Seattle loses safety Earl Thomas for rest of the season

Members of the Seahawks’ medical training staff carried Thomas off the field so he wouldn’t have to put weight on his left leg.

A tie turned into a loss for the Carolina Panthers on Sunday night.

Thomas has been named to the Pro Bowl the last five seasons and had started 106 straight games until missing the loss at Tampa Bay with a hamstring injury. With that unmatched range and reaction skills deep in the defensive backfield, his presence on the field is what allows Chancellor and Sherman to do what they do so well.

Mentioning retirement at the age of 27 with seven National Football League seasons on his résumé, Thomas’ tweet expectedly raised eyebrows after making it clear how serious he considered his injury to be.

Thomas suffered the injury after colliding with strong safety Kam Chancellor while the two were breaking up a pass play in the first quarter.

But playoff positioning or Seattle reaching the 40-point mark for the first time since its Super Bowl rout of Denver was secondary to Thomas’ broken lower left leg. Seahawks coach Pete Carroll said Thomas has a cracked tibia and the injury is “always six weeks”, but his status for a possible return during the postseason remains very much in question.

The Panthers (4-8) began the night with a different sort of absence.

“I didn’t follow dress code, and coach told me that I wasn’t going to start”, Newton said in the postgame news conference.

Newton described in detail late Sunday night the sequence of events that led to him violating head coach Ron Rivera’s team rule that requires all players to wear a tie.

Backup quarterback Derek Anderson, who came in during the game’s first series, was immediately picked off by Seahawks linebacker Mike Morgan on a pass that bounced off of fullback Mike Tolbert’s hands and into his arms. But Rivera’s decision started a domino effect that seemingly kept the Panthers out of a groove all game.

Newton didn’t express disagreement with Rivera’s decision after the game, explaining he realized just before the buses left to take the team to the airport that he hadn’t packed a shirt and tie. It was gonna be one series. “So, a lot of people take that play off and like I said, it’s an opportunity to make something happen and I’m going to make the most of it”. So the idea that he could get a dress-code violation from anything but the back page of Us Weekly is staggering.

Yeesh. Even the most optimistic of Panthers fans will find it hard to find some good from this game aside from “yeah but did dey die doe?” The Seahawks raced to a 23-7 halftime lead as RB Thomas Rawls busted for 103 yards and a pair of touchdowns and Stephen Hauschka had three field goals.

The Seahawks received the second-half kickoff, too, and wasted little time adding to their edge.

Newton was back under center on Carolina’s next drive.

Newton missed just one play, but was also just 14-of-32 passing for 182 yards and one touchdown. The visitors finished with only 271 total yards. His passion for the game is unquestioned, and it’s impossible to predict where those facts might lead the mind of a player given access to his social media accounts minutes after suffering a season-ending injury.

Again, the Carolina offense never really got on track.

The shoes do reference the Cam Newton Foundation on the back with the initials “CNF”.

Carroll said he didn’t know definitively whether Thomas has a chance of returning at some point this season.