Russell Wilson drug tested after what he sees as an “unacceptable” end to Seahawks season
Russell Wilson was trying to get to his locker to conduct a season-ending chat with the media.
A short, middle-aged man hired by the NFL to conduct random drug tests then did what few defenders did this season. He intercepted Wilson.
The man stopped Wilson on his way to his locker. He told him he had been selected to be tested, that he needed to submit a urine sample.
“Right now?” Wilson asked the tester, his voice rising.
Wilson laughed at the timing. The morning after he did everything but awaken Vince Lombardi to rally the Seahawks from 18 points down to within a play or two of beating the Packers in Green Bay, a playoff performance his coach called “spectacular,” the NFL was drug-testing him.
He turned to the throng of reporters who had gathered at his locker. Wilson smiled. Then he said with more disbelief to video cameramen in particular: “You guys getting this?”
In the prime of his career, months after signing the richest contract in NFL history, Wilson indeed gets this: He and the Seahawks roared back from being down 21-3 and 28-10 Sunday night at Lambeau Field. But not all the way back. A dropped pass off the chest of Malik Turner in Green Bay territory with 4 minutes left, then the defense failing twice to stop the Packers on third down and long in the final 3 minutes, ended Seattle’s season with a 28-23 loss.
It’s the fifth time the Seahawks have lost in five road divisional-playoff games, dating to coach Pete Carroll’s first season as their coach in 2010.
The $140 million franchise quarterback sees that as “unacceptable.”
“I know for (Sunday) night’s game, for example, we were able to lay it all on the line, especially in the second half,” Wilson said Monday after his test, as he and his teammates cleaned out their lockers while the playoffs went on without them for the fifth consecutive January.
“And (to) come up short, to me—I don’t mean this in a bad way—but it’s unacceptable.
“We got to be better. We got to find ways to be better and we got to make sure we make that happen, for years to come.”
His “I don’t mean this in a bad way” was a clutch. It’s the ultra-programmed, all-in Wilson’s way of checking his frustration into a finite corner of his team-first, relentlessly positive mind.
Yet that comment is a rare hint of his true feelings that, at age 30, Wilson believes he and his reformed team should be doing more than making second-round exits from the playoffs year after year since its last Super Bowl.
It’s a reminder that for all his wonder in his eight seasons—tying Tom Brady as the winningest quarterback in NFL history over the first eight years of a career, the seventh Pro Bowl he will play in this month, the Seahawks records for passing, for running, for comebacks, for never missing a game, for winning—WIlson still has won “just” one Super Bowl.
I asked if he feels urgency that real opportunities to get back to and win another are becoming fewer as he now turns his attention to a 2020 season during which he will turn 31.
“I don’t feel panicked, or urgency, at all,” he said.
“I feel urgency just because I love playing the game. I want to win every year. When I step on the field, when I put the jersey on, it’s always urgency. It’s always been, since my rookie year. I’ve always felt urgency, even since day one.”
He is signed with the Seahawks through the 2023 season, with $77 million of his $82 million in base salaries from his contract he signed last April still due to him.
“The urgency hasn’t changed for me,” he said. “I’m going to play a lot longer. I don’t feel panicked in my years. I’ve got 12 (years left)—12, maybe 15.”
He smiled.
“But I think the reality is that I think of some of the best players in the world; I was thinking about it (Sunday) night on the way home, honestly. I was thinking about guys like Drew Brees. I think about guys like Tom Brady, the Peyton Mannings of the world. Where I’m at in my career right now, I’m just finishing year eight. Where those guys were, I want to be the best in the world. That’s the reality.
“And so, I know this offseason, for me, it’s: What are the next five years going to look like? What’s it going to look like for this organization, and what are we going to do to make sure that happens? Because those guys in years eight through 13 or so, that’s where they really, really cemented themselves and their legacy.
“That’s really what I think about, to be honest with you. I think about trying to be the best in the world.”
What Seattle needs
History and odds say Wilson and the Seahawks won’t get home games deeper into the playoffs again for a straighter path back into a Super Bowl unless they find ways to take that next step.
Those ways must include improving: Wilson’s offensive line, the pass rush, the cornerbacks’ pass coverage and the health of starters late in the season.
That’s what has kept Seattle from earning during the regular season what it hasn’t since 2014: a home game in the divisional round of the NFC playoffs.
That 2014 season remains the last one the Seahawks made the Super Bowl.
Since then, Wilson and his team have lost in round two of the playoffs at Carolina to end the 2015 season, in round two at Atlanta, round one at Dallas and round two Sunday night in Green Bay.
“We’ve got to find ways to get better,” Wilson said. “Would I say it was a great season? No. I’d say it was a really good one. We’ve got a lot more to do, and a lot more things we want to focus on. ...
“I think it comes down to making plays. I think it comes down to making sure we are putting ourselves in the best position to make them, and what we are trying to do and how we are trying to attack the defense.”
His latter point is for the coaches, specifically offensive coordinator and play caller Brian Schottenheimer.
There is growing sentiment outside the Seahawks’ locker room that the offense is wasting Wilson’s prime of his career. That they rely too much and too long in games on the running backs rushing instead of on Wilson’s magical play-making. The critics of Seattle’s approach well beyond the Pacific Northwest point to the latest statistical evidence: the 135 yards and three points the Seahawks managed in the first half against the Packers Sunday, then the 240 yards and 20 points Seattle scored in the second half.
But a closer look suggests the Seahawks didn’t change their play-calling and game plan all that much between the two halves in Green Bay.
They ran some, consistently in each half. That was Schottenheimer’s and Carroll’s effort to keep the Packers’ pass rush playing more honestly, and from teeing off on Wilson just dropping back to pass virtually every play. Seattle’s offensive linemen, mostly unchanged from 2018 to ‘19, have proven to its coaches the last couple seasons they are mostly massive road graders who are better at run blocking. Better, that is, than at pass blocking on almost every down, which is what the Wilson proponents keep begging to see.
In the first half at Green Bay Marshawn Lynch ran it six times. David Moore ran it once, on an end around,. Wilson threw 13 times and ran twice. That was 15 chances for Wilson, seven for anyone else.
In the second half Wilson had 23 opportunities with the ball (18 throws, five runs, on scrambles after trying to pass). Everyone else had 10 touches, Lynch had six runs, Travis Homer had three, and tight end Luke Willson had one carry around end. As in the first half, Wilson had a little more than twice the number of touches than the running backs.
Yet the Packers’ pass rushers feasted throughout the game. They sacked Wilson five times. They hit him 10 times.
NFL’s Next Gen Stats said Wilson had an average snap-to-pass time of 4.03 seconds at Green Bay. That’s the longest in an NFL game for any quarterback since it first began tracking that time in 2016. The Packers pressured Wilson on almost half his 31 attempts to throw; his 42-percent rate of pressure was the second-highest rate Wilson faced this season.
On the Seahawks’ final offensive play of the season Green Bay’s Preston Smith stormed in free past tight end Jacob Hollister and right tackle Germain Ifedi. Ifedi arrived late after fanning out to try to pick up Smith after he beat Hollister off the right edge. Smith sacked Wilson on a third and 5 at the Seattle 42-yard line.
It was a huge play. It stopped the obvious momentum the Seahawks had in the game’s previous 10 minutes. Without that sack, Carroll and Schottenheimer likely would have gone for the first down on fourth down with 2:41 left. Instead, they decided the odds of converting on fourth and 11 were too long. So they punted and relied on their defense.
That failed. The defense left Davante Adams one on one in the right slot against rookie nickel back Ugo Amadi on third and 8 from the Packers 22 with 2:19 remaining. Adams, the Packers’ only receiving threat who had a Green Bay playoff-record 160 receiving Sunday, easily beat Amadi for a 32-yard catch to midfield on a perfect throw from Aaron Rodgers. That kept Wilson on the sidelines.
Wilson never touched the ball again this season. The Packers ran out the clock from there to reach this weekend’s NFC title game at San Francisco.
Carroll said the Seahawks’ scheme on that Packers third-down conversion left the defense hoping Amadi could make the play there in the tough assignment against Adams.
“They were just better than us on that play,” Carroll said.
Wilson made that point, too, on Monday, that the players need to make better plays.
“Also it comes down to us, as players, to ultimately making plays. We’ve got to find ways to do that,” Wilson said.
“I always put things on me first. How can I get better to do that, first. Then as a collective group, is there something else that we can do better?...
“We were a few plays away from being really special.”
A 2012-13-like rise?
Carroll sees his team as on the rise, not stalled at a round-two road block.
After Sunday night’s loss, Carroll likened this Seahawks end to the close of Seattle’s 2012 season.
Those Seahawks fell behind 20-0 in the first half of a divisional-round playoff game at Atlanta. They stormed back to take a 28-27 lead with 31 seconds left on a touchdown run by Lynch, only to have its season end on a last-second field goal by the Falcons.
That rally in the Atlanta playoff loss buoyed the Seahawks through the subsequent spring and summer into the 2013 season. They stormed to a 13-3 regular season in 2013. They earned home field throughout the NFC playoffs. And they completed a historic rout of Manning and the record-setting Denver Broncos 43-8 in Super Bowl 48.
“This, I think, is the start of this team,” Carroll said Sunday night at Lambeau Field. “It feels like 2012 all over again. ...
“This was so similar. I mean, there was not a guy on that sidelines that we are connected to that did not feel like we were going to win that football game. And all the way until we didn’t. And that is what this team felt like, all year. It’s an amazing chemistry and it’s an amazing group.”
Wilson agrees with Carroll that this feels like the start of a 2012-to-13-like surge.
Is this indeed a second rise in the Carroll era?
“I think it’s a good comparison,” Wilson said. “The 2012 team, we were young. We were vibrant. We had a lot of spunk to us. We brought a lot of juice to the games. We brought a lot of energy. We walked off the field in Atlanta and we felt like we could do a lot of great things. We took the next step, I know that, of going from 2012 to 2013. We took the next step as players, as coaches, as an organization. We took the next step of where we wanted to go.
“The question for us is, what are we going to do to take the next step?”
Wilson wasn’t done describing the need for changes and improvement, though he stopped short of providing specifics.
“I think that’s what we got to figure out as players and as coaches and the whole organization as we continue to try to be the best in the world,” he said. “To be the best in the world, you got to do all the necessary things to get there.
“I think that we have a lot of those things. We need a few more things here and there to get that done. I think that’s just the reality.”
Wilson didn’t think the Seahawks’ current situation was bad. But...
“It’s a good one to be in because we’re not far off. It’s also not a good one to be in because we’re sitting here today,” he said.
“I don’t want to be sitting here today anymore.”
This story was originally published January 15, 2020 at 6:44 AM.
