Before Jimmy Graham caught two touchdown passes Sunday, including the game-winner against the Houston Texans, an NFL Network report suggested that the Seattle Seahawks could trade their Pro Bowl tight end before Tuesday's deadline in order to add a left tackle.

The team quickly refuted it. General manager John Schneider shot the report down in his pregame radio interview with 710 ESPN Seattle and Carroll told the NFL Network's Mike Silver that it's not happening.

Carroll sought out Graham to tell him the same thing.

"When I heard that, too, I went straight to Jimmy, I ran to him to make sure that it wasn't bothering him," Carroll said in his Monday morning radio show on 710 ESPN Seattle. "He was aware of it, in my observation. So we just talked about it eye to eye, the reality and the truth of it and that there was nothing there and somebody just made that up. By the time we got to game time, I checked back in with him a couple times just to make sure he was OK, because we need his spirit going in the right direction. He came around fine. He was fine. But he was -- I don't know, you'd have to ask him. I think it bothered him."

Seahawks head coach Pete Carroll on the recent Jimmy Graham trade rumors: "I think it bothered him." AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Trading Graham seemed unlikely for a few reasons. He's making $7.9 million this season, which would be a lot of money for a new team to take on. There would also be a question of whether the Seahawks could get the right value in return in the form of a player and/or draft-pick compensation. It would have to be enough to offset what Seattle's offense is getting from Graham, which has been quite a bit of late.

Graham has four touchdowns over the past three games after catching two on Sunday. His four receptions for 39 yards all came in the second half after he wasn't targeted over the first two quarters.

"I don't care when he catches the ball. I just care that he does," Carroll said. "He made some great plays and came through in great fashion and played a good football game. There was no design to that or anything; it just happened that way."

More from Carroll on 710 ESPN Seattle:

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He said the decision to not spike the ball before Graham's touchdown on the final drive was built in. Russell Wilson's 19-yard completion to Tyler Lockett put Seattle at Houston's 18-yard line with a fresh set of downs but only 40 seconds on the clock and no timeouts. Spiking the ball would have stopped the clock and left Seattle with three shots at the end zone, but the plan all along was to keep going. Why? "Because we can, because we're really good at it," Carroll said. "The time difference that it takes to go 'spike, spike spike' or 'whatever, whatever, whatever' we're calling is the same one word. You've got to call it and they've got to go execute it, so we can get a play off and have a shot. So we forgo that for the most part. There's only rare instances where you'll see us do that. We're just going to be on the attack, and we're so clear about it and we're so efficient at it, everyone of those guys will tell you it was like no big deal."

Every interception has a story, and based on the one that Carroll told about Wilson's interception on Seattle's second-to-last drive -- when he was trying to hit Paul Richardson near the goal line -- the quarterback wasn't at fault. "I know that they did talk about what happened on the route," Carroll said. "We could have -- we were supposed to come underneath right there and he was anticipating that Paul would get underneath the cornerback and he didn't. So it all happens on time and the guy steals the ball away. Russ wasn't going to throw an interception in that game. He just wasn't. That just happened because we made a little error there."

Carroll said what you'd expect him to say about Seattle's struggling running game -- that the Seahawks won't give up on trying to get it going and that he's confident they will. Seattle rushed for only 33 yards Sunday, and 30 of them were on Wilson scrambles. Thomas Rawls, Eddie Lacy and J.D. McKissic combined for all of five yards on 16 carries. "We'll be all right. I'm not worried about it," Carroll said. "We're going to go to work on it. It's not insurmountable or anything like that, but it is what it is. We've got our guys, so we have to just keep working and we've got to get rid of the errors. That's really disappointing. We had a couple bad choices technique-wise for the situation, and that's inexperience, so we can get better at that stuff."