Richard Sherman says knee injury wasn't serious, Seahawks don't think they should be punished

It’s not exactly deflate-gate – hopefully not, anyway – but the Seattle Seahawks’ injury reporting fiasco seems like it is developing into a heated offseason controversy.

To recap, Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said after the season that cornerback Richard Sherman played through a sprained MCL in his knee. The problem is, that injury was never reflected on the injury report. ESPN reported that the NFL is considering penalizing the Seahawks a second-round pick for not following injury report rules. The Seahawks already lost a fifth-rounder for OTA violations; the NFL might change it from a fifth to a second if it decides that’s the proper punishment for the Sherman injury report issues. That’s a significant punishment.

However, the Seahawks don’t feel they did anything wrong. Sherman didn’t miss any games, nor was he in danger of missing one.

“It wasn’t that serious, so there’s nothing to address,” Sherman told Conor Orr of NFL.com. “There wasn’t anything to address.”

Seahawks general manager John Schneider said there was no attempt to skirt the injury report rules.

“We feel like we didn’t do anything that was out of the norm or trying to avoid any rules, by any stretch of the imagination,” Schneider said on Sirius XM Radio, via the Tacoma News-Tribune. “All docs, all orthopods will tell you have to manage the player and not the MRI, the patient and not the MRI. And that’s what we did.”

Seattle has referred to the case of Indianapolis Colts quarterback Andrew Luck in 2015. Luck had a rib injury that wasn’t on the injury report, though the Colts were not punished for it. The Seahawks are curious what makes their situation different. Sherman said, “The Colts had a similar situation, and didn’t get docked a draft pick,” according to the News-Tribune.

“I think they kind of are a little too hard on our team, for no reason,” Sherman said. “I think if there’s other teams that kind of just got docked for the same thing, so it’s going to be curious how they treat the other teams.”

The NFL hasn’t punished the Seahawks, and perhaps there were reasons for the league to leak the possibility of the second-round pick punishment to ESPN. Perhaps they wanted to judge the reaction to the possible punishment, or scare the Seahawks (and other teams who might be less than honest with the injury report) before giving them a lesser sentence. But it’s clear the Seahawks aren’t going to be happy if they get the full punishment the NFL floated out through the media.