Pete Carroll on Jadeveon Clowney: Seahawks “were in it the whole time”

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The Seahawks offered defensive end Jadeveon Clowney earlier this year. Clowney didn’t accept it. The Seahawks nevertheless remained in the conversations up until the very end.

“He’s a good player and it was a long, long offseason in terms of trying to figure out how that was gonna work out,” Seahawks coach Pete Carroll told reporters on Monday. “And we were involved throughout. But yet, we moved on, you know, for the most part well early in the offseason so that we can do the rest of the team and fortunately we were able to do that and got some good players. But he’s a terrific player and should be a good addition for [the Titans].”

Even though the Seahawks moved on to sign other players, they didn’t give up on Clowney.

“I talked to him throughout the process and stayed with him,” Carroll said. “We had really good, amicable conversations about things and he was just waiting the whole time. He had his sights set really high to start with and it just put him in a situation where he had to wait it out. And he didn’t get near the amount that he wanted as it turned out. Our offers and stuff early on didn’t look attractive to him because he had his mindset elsewhere. I don’t know. It was just a pretty normal process but he just wasn’t ready to make a call early on.”

As the process moved to a conclusion, the Titans, Saints, and Seahawks remained in the mix.

“We were in it the whole time,” Carroll said. “We were with him the whole time in the discussion. . . . [G.M.] John [Schneider] was in on all of it.”

It didn’t end until late Saturday night. Despite a report that Clowney had picked the Titans, he continued to talk to the Saints (and apparently the Seahawks) and to consider carefully his options before finally settling on the Titans.