Wait, hold on ... Russell Wilson on Seahawks practice/injury report? The QB explains
The name at the bottom of another, otherwise routine, midweek practice report leaped off the page.
“Full Participation in Practice: QB Russell Wilson Knee.”
That’s about as rare this time of year as 80-degree days at Seahawks headquarters.
Wilson has never missed an in-season practice, let alone a game, in his eight NFL seasons. That’s every game of his career, 119 consecutive starts in the regular season and 13 more in the postseason.
So, no, he’s not missing Sunday’s game for the Seahawks (5-2) at the Atlanta Falcons (1-6). Seattle is attempting to begin a season 4-0 on the road for the first time since 1980, before Wilson was born.
“Yeah, I guess nowadays you’ve got to (list) anything,” Wilson said of league reporting guidelines before he practiced fully again Thursday.
“A little ice on the knee. I’m good. I’m ready to roll. Excited about this week, going on the road; we’ve been playing well on the road, so we are excited about it. ...
“I’m ready to roll.”
His opposing QB this week is not. Matt Ryan reportedly has a high-ankle sprain. He has not practiced this week and needs more than a “little ice” to play Sunday. The NFL MVP in 2016 when the Falcons made it to the Super Bowl, Ryan got hurt last weekend while being sacked for one of five times in Atlanta’s 37-10 home loss to the Los Angeles Rams.
Falcons coach Dan Quinn tried to sound hopeful about Ryan playing against the Seahawks but was nowhere near definite nor convincing while talking to Seattle media members on a conference call Wednesday.
“He’s one of those guys you just never count out,” the Seahawks’ former defensive coordinator said. “Offensively, we’ve got about three of them – he, Alex Mack our center, and Julio (Jones, the Falcons’ star wide receiver). They’ve just proven to me through the last five years that if there’s a chance they go, and they’re down for it, and they’re ready, their pain tolerance and ability to play with things are just so high.
“I know he’s doing everything he can to play,” Quinn said of Ryan, “and if we can get going...and moving around coming into Friday, I think we have a better chance. Unless he can move and do the things that make Matt unique, then he won’t be able to.
“At this point, he definitely thinks there’s an opportunity for him to give it a go.”
It appears Atlanta will have 38-year-old Matt Schaub at quarterback. He hasn’t made an NFL start in four years, since two games in 2015 for Baltimore.
The Atlanta Journal Constitution and others in Georgia this week have been calling Schaub the starter.
The Seahawks have no such issues with their No. 1 quarterback. Never have, since Wilson got the job in week one of his rookie season of 2012.
His streak of 119 consecutive starts is the fourth-longest active streak in the league among quarterbacks. He already owns the team’s record for consecutive starts by a QB. At this rate, Wilson will pass Joe Nash for the third-longest streak of consecutive games played in Seahawks history Dec. 15 in the week 15 game at Carolina.
For perspective, Wilson isn’t even halfway to Brett Favre’s NFL record of 297 consecutive starts. Favre amasses that from 1992-2010 for three teams, the Packers, Jets and Vikings.
Wilson takes enormous pride in his games-played streak. To him, it exemplifies leadership, toughness and will to win.
In Sept. 2016. Ndamukong Suh, then of the Dolphins, landed on Wilson’s foot and ankle in the opening game of that season. It caused what was believed to be a high-ankle sprain, though the Seahawks never detailed it as that. Those ligament injuries higher up the leg usually keep football players out at least three or four weeks.
Wilson started the next week at the Rams.
In the game after that, the third game of that 2016 season, he sprained his knee. He watched the final 21 minutes of that win over San Francisco. It remains the only time he’s missed an extended amount of time in a game.
Doctors told him he should take four weeks off for the knee to heal fully. Wilson played on, of course. He threw for 309 yards and three touchdowns the following game while beating the Jets, furthering his already Super Bowl-winning legacy on that day in New Jersey.
During that stretch of pain three years ago, he brought a personal trainer and a physical therapist up from southern California to stay in his lakeside home in Bellevue with him. The PT awakened him every couple of hours during nights for weeks, to flex the knee and ankle and reduce swelling.
Wilson still has his personal PT with him inside and outside Seahawks headquarters, working in concert with the team’s medical staff.
That’s how much Wilson wants to play every game of his NFL life.
“I think that practicing every day, playing the games, obviously, it’s important to me to get out there every time I get the chance,” he said Thursday. “Anytime I get the chance to play, I get excited.
“It definitely means a lot,” he said of his games-played streak. “It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, is play every game, if I can.
“But I’m feeling great, so it’s nothing really crazy.”
Indestructibility has been only one of his traits as a Seahawks quarterback.
Rebounding from defeats is another.
Wilson is 29-7 following an in-season loss in his career. That is the best such record by a quarterback in the league since the 1970 NFL-AFL merger.
Yes, the Seahawks lost last weekend at home to the Ravens after Wilson threw his first interception of the season. Baltimore’s Marcus Peters returned it for a touchdown.
Wilson has a reason for such success immediately after losses: coach Pete Carroll consistently emphasizing “every game is a championship opportunity,” that no one game is more or less important than another.
“I think our ability to move forward, through all the great moments and some of the tough ones, and the tough losses or whatever, I think it’s because of the consistency in our approach,” Wilson said. “I think that every game—I know we say this—but every game we really view as a championship game, have championship preparation. And no matter how well it goes or how tough it is, we still have that same approach the next week.
“We leave the last game behind and focus on the next moment. ...Everything is still right there in front of us. I keep telling guys out there, keep telling the guys in the huddle, ‘Hey, why not?’”
Carroll says he used to make big deals out of games that were supposed to be bigger than others. Until he took the first USC team he coached to Notre Dame. From the day he arrived on the SC campus he’d heard about how large the Trojans-Fighting Irish rivalry was, how big those games are each year.
For his first game leading a team into South Bend in October 2001, Carroll made a huge deal of Notre Dame’s history, its traditions.
“I had been told in the buildup to that game that this is the biggest thing in the world,” Carroll said Wednesday. “You’re going to hear the bells ringing when you walk through the arches of the stadium to see the scoreboard and all of the stuff. You’re going to hear all of the echoes. I made the biggest deal out of that game. ...We went to the grotto, and we went to the ‘Touchdown Jesus’ and the whole thing.
“We got our butt kicked. We just got our butt kicked.”
Carroll called it “the biggest waste of time I have ever encountered.”
“I thought, ‘I’m never letting that happen again.’ That’s when the mentality kicked in. It wasn’t all at once, but that was when the mentality kicked in that no longer are we going to make a game any different than any other one. It took away all the good things that we had just diminished in the midst of all of the hoopla and the buildup. It was a waste of time.”
This story was originally published October 24, 2019 at 3:26 PM.
