The Seahawks as a whole played five quarters Sunday night, but the members of their defense were forced to carry most of the load.

And as a result of guys playing 100 snaps or more in a game, the Seahawks are focusing this week on recovery.

Via Sheil Kapadia of ESPN.com, coach Pete Carroll has ordered his players to get eight or nine hours of sleep, hydrate often, and load up on carbohydrates after last week’s marathon against the Cardinals. His work this week is in conjunction with director of player health and performance Sam Ramsden, who is bringing the sports science and the holiday side dishes.

“I’ve been big on sweet potatoes,” Seahawks cornerback DeShawn Shead said. “I love sweet potatoes, so it’s been easy. You don’t have to tell me to carb up on sweet potatoes.”

Shead played 95 snaps in last week’s game, and the alarming part is he was sixth on the team in that category.

Safety Kelcie McCray played 108 snaps, including 95 on defense and 13 on special teams. Linebackers Bobby Wagner and K.J. Wright played 102 each. Richard Sherman and Earl Thomas played 99.

Sherman said he couldn’t make it from the showers to the locker room by himself, and needed Wagner’s help to get there. He received two bags of intravenous fluid after the game, but said he wasn’t himself on the trip home.

“They didn’t let me lose consciousness, but I definitely wasn’t focused,” Sherman said. “That’s why they wouldn’t let me go for a long time until I got my focus back, and they looked me in the eye, and they just kept saying I wasn’t right and I was looking clammy and stuff like that. But after a while, you get some energy, you get some food in you, you get your stuff back.

“I was too tired to be that concerned. I think other people were more concerned than I was, but I was just trying to get cooled down and get some energy back in me. It was just a blur. I don’t remember being too concerned. I remember them saying something about a stretcher and paramedics, and I was like, ‘Yeah that’s not how we’re going to end this today.'”

That kind of reaction makes you wonder how much they’ll have in the tank when they fly across country again this week, to play at New Orleans in a 1 p.m. start.