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Some Seahawks side with Bill Belichick in using paper over tablets

RENTON, Wash. -- Before coach Pete Carroll started answering questions Wednesday at his midweek news conference, he wanted to give a shoutout to his boss, Seattle Seahawks owner and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.

"I was really going to talk about the tablets," Carroll said with a smile. "I don’t know if it’s because we’re so close to home base, but shoot, I think the quality of our stuff’s been great. I’m not one that looks at tablets, but the fellas that do love them. Great quality."

Earlier in the week, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick ripped the Microsoft Surface tablets and said he's sticking with paper from now on.

The tablets feature still images of plays that coaches and players can view on the sideline. They are the same images that are available via hard-copy printouts.

"Honestly, I love the paper much, much more," Seahawks linebacker K.J. Wright said. "I can’t explain it. It’s just something that you’ve always been used to. It’s kind of like when the cell phones come, older people struggle with it. I’ve been used to paper my whole career. I just like to stick with it. So I don’t blame him on that.

"When I have gloves on, I can’t use [the tablet] because they don’t work against gloves, so I’ll be trying to swipe left, swipe right, and it just stays still. So I throw it, and I get the paper copy."

Apparently, the gloves are an issue for safety Earl Thomas as well.

"Earl likes the paper copy," cornerback Richard Sherman said. "I don’t think he’s technologically averse, but sometimes you have a hard time swiping it with the gloves on so you’ve got to take the glove off and do all that, and he doesn’t feel like doing all that so he gets the paper copy and can just flip it."

Guard Mark Glowinski conceded some of Belichick's points.

"I feel his pain. That’s definitely true," he said. "There’s been incidents where last year, I’d be the guy to make sure the plays and stuff were written down, and I’m looking at it like, 'Where did everything go that I just wrote down?' and stuff like that. Or only one or two plays would load."

Wide receiver Doug Baldwin is a fan of using the tablets and said he would be in favor of them having video. That's something teams got to try out during the preseason.

"It makes it a lot easier for us to make our adjustments to talk through the series and what happened previously on the field," Baldwin said. "It's been a great help to us.

"We did experiment with the video. I loved it," he said. "I would prefer to have that if we could. Obviously it’s a little different from position to position. Some guys like the still images because then they can get more of the information that they need, especially on defense. But I personally like the video as well."

Defensive players like Sherman and Wright were against the use of video on the tablets.

Offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell was initially with them, but after experimenting with it during the preseason, he found he liked the video.

"If they asked me before, because people were asking us before the preseason, I said no. I don’t want video," Bevell said. "And then all of a sudden we used it, and it was like, 'Yeah, OK I'll use video.' I kind of liked it after that.

"You almost feel like it's cheating a little bit, and you figure out some of those things after the fact, but we kind of liked it."