Seattle Seahawks

The Broncos did not practice Monday, but the NFL required an estimated injury report ahead of Thursday Night Football.

They estimated cornerback Riley Moss as a limited participant in practice. He did not play Sunday against the Chargers after injuring his ribs in Week 4.

Defensive end Sai’vion Jones (shoulder) was also estimated as limited.

Safety Talanoa Hufanga (ankle) and cornerback Pat Surtain II (ankle) were both listed as non-participants. Hufanga exited Sunday’s game, while Surtain did not play after his injury in Week 4.

Safety Brandon Jones (foot) and guard Ben Powers (biceps) were estimated as full participants.

Seahawks wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba stayed in Sunday’s loss to the 49ers after having his ankle heavily taped during the first half of the game and the issue landed him on the team’s injury report Monday.

The Seahawks did not hold a practice ahead of Thursday’s game against the Broncos, but they estimated Smith-Njigba as a limited participant because of the ankle injury. Smith-Njigba had five catches for 102 yards and a touchdown on Sunday, but he dropped a third down pass when the Seahawks were trying to tie or win the game on their final possession.

Running back Zach Charbonnet (knee), quarterback Drew Lock (right forearm), guard Beau Stephens (shoulder), and defensive tackle Leonard Williams (ankle) were also listed as limited participants.

Linebackers Chazz Surratt (calf) and Drake Thomas (ankle) would have missed practice on Monday. Wide receiver Irv Charles (knee) and running back George Holani (ribs, knee) were listed as full participants.

Thanks to Dan Quinn’s colossal clock-mismanagement error, plenty of other mistakes made by NFL coaches from Week 5 weren’t as conspicuous as they should have been.

One possible blunder requires further consideration.

With 18 seconds left in the second quarter, the Seahawks called a running play. From their own four yard line. Running back George Holani (who had dropped the ball without contact earlier in the half) fumbled, and the 49ers recovered it for a touchdown.

During PFT Live, Simms said the Seahawks should have just taken a knee and ended the half. It was indeed a nonsensical decision, on the surface, to run the ball. It’s not as if the Seahawks were going to pop a 96-yard touchdown run. They opened the door to a possible turnover, and the turnover happened.

After the show, I took a closer look at the situation. The Seahawks had exhausted their timeouts as a 49ers’ drive in Seattle territory sputtered, forcing a punt with 27 seconds left. The fourth-down play from the Seahawks’ 42 resulted in a punt that was touched at the four and downed before entering the end zone.

At that point, the Seahawks had a problem. The 49ers had all three timeouts in hand. If the Seahawks had opted to take a knee, and if the 49ers had used their timeouts, Seattle would have been punting out of their own end zone with roughly 10 seconds left. And even if the clock had expired on the punt, a fair catch would have set the stage for a free kick on an untimed down from the spot of the fair catch, and a potential three points.

So the Seahawks tried to gain some yards and churn some clock. The problem is that Holani fumbled.

The other question is whether the Seahawks should have refrained from calling their own timeouts. If that had happened, however, the 49ers could have allowed the clock to run down to the final seconds, with either a Hail Mary throw or a 60-yard field goal attempt to end the half.

There was no easy way out of the maze, and the ability of the 49ers to put the ball inside the five put the Seahawks in a box.

The easy solution is don’t fumble. The more important consideration is whether a guy who dropped the ball earlier in the half should have been trusted to possess the ball so close to his own goal line.

Regardless, that was a big moment that the Seahawks then had to fight to overcome in the second half. And while they did indeed take a 23-21 lead (and later a 26-21 lead), it would have been a lot easier for the Seahawks to win if they hadn’t handed the 49ers an easy seven points right before intermission.

They say football is a game of inches. At a key moment in Sunday’s game in Seattle, it was a game of millimeters.

With the Seahawks facing fourth and 10 from the 50, quarterback Sam Darnold threw a pass to receiver Cooper Kupp, who dove for the line to gain at the sideline.

As explained by NFL V.P. of instant replay Mark Butterworth in a pool report, the proper spot is where the ball is when it breaks the plane of the sideline.

Given the high bar that applies to replay review (“clear and obvious evidence”) it would have been impossible to overturn the ruling on the field. It would have been possible, with comprehensive digital mapping, to know where the ball was in relation to the first-down line when the ball crossed the sideline.

We saw it during the World Cup, with FIFA almost instantly knowing whether a player was offside.

The league currently is able to determine whether a manually spotted ball has made it to the sticks. The NFL has yet to incorporate technology into the ball itself.

Sunday’s situation is a prime example of how technology would have allowed the officials to pinpoint whether the ball did, or didn’t, get as far as it needed to go before the ball went out of bounds.

It’s relatively simple. And the expense is worth it, in the name of getting the calls right.

Hopefully, the NFL will eventually get there. If it already was there, there would be no doubt as to whether the Seahawks did, or didn’t, keep a potential game-tying (or game-winning) drive alive.

The Chiefs had their bye this week, meaning they’ve only played four games. But Chiefs running back Kenneth Walker still has more rushing yards this season than his former team, the Seahawks, has totaled in five games.

Walker has 87 carries for 537 yards in four games. The Seahawks have 139 carries for 530 yards in five games.

The Seahawks could have used a good running back in Sunday’s loss to the 49ers. The two running backs Seattle had, Emanuel Wilson and George Holani, combined for 24 carries for 68 yards, an average of just 2.8 yards per carry.

Seattle drafted running back Jadarian Price in the first round after the Chiefs signed Walker away, but Price is on injured reserve with a chest injury. When healthy, Price was better than Wilson or Holani, but Price isn’t the player Walker is. Price averaged 39.7 yards a game in the three games he played; Walker is averaging an NFL-high 134.3 yards per game this season.

Walker, who was the Super Bowl MVP for the Seahawks in February, has been one of the NFL’s best playmakers for the 4-0 Chiefs this season. The 3-2 Seahawks may be regretting letting the Super Bowl MVP walk away.

Wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba has come through for the Seahawks many times over the past couple of seasons, but he wasn’t able to do so late in Sunday’s 32-29 loss to the 49ers.

After the 49ers kicked a go-ahead field goal on the first play after the two-minute warning in the fourth quarter, Smith-Njigba picked up 35 yards on a first-down throw from Sam Darnold to get the Seahawks near midfield. He took a big hit and stayed down an extra beat when Darnold tried to connect with him again on the next play, but it was the third down play that will linger as the Seahawks process their loss.

Smith-Njigba was open on that play and Darnold put a pass on him, but the wideout couldn’t control it and the Seahawks’ chances were dashed when Cooper Kupp was ruled out of bounds short of the sticks on fourth down. After the game, Smith-Njigba reflected on the drop.

“I guess I was thinking too much at that time,” Smith-Njigba said. “Just needed to play free and catch the ball at the end of the day. . . . I had the chance to catch the ball, so really just catch the ball. Catch the damn football at the end of the day. I know I’ll make the next one.”

Smith-Njigba did not expand on whether the first-down hit or an ankle issue that led to a heavy tape job in the first half were among the things on his mind, but it was a rare and poorly timed lapse from the Seahawks’ reliable star. He’ll have to shake it off quickly as the Seahawks will be back on the field in Denver on Thursday night.

YouTube reportedly believes the NFL could “deconstruct” Sunday Ticket as of 2030. Some customers could surely think of more graphic and profane verbs to describe their preferred fate of the league’s out-of-market game service.

It was marketed for years as a way for a fan who, for example, doesn’t live in Pittsburgh to watch all Steelers games. As the antitrust problems became more and more obvious, given the sky-high price the league attaches to the package in order to encourage fans to settle for the “free” Fox and CBS games in their local markets, the tagline became that it’s a way for zealous fans to watch all games.

But that continues to have a significant asterisk that YouTube and the NFL have yet to rectify. When “bonus coverage” of an early game trickles into the 4:25 p.m. ET window, a fan not in either market of the two teams involved in the 4:25 p.m. ET game won’t see the early phases of it on their local Fox or CBS affiliates. And, because the game is due to eventually be available on their local Fox or CBS channels, it’s completely blacked out of Sunday Ticket.

It has already happened multiple times this season. On Sunday, folks not in Seattle or San Francisco (or who were getting Lions-Cardinals as the 4:25 p.m. ET game) had no way to watch 49ers-Seahawks until “bonus coverage” of the 70-minute Giants-Commanders game ended. (Our friend and former PFT Live producer Rob “Stats” Guerrera sounded off about it.)

Eventually, the 49ers-Seahawks broadcast began on the Fox affiliates televising the game with 4:47 left in the first quarter.

The same dynamic kept Lions and Cardinals fans not in Detroit or Phoenix from watching the early portions of the Lions-Cardinals game.

It makes no sense. People pay a premium to be able to watch every minute of every game, but they can’t watch on Sunday Ticket all of a game that is not yet being televised by their local Fox or CBS affiliates.

Here’s where it becomes even more bizarre. In Detroit and Phoenix (and wherever else Lions-Cardinals was the 4:25 p.m. ET Fox game), folks with Sunday Ticket got to see all of the 49ers-Seahawks game. In the vast majority of the markets where 49ers-Seahawks was “America’s Game of the Week,” all of Lions-Cardinals was available on Sunday Ticket.

It should be an easy fix. Late-afternoon games that otherwise could be partially preempted if one of the early games takes longer than three hours and 25 minutes to conclude should be available on Sunday Ticket until the game is available on their local Fox or CBS affiliates. In this age of AI (or SI, lest you be regarded an enemy of the people), a simple mechanism could be put in place to lift the Sunday Ticket blackout until the “bonus coverage” ends on the local channel.

While the NFL has far bigger legal fish to fry given the antitrust issues raised by the pricing and the all-or-nothing purchasing obligation of Sunday Ticket, the league is inviting a specific class action from those folks who have plunked down $400 to see all games every Sunday, but who are kept from seeing much if not most of the first quarter of one of the biggest games of the week.

Sunday’s ejection of 49ers linebacker Dre Greenlaw came not at the behest of the officials on the field, but at the direction of the league office.

In a pool report following Sunday’s win by the 49ers over the Seahawks, NFL V.P. of instant replay Mark Butterworth explained that Greenlaw was sent to the showers via a message that was sent from 345 Park Avenue.

“The clubs passed a rule this year that the [Art McNally Gameday Central in New York] can actually eject a player even when there is not a flag down on the field for the action,” Butterworth told Brady Henderson of ESPN. “But in this case, there was a flag down on the field. When they went to the sideline, the player in question actually head-butted a non-helmeted player on the sideline. We have a very specific process we go through. [NFL executive V.P. of football operations] Troy Vincent let us know that the player was ejected, so then I communicated with the field to inform them that number 57 was ejected from the game for a non-football act.”

The next question is whether Greenlaw will be suspended for the infraction. The NFL will review the situation on Monday and make a decision.

49ers wide receiver Mike Evans terrorized the Seahawks with seven catches for 113 yards and a touchdown. He also caught a two-point conversion that gave the 49ers a 29-26 lead with 11:02 remaining.

It was Evans’ best game in a 49ers uniform.

Evans also agitated Seahawks cornerback Trevon Diggs, something he has done to other players in the league in his 13 seasons.

Evans was seen on the Fox broadcast turning around to face Diggs, who was chirping at him. Evans turned Diggs’ shoulder to get a look at his nameplate before walking off.

“I was blocking him to the whistle, and then he said something like, I’m ‘doing extra,’ or something like that,” Evans said after the 49ers’ 32-29 win over the Seahawks. “And I didn’t know that was him at first, because I played against him a few times, and we always been cool. He was a good player. And I honestly didn’t know it was him because in the helmet, it’s hard to tell sometimes. And we were talking trash, and I think I pushed him, and then I was like, ‘Who are you?’ I looked to make sure, ‘Oh, it’s fucking Diggs.’ And then he mushed me. It should have been a penalty [on Diggs]. It is what it is.”

In his second game with the Seahawks, Diggs had no stats. Diggs was on the team’s practice squad until Saturday when the Seahawks signed him to the active roster.

Evans’ teammates got a kick out of his exchange with Diggs.

“It’s pretty funny,” Trent Williams said, via Matt Lively of CBS Sports Bay Area. “That’s what it says. Mike plays with an edge. He plays with a huge edge, something you wouldn’t expect a receiver to have. But that was pretty funny.”

The 5-0 49ers had to play without linebacker Dre Greenlaw for more than two quarters. Next Monday night against the Commanders, they could be missing him for all four quarters.

Greenlaw’s ejection for head-butting Seahawks linebacker Ernest Jones IV (who wasn’t wearing a helmet at the time) could result in a suspension.

The NFL will review the situation on Monday for potential discipline. And that discipline could include preventing Greenlaw from playing in Week 6.

The play itself was inherently unsafe. While not the same as the time when then-Browns defensive end Myles Garrett struck still-Steelers quarterback Mason Rudolph with his own helmet, striking someone who isn’t wearing a helmet in the head with a helmet should be a bright line, when it comes to discipline.

Then there’s Greenlaw’s history. He has now been ejected three times. In 2022, Greenlaw was sent to the showers prematurely for an illegal hit on Chargers quarterback Justin Herbert. In 2023, Greenlaw was tossed after a sideline incident that first introduced a national audience to the legend known widely as Big Dom.

Last year, Greenlaw was suspended for one game, as a result of his post-game interactions with referee Brad Allen following a game between the Giants and the Broncos, for whom Greenlaw played in 2025. And, just last week, Greenlaw had some harsh post-game words for Denver coach Sean Payton after a Broncos-49ers game. (Greenlaw was fined for taunting during the game.)

If a suspension will be imposed, it likely will happen on Monday. An expedited appeal would follow.