s a lot of high expectations on him and (we are) letting him know that, ‘Hey, we are here to do everything we can to make you the best player you could possibly be.’
“The great thing is, he makes it easy on us, because he wants to put the work in.”
