Field Gulls
The Seattle Seahawks held a Sunday morning practice after some rest and recovery time from their 33-16 preseason win over the Kansas City Chiefs on Friday. While Kenneth Walker III returned to practice and Olu Oluwatimi got in some limited work, the biggest story of the day was outside linebacker Uchenna Nwosu passing his physical and coming off the PUP list. Nwosu had offseason knee surgery and has otherwise missed the majority of Seattle’s last two regular seasons with separate injuries.
It’s undoubtedly encouraging to see Nwosu avoid starting the regular season on the PUP list, which would’ve forced him to miss the first four games. Speaking with media after practice, Seahawks head coach Mike Macdonald talked about Nwosu’s recovery process and how the team intends to handle the next steps.
“It’s exciting, because to my knowledge, we’re ahead of schedule, which is cool,” Macdonald said. “I know Uchenna has been working his tail off, which is par for the course for him. Our training staff had a great plan, guy has done a great job. He’s going to be back with us, we have a plan to ramp him up here over the course of the rest of training camp, going into the first game, and gives us the option to possibly get out there early in the season.”
Last year, Nwosu had the misfortune of being chop blocked in the preseason finale against the Cleveland Browns, resulting in an MCL sprain that caused him to miss the first five games of the year. The timeline is tight, but will Nwosu be set ready the season opener against the San Francisco 49ers in three weeks? Don’t count on it, but don’t rule it out.
“It’s probably too early to come to any conclusions [on if he’ll play against the 49ers],” Macdonald said, “but we have a preliminary timetable that gets us around the beginning of the season. There are some checkpoints we have to hit along the way. The first thing is to do an individual, going through walk through, staying sharp mentally, he’ll be ready on all that, but we have to get through that first.”
The arrival of DeMarcus Lawrence to play alongside Boye Mafe and Derick Hall makes for a much better situation for the Seahawks than when Nwosu missed 11 games in each of the last two seasons. It’s already a major victory for Nwosu to be off PUP, now it’s all about gearing up for the regular season and helping the Seahawks reach their potential as one of the NFL’s best defenses.
