Seattle Seahawks Camp Update — August 9: Jadarian Price Has Missed Two Straight Practices

In July we said the defending champions were the strangest sentence in football — a 14-win Super Bowl winner priced behind the team it beat in January. Our case rested on two pillars: Sam Darnold's repeatable core, which graded top-five in the situations that carry year to year, and a defense that kept both of its architects. The soft spot we named was the backfield — Kenneth Walker gone to Kansas City, Zach Charbonnet rehabbing a January ACL, and rookie Jadarian Price walking into the clearest lane any first-year back has.

Two weeks of camp have mostly been the preview coming true, with one wobble arriving at the exact spot we flagged.

Start with Darnold, because the beat's read on him is nearly unanimous. Bob Condotta at The Seattle Times wrote Friday that Darnold has been "mostly mistake-free in camp" and looks a step ahead of where he was at this point last summer — which, given where last summer ended, is a sentence worth sitting with. The bad day exists, and we'll log it: Darnold threw two interceptions Friday, one of them a genuinely good play by linebacker Drake Thomas stepping in front of a throw meant for George Holani. At Sunday's Fan Fest run-through at Lumen Field, he threw one more — described in the Seattle Times' coverage as a rare miss — and otherwise capped a red-zone drive with a touchdown to second-year tight end Elijah Arroyo against the first-team defense. Three picks across two practices is the whole blemish file for two weeks. Cooper Kupp, per Condotta, looks far more comfortable than he did a year ago.

The defense has been holding up its half too. The first-team unit stopped the ones in a red-zone period Sunday, with Byron Murphy II sacking Darnold on one snap and Derick Hall and Uchenna Nwosu arriving together on third down to kill the drive. The architects stayed; the pass rush is making its own arguments.

Now the wobble. Jadarian Price had been exactly where the preview projected him — the lone back taking first-team goal-line handoffs in the first padded practice on July 30, catching passes daily, drawing a public endorsement from Mike Macdonald in week one: "There's not a lot of things you're checking off of stuff that he can't do. That's exciting." Linebacker Ernest Jones IV, after getting beaten on a route: "He got me today. He's good. I think he's going to help us."

Then Friday he wasn't on the field, and Sunday he wasn't in uniform at Fan Fest — two straight practices missed with what the team is calling lower-body soreness. Macdonald, via the team's website Sunday: "It's a minor issue right now. We'll see. It's a matter of days, so he'll be back soon." We'll take the coach at his word and also note what the room looked like without him. With Price out, Jacardia Wright also sidelined, and Charbonnet still on the physically-unable-to-perform list, Condotta counted four healthy running backs on Friday — Holani, Emanuel Wilson, Velus Jones Jr., and T.J. Harden, an undrafted rookie from SMU signed midweek. The team added another back, Justin Jones, on Saturday. When a champion is signing undrafted runners in August to get through practice, the position the preview called thin is announcing itself.

The one that matters is Price, and the honest frame is that both halves of his camp are real. The pre-soreness half confirmed everything the draft capital implied — first-team work, a featured receiving role, teammates volunteering praise. The soreness itself is, per the only person who has spoken on it, minor and measured in days. But this backfield has no margin: Charbonnet's recovery points to midseason at the earliest, and the depth behind Price is two journeymen and two players signed inside the last week. A minor issue in a room like this is a bigger story than a minor issue anywhere else on the roster.

Does the July framing hold? Confirmed. The preview's core claim was that Darnold's repeatable profile and the retained defensive brain trust made the market's shrug wrong, and two weeks of practice reporting have supported both pillars — the quarterback sharp by every account, the defense winning its share of the red-zone and pressure battles. The backfield was always the asterisk, and it remains the asterisk; nothing that happened this week changed the argument, it just underlined which sentence of it to reread.

What would change it: whether Price is back on the field this week as Macdonald projected, and in what role — the days-not-weeks framing is checkable almost immediately. Behind that, any movement on Charbonnet's PUP status before cutdown. We'll check Sunday.

_Data via nflverse._