Why Russell Wilson’s likely also happy ex-Seahawks coordinator Darrell Bevell is back in NFL
I’m happy to see a good man back in the NFL.
Guessing Russell Wilson is, too.
The Detroit Lions on Wednesday hired Darrell Bevell to be their new offensive coordinator. Bevell was out of football in 2018.
That was, of course, after the Seahawks fired him after he was their offensive coordinator and play caller for seven years, from 2011 through five consecutive playoff appearances, two Super Bowls, Seattle’s only NFL championship—and the entirety of Wilson’s career.
That is, until Pete Carroll fired him in January 2018 and replaced him with Brian Schottenheimer. That was
Training camp hadn’t even started this summer when Wilson was asked about working with Schottenheimer and the franchise quarterback showed his old bonds break hard.
“Schotty’s been great. (But) first of all, I’ve got to pay my respects to Coach Bevell,” Wilson said.
It was unsolicited, and telling.
“Obviously, we won a Super Bowl. Went to two. Won multiple playoff games. Won a lot of games,” Wilson said. “He’s a great coach. He helped me, a lot. Tremendously.
“The unfortunate part about the NFL is there always seems to be change, you know. It’s just part of the process, I guess.”
Wilson continued to mention Bevell at times during the past season, when the Seahawks returned to the playoffs with Schottenheimer and new line coach Mike Solari (who replaced Tom Cable, fired by Carroll the same month he fired Bevell) calling the league’s top rushing offense and Wilson having the most efficient passing season of his career.
No wonder Wilson, 30, remains fond of the 49-year-old Bevell.
Wilson went 65-30-1 in the regular season, 8-4 in the playoffs, started consecutive Super Bowls, won a ring and earned an $87.6 million contract extension from the Seahawks all while Bevell was coaching him more directly than any one coach had in Wilson’s football life.
Bevell’s undoing coincided with the disintegration of the running game by which Carroll wants his Seattle teams identified. The disintegration of Seattle’s running game coincided with three years of injuries to and failures by a parade of lead backs the Seahawks tried after Marshawn Lynch left the team during and after the 2015 season.
Thomas Rawls. Christine Michael. Alex Collins. Troymaine Pope. C.J. Prosise. Eddie Lacy. Mike Davis.
Oh, boy.
By the end of the 2017 season Bevell’s Seahawks offense had the lowest production by running backs not just in the league but in many NFL seasons. Bevell relied almost exclusively on Wilson; the quarterback gained a ridiculous 90 percent of Seattle’s total yards on offense. The Seahawks missed the playoffs for the first time in six years.
And Bevell was out. The former Wisconsin Rose Bowl quarterback and Badgers career passing leader when he was there in the early 1990s was entirely out of football in 2018. That was the first time that had happened since before he began playing the sport as a kid in Arizona, 40 years ago.
Here’s a story people that blame Bevell for Super Bowl 49 and the Seahawks’ failures in 2017, the folks who are glad is gone, don’t know. Or don’t care about:
I arrived in the desert the night prior to a Seahawks road game at Arizona a couple seasons ago. When rooms are available the team gives beat writers and media members who regularly following it the option stay at the team’s road hotel (at their company’s expense), and this night I was checking into the Seahawks’ hotel in downtown Phoenix.
Bevell was in the lobby. He recognized me, and he came over to say hi as I was at the check-in desk. Though the coach was on his way back to his room to continue preparing for the next day’s game, we talked there in the lobby for about 15 minutes. It was mostly about our families. He asked me many questions about mine, about my kids, what they like to do. He joked about youth soccer and about being a parent spectator—about everything, in fact, except football.
That’s happened three times away from a stadium or team headquarters in my 20 years of doing this (the second time, by the way, was Carroll, at the San Jose Marriott before a game against the 49ers a few Thanksgivings ago).
Not that any of it means he shouldn’t have been fired, but Bevell was that personable to just about everyone in his seven years here.
Way more than that, he was far better at his job than many want to remember.
To be sure, his biggest role was to develop Wilson, and to do it from day one of the third-round pick’s rookie minicamp in May 2012. By that August, Wilson was Seattle’s starting quarterback. And the veteran that Carroll and general manager John Schneider signed to a $26 million contract that spring to be the Seahawks’ starter, Matt Flynn, was done with the team before really ever joining it.
Wait...who was Matt Flynn?
Wilson set 14 franchise records for a quarterback, passing and running, with Bevell coaching him. Bevell’s offenses finished in the top half of the NFL in scoring in every season from 2012 through his firing, even in the wayward 2017. It was ninth, eighth and fourth in scoring from 2013-15, the first two of those the Seahawks’ Super Bowl years. And with Lynch, the offense was in the top five in rushing four out of five years. It was number one in the NFL in the second Super Bowl year of 2014.
Yes, I remember Lynch didn’t get the ball on the 1-yard line for Seattle’s final play of that Super Bowl 49 against New England. I was there. The nation hasn’t forgotten, either. The stories from Detroit to Darrington Wednesday announcing the Lions hired Bevell mentioned he called the pass Wilson threw to the Patriots’ Malcolm Butler at the goal line that cost Seattle its second consecutive Super Bowl title in February 2015.
Wrong.
People forget it was Carroll, not Bevell, who directed that pass. It was Carroll, not Bevell, who when he saw the Patriots go to a heavy defensive-line package before the fateful play told his play caller to spread the formation, to pass, not run it with Lynch.
Yet it was Bevell who stood in front of the cameras and microphones and recorders minutes after the worst play call in Super Bowl history and took full responsibility for it. So did Carroll, by the way, but no one remembers that. That doesn’t fit the Bevell narrative.
Whatever. Now he is in Detroit. He again has an outstanding quarterback, Matthew Stafford, around which to build what he’s always maintained he needs: a balanced offense. He’s got a head coach, Matt Patricia, the former Patriots’ Super Bowl-winning defensive coordinator, who is like Carroll: he believes in winning with a strong defense complimented by that balanced offense.
So, yes, I’m wishing Bevell all the best in Detroit.
And I’m thinking Russell Wilson is, too.
This story was originally published January 17, 2019 at 7:41 AM.
