The glue that holds the vaunted Seattle Seahawks secondary together, free safety Earl Thomas, had surgery on Tuesday to repair a torn labrum in his left shoulder.

The recovery timetable for such a procedure is generally six to eight months, casting doubt on Thomas’ status for the start of the 2015 season. Reports on Tuesday indicated that Thomas will miss Seattle’s offseason training program, as well as much of training camp and the preseason, but the Seahawks expect the star safety to be ready for Week 1 of the 2015 campaign.

“It’s a normal procedure, so he should do well,” Seahawks general manager John Schneider said during a press conference at the NFL Scouting Combine. “We are going to monitor him and make sure we do what’s best for the long term. He is going to be fighting and scratching to be out there as soon as he can, but we just don’t know where we will be.”

Thomas was named First Team All-Pro for the third consecutive season in 2014, and selected to his fourth Pro Bowl after a season in which he logged 88 tackles, eight pass defended, four forced fumbles and one interception while holding down the fort at the backend of the league’s top-ranked defense.

The star safety suffered the injury, which caused his shoulder to separate, in the second quarter of Seattle’s 28-22 overtime victory over the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Championship Game. But Thomas missed just one series and returned to play the rest of the game with a harness on the injured shoulder. The Seattle safety blogged about the experience of suffering the injury on his personal website, EarlThomas.com, after the NFC title game:

“They saw it was separated, and told me to go to the locker room. That was going to be it for the day. I told them I was going back onto the field. There were only a few minutes left before half. They could check me at halftime. When they saw my reaction, they talked to Coach Carroll, who came over to talk to me. ‘You need to go get checked out now,’ he said.

“Back in the locker room, they reset my shoulder. I felt it pop into place, and that was it. I felt much better immediately. I felt like I could go play. They did some X-rays, and while I waited, I kept telling myself, “Just finish the game.” I had to go out there and finish. That would have been the regret of my life if I didn’t finish that game. And to the training staff’s credit, they got me fixed up and ready to go really fast.”

Thomas went on to play in Super Bowl XLIX despite the injury, which was only revealed to include a torn labrum in a NBC Sports report on Super Bowl Sunday.

Following the season, doctors again examined Thomas and determined that he would need surgery to repair the injured shoulder. After three weeks spent waiting for swelling to subside, the safety went under the knife on Tuesday. Afterward, he posted a picture to his Instagram account of several surgeons huddled around a patient in an operating room, a photo which was apparently taken during the surgery.

Starring ET3 lol

A photo posted by earl_thomas29 (@earl_thomas29) on Feb 24, 2015 at 3:03pm PST

Seattle Times reporter Bob Condotta spoke to renowned orthopedic surgeon Dr. Neal ElAttrache about the severity of the injury and the timetable for Thomas’ return, and ElAttrache surmised that Thomas’ recovery should put him at the shallow end of that 6-8 month timetable. 

“I think it would be reasonable to think he would be ready by the beginning of the season,’’ ElAttrache said. “Usually with a typical labrum repair, especially for a football player, a contact-collision sport, generally we like to wait at least six months. Sometimes they try to come back a little sooner, and some guys can come back a little sooner. But about six months is what we aim for.”

Thomas has never missed a game, and has only missed a handful of plays, over the course of his five NFL seasons since being selected by the Seahawks with the 14th overall pick in the 2010 Draft. He’s played in a total of 90 consecutive games for Seattle since his debut, including 10 playoff games, and there’s little reason to believe that streak won’t continue at the outset of the 2015 season.

NFL CONSIDERS CHANGES TO PASS INTERFERENCE PENALTY

It seems every season the NFL makes a tweak to the rules that makes it more difficult for defenders to cover receivers without being penalized, but a rule change could soon be coming that might actually benefit defenders.

When the NFL’s Competition Committee meets next week, they will be examining possible changes to the instant replay system in the wake of a series of a controversial calls in the 2015 postseason that marred the outcomes of several games. 

One of the teams victimized by such calls, the Detroit Lions, proposed a rule change that would permit a coach to challenge any play in which an official throws a flag, like the controversial call in the fourth quarter of their Wild Card round loss to the Dallas Cowboys, when a flag thrown for pass interference was mysteriously picked up. NFL officials later confirmed that pass interference should have been called on the play, which would have given the Lions a first down and perhaps changed the outcome of the game. 

But while the competition committee will look into the possibility of making some penalties reviewable to avoid controversy, NFL Executive Vice President of Football Operations Troy Vincent, a three-time All-Pro defensive back during his 15-year playing career, suggested to NFL Media’s Judy Battista that another change could be in the offing as a compromise. 

Vincent expressed concern that making a judgement call penalty like pass interference reviewable could make for a messy situation for officials. As a solution, he indicated that the NFL might instead seek to change the pass interference rule from a spot foul to a 15-yard penalty, a rule that is already in place at the NCAA level. 

“We must keep in mind that officials and players are moving at game speed, and those of us who are making decisions on rules have the luxury of slow motion video,” Vincent said. “Sometimes game speed and rule changes aren’t always compatible.”

According to Vincent, the league is hesitant to make any penalties reviewable because doing so could have an unintended snowball effect that slows down the game and takes it out of the hands of the players.

“For a coach to potentially challenge something that was not called, we run the risk of creating fouls. ‘Yeah, that was a hold. Yeah, that was an illegal hands to the face,’” he said. “We saw 12 different proposals on replay, which means it’s something we have to look at. You want to get it right but you could be creating fouls. And long term, if we start here, you just continue adding year in and year out and is that what you want? You don’t want to go down the road of opening Pandora’s Box and this year it’s expanding this and next year it’s expanding that.”

Regardless of how the NFL proceeds on the matter, it’s clear that more changes are coming to the NFL’s rulebook and all we can do is hope that the tweaks can clarify rules and eliminate the gray areas that make some penalties so difficult to determine and enforce. 

GIANTS CUT KIWANUKA 

The New York Giants announced on Tuesday that they have released defensive end Mathias Kiwanuka, a nine-year veteran and member of two Super Bowl Champion Giants teams. 

Kiwanuka, who will turn 32 next month, has spent the entirety of his career with New York after the team drafted him out of Boston College in the first round, 32nd overall, in the 2006 NFL Draft. Over the course of his nine-year NFL career, playing both defensive end and linebacker for the Giants, Kiwanuka played 120 games and compiled 38.5 sacks, 13 forced fumbles, three fumble recoveries and three interceptions.

He was one of the final remnants of New York’s unlikely run to a championship in 2007-08, though he played in only one game that postseason due to injury. Now only quarterback Eli Manning and long-snapper Zak DeOssie remain from the underdog Giants team that derailed the New England Patriots’ quest for a perfect season and won Super Bowl XLII.

Kiwanuka remained a staple of the Giants defense for several years following that championship and played in all four postseason games when New York reached the pinnacle again in 2012, capped by another win over New England in Super Bowl XLVI.

“Mathias has a warrior mentality,” Giants general manager Jerry Reese said in a statement. “He has been the ultimate team player for this franchise, and was a true pro from day one.” 

Though he was a long-time member of the franchise and a leader for the team on defense, the move doesn’t come as a surprise. Despite agreeing to a pay cut before the 2014 season, Kiwanuka would have counted $7.45 million against the Giants salary cap in 2015 after struggling through his worst season as a pro last year. He played 11 games for New York in 2014 and recorded just 2.5 sacks and a pair of forced fumbles before a knee injury forced him to injured reserve late in the season.

The Giants save nearly $5 million in salary cap space by parting ways with him before the final year of his contract kicked in. 

In a statement released by the team, New York head coach Tom Coughlin, who led the team through the entirety of Kiwanuka’s tenure, complimented the veteran defender on his play and professionalism during their time together.

“The thing that has always impressed me about Kiwi is how serious he is about the game. He was always prepared and always in outstanding condition and played very hard,” Coughlin said. “He is dependable, reliable and there is no question about his professionalism….His character and professionalism and serious approach to the game will be missed.”