The Sports Xchange

Seattle Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll said the franchise was comfortable it had all the information available on Michigan second-round pick Frank Clark, who was kicked off his college teams two days after a domestic violence arrest.

Clark, 6-2, 277, was accused in a police report of punching his 20-year-old girlfriend, Diamond Hurt, in the face at their hotel room at a waterpark in Ohio. Hurt’s younger brothers said the same thing. The Seahawks said Monday they did not talk to witnesses who found Hurt yet their final assessment was that Clark had not punched the woman.

Lis Babson, 44, and Kristie Colie, 43, who were in the room next door with their young daughters, told the Seattle Times they ran to Clark’s room pounding on the door when they were loud banging and screaming. Clark eventually opened the door.

Hurt, half-dressed and motionless on the floor, was just on the other side, the women told the Times.

“She looked unconscious,” Colie said. “She looked like she was knocked out.”

Clark settled the case with a plea deal.

Carroll said there are always two sides to every story, and because he has four older sisters, he is sensitive to the strong backlash against the pick. General manager John Schneider said the Seahawks did do a “ton of research” before selecting Clark.

“We can’t tell you how much time we spent researching Frank,” Schneider said. According to the Seattle Times, the Seahawks’ vast research project did not go much further than Clark’s version of events.

Carroll said there was a big time investment made in Clark’s character, but allowed that the rush to be the first team to Clark was a factor.

“Holy smokes, I can’t even get into it — several, several months of talking to people, and making sure in talking to other clubs and making sure everybody’s stories hold up, and talking to the school and all of those stories hold up,” Carroll said. “… You guys have heard me say this before, once he was selected he was one of those players that people reached out to us, too. This was going to happen soon. Like all of the other players that we evaluate, we had to figure out where we were going to (him). There’s three teams in particular that I spoke to right away that were going to do it.”

Schneider said that any player who “punched a woman or struck a woman” would not be on the team’s draft board. The Seahawks, in a statement Monday, said their own investigation provided the “organization with an in-depth understanding of the situation and background.”