AROUND THE NFL : Buffalo Defender Eased Up on Patriots’ Battered QB

Buffalo Bills defensive end Leon Seals may have taken it easy on battered New England Patriots quarterback Steve Grogan on Sunday, but his teammates said they didn’t.

“My experience has been any time that you go less than 100%, you’re going to get hurt,” Bills linebacker Ray Bentley said. “You can’t hold up.”

But, after Buffalo’s 27-10 victory over the Patriots Sunday, Seals said he “low-keyed it a lot” after finding out Grogan was forced by the Patriots to sign a document acknowledging that a neurosurgeon advised him not to play football because of a spinal condition.

“I’m just going to be honest about it,” Seals said. “I wasn’t going in there for the kill.”

Seals, 6-foot-5 and 267 pounds, did sack Grogan, 6-4 and 210, in the second quarter, tackling the Patriots quarterback just as Grogan saw him break through the offensive line. The Bills also had two other sacks.

“I went back there and got him, but I wasn’t saying, ‘I’m going to kill you’ and that kind of stuff,” Seals said. “It’s a touchy situation, because as a defensive lineman you’re taught to go in there and rip a person’s head off.

“But in a situation like that, you have to kind of low-key it. You have to have respect for a guy like that.”

Grogan said he signed the document, designed to protect the Patriots legally should the 16-year veteran suffer a serious injury, and agreed to play because four other doctors told him that he faced no greater risk than any other player.

“This is a business,” Grogan said. “We compromised on the language so that everybody was comfortable with it.”

Seals said several Bills defenders talked about Grogan’s frail state before the game.

“Everybody said, ‘I just hope I’m not the one to go in and hit him and have him stay down. If I ever get a sack, I hope he gets back up.’ ”

Seals said every player lives with the possibility that he could cause permanent injury to another player.

“With any kind of hit, the guy could go down for good,” he said. “And for you to deliver that hit, it’s going to be something you’re going to live with the rest of your life.”

Bills Coach Marv Levy said the game film showed that Seals “played very hard.” In fact, the team awarded Seals a game ball for his efforts.

A comment by Max McGee, former football great and now a broadcaster, that Minnesota running back Herschel Walker “looks like he’s just stole a watermelon headin’ south” wasn’t uttered maliciously, he said.

McGee’s comment was made Sunday on the Packer Radio Network during broadcast of the Green Bay-Minnesota game. McGee, Green Bay’s receiving star in the 1967 Super Bowl, analyzes games for the radio network.

“You know Walker looks like he has on so much pads when he carries the ball, he really can’t put the ball. . . . It looks like he’s just stole a watermelon headin’ south,” McGee said after Walker had returned a kickoff near the end of the third quarter.

McGee apologized on Monday, saying the remark in “no possible way had any racial connotations. I used to steal watermelons when I was a kid. . . . It just popped right out.”