No fans in Atlanta for Seahawks opener? Old hat for ex-Tri-City Dust Devil Russell Wilson
For Russell Wilson, Sunday’s going to be like playing in Gesa Stadium in Pasco.
The Seahawks’ $140-million quarterback is used to competing in front of sold-out crowds with 70,000 or 80,000 people watching him.
But he’s also familiar with playing in front of what he and his Seahawks are going to get here in Atlanta for this season opener like no other Sunday.
Nobody.
The coronavirus pandemic is keeping Falcons fans out of Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and fans for 26 of the NFL’s 32 teams from attending this unprecedented season’s first games this month.
“You just miss the fans. That’s the fun part of it about football, especially,” Wilson said with a huge grin this week.
He was speaking remotely, via an online Zoom call, of course.
Then Seattle franchise QB flashed a smile. He gave a playful dig at his teammates — almost all of his contemporaries in the NFL, for that matter.
“I’ve played baseball. None of these guys have played minor-league baseball before,” Wilson said. “I’ve been in stadiums where nobody’s around and you are just out there by yourself and you are working every day.
“So this is A-OK for me.”
Wilson played for the Class-A Tri-City Dust Devils of the Northwest League in 2010. That was soon after the Colorado Rockies drafted the college quarterback-second baseman in the fourth round of the Major League Baseball draft.
He played in 32 games for Tri-City 10 years ago, batting .230 with two home runs, 11 RBI and four stolen bases in 10 tries. He had a .336 on-base percentage and 36 strikeouts in 122 at-bats.
He played one more year of minor-league baseball, in the summer of 2011 for Class-A Asheville in North Carolina. Then he chose football. He led Wisconsin to that football season’s Rose Bowl before the Seahawks selected him in the 2012 NFL draft.
New rules
The Falcons said earlier this summer they were expecting 10,000-20,000 fans to attend Sunday’s game. Then last month the team announced there will in fact be no fans in attendance Sunday because of concerns about the ongoing presence of the COVID-19 virus in Georgia.
That’s a bad deal for running back Chris Carson and linebacker Bruce Irvin. Both Seahawks are from Atlanta. They would have dozens of family members and friends at the opener.
Instead, they won’t even be able to see them. The Seahawks are quarantined inside their hotel from their arrival late Friday night until the buses leave for the game Sunday morning.
Players can’t even entertain family members and friends in the team hotel’s lobby this season.
“Those rules are really, really specific. They are very strict,” coach Pete Carroll said before the team left for Atlanta Friday. “As far as visitors at the hotel, and guys leaving the hotel, you know, almost leaving your room, there’s very, very ... it’s governed very tightly.
“Which we are all for. It’s the elements that we can’t control that we’re concerned about. ... The NFL and the NFLPA (the players’ union), they’ve decided on a very strict regimen. So we’re abiding by that.”
There will be fans in just two of the 16 stadiums hosting NFL games this opening weekend. About 17,000 fans attended Thursday night’s Chiefs-Texans game in 77,000-seat Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City. The same number of fans is expected Sunday in Jacksonville for the Jaguars’ opener against the Indianapolis Colts.
Four other teams are planning to have fans at home games this month, capped at a percentage of stadium capacities: Cleveland, Dallas, Miami (the Seahawks’ second road game, Oct. 4) and Indianapolis.
Fake noise
The NFL is allowing teams that are not permitted by local public-health restrictions for COVID-19 to have fans in attendance to pipe in recorded crowd noise during games. The league has given those teams a range of sound levels permitted during games.
The Seahawks had two mock-game scrimmages at CenturyLink Field during training camp last month, primarily so they could try out noise levels and find the optimal one for their home games this season. Initially this spring, when it became apparent King County and Washington state COVID-19 restrictions would keep fans from attending Seahawks home games, Carroll indicated he wanted to crank the volume to 11 during games. He wanted to replicate as raucous a Seattle crowd as possible.
Then Carroll reconsidered. He and Wilson talked how maxing out the allowable artificial noise would hamper the quarterback’s ability to communicate with his offense and change plays through verbal audibles before snaps. League rules mandate a stadium’s recorded crowd noise must stay the same from kickoff through the end of the game; it can’t be loud when the opponent’s offense is on the field then lower when the home team has the ball.
So Carroll and the Seahawks have settled on what sounds more like background, white noise from cars and trucks going by on nearby I-5, than a Seahawks home crowd.
In Atlanta Sunday, the Falcons also will have what their coach Dan Quinn, the former Seahawks defensive coordinator, this week called more like “ambient” noise inside roofed Mercedes-Benz Stadium. Quinn likewise decided 2016 NFL most valuable player Matt Ryan and his offense shouldn’t have to be challenged by artificial noise turned up too loud. The home offense shouldn’t be challenged by noise as if it was in a road game.
Road stud
Whatever the noise, Wilson has been wondrous on the road in his career.
He is the reason the Seahawks are 16-6 in their last 22 games played at 10 a.m. Pacific Time. Those early games in the east on Sundays used to doom this franchise. But Carroll’s way of flying out Friday, two days before those early East Coast games as the Seahawks did again while wearing masks this latest Friday to Atlanta, has worked.
Wilson is the primary reason the Seahawks started last season 6-0 away from home and won a franchise-record seven road games in 2019. Counting the wild-card playoff win at Philadelphia (in which Wilson completed 18 of 30 throws for 325 yards, a long touchdown strike to DK Metcalf and a passer rating of 108.3), Seattle became the sixth team in league history to be 8-1 or better on the road in a season.
Wilson holds the NFL record for consecutive road games with a passer rating of 110 or higher (nine). His road passer rating of 99.2 for his career is the best in league history. He owns the longest streak ever in the NFL with nine consecutive road games of having at least one touchdown pass and zero interceptions.
Sunday, in his 144th consecutive start to begin his career (the league’s second-longest active game-played streak by a QB behind Phillip Rivers with 224), Wilson will be in a situation like no other.
Except, of course, those summer days in Pasco 10 years ago manning second base for those Dust Devils.
“At the end of the day, I’d rather play in front of thousands and thousands of fans,” Wilson said. “That’s always the tough part, traveling on the road.
“I embrace going on the road, you know. Going on the road and playing in tough environments, it’s one my favorite parts of playing quarterback and playing on this team, those two-day trips and having go into those tough environments with all those fans. ...
“The key is ... we’ve remained neutral along the way, in terms of how we’ve dealt with the Zoom meetings, how we’ve dealt with those whole situations. We are meeting in the IPF (the team’s indoor practice field). I’m not even with you guys (in the media) anymore. We’re so distant. It’s a new way.
“And I think in the midst of it all, we have to adjust. The great players and the great teams are great at being consistent. But they have to be great at consistently adjusting, as well.
“I think that’s what we can do really well. I think that’s what we’ve always done. And that’s what we’re going to do right now, this year.”
Roster move
With Cedric Ogbuehi out with a pectoral injury and hours after adding fellow reserve offensive tackle Jamarco Jones to their injury list as questionable with an illness that is not COVD-19, the Seahawks signed tackle Chad Wheeler off the practice squad to the active roster for Sunday’s game.
This season each team is allowed to add one or two players from the practice squad to make a 55-man rather than 53-man roster for each game. The Seahawks could add another practice-squad player up to 90 minutes before Sunday’s kickoff.
This story was originally published September 12, 2020 at 9:53 AM.
