Russell Wilson: Seahawks must do ‘whatever it takes’ to ensure a return to winning in 2022
Russell Wilson laughed at the question.
That’s because he’s gotten it more lately than “How are you?” and “How’s Ciara?”
Seattle’s 33-year-old franchise quarterback was asked yet again Sunday: What do you think about your future with the Seahawks? Do you want to be back?
“Yeah,” Wilson said, chuckling following homeward-bound Seattle’s season-ending upset win at playoff-bound Arizona.
“You guys keep asking me the same question.”
To be fair, the questioner was a Phoenix-area reporter. He had yet to ask Wilson what seemingly every person in Seattle except the mayor —and maybe even he — had asked the QB. That is, amid incessant national rumors: Was Wilson perhaps playing his last game for the Seahawks?
(He wasn’t).
“But I think maybe you guys know something that I don’t know,” Wilson said, joking.
Yes, he was joking. JOKING.
“I think the biggest thing is that I love playing here. I love being here and everything else,” Wilson said at the end of Seattle’s 7-10 season, its first losing record of Wilson’s 10-year Seahawks career.
“I also love winning,” he said. “We also have to do whatever it takes to make sure that we’re doing that. And that’s the standard, and that’s what I believe in.
“So I have to do my part. It starts with me first, and the rest of the guys and all of us together, collectively, what we can do better?
“Obviously, I love this city, and that’s my hope and prayer.”
Saying that reiterated what he said last week, Thursday when he was back at Seahawks headquarters in Renton: “My plan is to win Super Bowls. And my plan is to win them here. It’s that simple,” Wilson said Thursday. “There’s nothing, really, else, other than that.”
Status appears quo
All signs from inside the team remain that Seahawks chair Jody Allen will keep Wilson, coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider to run it back in 2022, that she will assess this season as what it was: only the second one with Seattle not making the playoffs in 10 years.
The signs from within the franchise have been there for the last 11 months. That’s been despite Wilson saying, “I’m frustrated with getting hit so much,” after watching Tom Brady win another Super Bowl 11 months ago, then Wilson’s agent Mark Rodgers telling ESPN there were four teams Wilson would waive his no-trade clause to go to, should the Seahawks ever want to trade him.
They, still, do not.
Seattle’s 38-30 win over the Cardinals Sunday was the team’s fourth win in six games to close an otherwise lost season. After it, Carroll said he looked forward to meeting soon with Allen. The 70-year-old coach of the Seahawks since 2010 said he expects a normal, end-of-season assessment from Allen, one dedicated to how to return immediately to the team’s playoff and championship ways of the last 10 years before this lost season.
“Like we’ve always had. Really pointed, figuring things out,” Carroll said of what he expects when he meets with Allen.
“She’s very analytical, and she wants to make sure that we’re doing everything we can possibly do to get everything right.
“She’s a terrifically competitive person in that regard. And she doesn’t want any stone unturned — exactly the way I look at it. I just feel so connected to that thought that that’s what we do. To have your owner talk that same way, that’s a competitive perspective.”
Carroll says that approach goes back to what he instilled in the franchise beginning with the 2010 season. That was after Allen’s brother, the late Seahawks owner Paul Allen, sent then-team CEO Tod Leiweke to Los Angeles a dozen Januarys ago to get Carroll to sign with Seattle after he restored a college football dynasty at USC.
“It goes back to the old line we used to have: ‘We’re in a relentless pursuit of finding the competitive edge in everything that we are doing,’” Carroll said. “That’s what it is. That’s what she (Jody Allen) represents.
“We’ll try to do a great job of exchanging the information and setting course for making sure that we give ourselves the best chance to be champions.”
There are practical reasons Wilson, Carroll and Schneider will return to lead the Seahawks through the 2022 season.
Wilson has two years remaining on the record-setting, $140 million contract he signed in April 2019. He’s the best quarterback Seattle’s had, and may ever have. Allen and Carroll can write off much of the team’s issues this season to Wilson missing games to injury for the first time in his career, three of them in the middle of the season while he was out a month rehabilitating his surgically repaired finger.
Wilson finished this season with 3,113 yards passing, and 25 touchdown throws. Sunday he joined Hall of Famer Peyton Manning as the only NFL quarterbacks to throw for 3,000 yards and at least 20 touchdowns in each of their first 10 seasons.
Wilson’s two touchdown throws to Tyler Lockett in the first half Sunday moved Wilson past Hall of Famer Dan Marino for the second-most passing TDs in the first 10 seasons of an NFL career. Wilson has 292 TD passes.
Manning had the most over the first 10 years, 306.
At times Sunday, Wilson looked like his Super Bowl versions of the 2013 and ‘14 seasons instead of his erratic, injury-shortened season this fall into winter. He had exquisite touch on long passes to Lockett, for the Seahawks’ first touchdown, and to DK Metcalf. The latter set up another of his three scoring throws in the first half.
Wilson also ran like he was 23, not 33.
With the game on the line in the fourth quarter, he dashed on a third-down scramble away from pressure and at Cardinals exquisite safety Budda Baker for the go-ahead touchdown from 4 yards out.
It was a play of want-to, in the finale of a lost season.
“It was a key third down, and they covered it up really well,” Wilson said. “They were kind of double-teaming DK in a split second, and then had different guys moving around the line. Did a great job blocking, and kind of stepped up and stood to the left to shoot it to Tyler, but they were closing on Tyler pretty quickly.
“And so, I saw a chance to run it and just took off. The next thing you know, when you see Budda Baker running at you full speed, it’s never a good thing, usually, because he knows how to smack some guys. He’s such a great player. I just decided the goal line is right there, and we need this win. So I switched the ball to my left hand and said, ‘All right, let’s put the foot in the ground, let’s go,’ and I was able to get in the end zone and get in there.
“That was a key play for us.”
The bottom line
The bottom line: The Seahawks would be back to square one, likely years from contention, without Wilson.
They can say with justification of five losses by three points or fewer this season show they are with Wilson coming back for years 11 in Seattle closer to championship contention again than they would be without him.
Plus, Carroll turns 71 years old next season. He doesn’t want a start-over project at quarterback and on offense.
Allen signed Carroll just last year to a contract extension through the 2025 season. She then signed Schneider to remain Carroll’s GM and right-hand man through the 2027 NFL draft.
One, 7-10 season in which Wilson missed a month does not appear to warrant changing that path of leadership.
Wilson said he is looking forward to a sit-down meeting of his own soon, with Carroll. Perhaps at the coach’s offseason home on Maui, the QB joked.
“Maybe I’ll fly to Hawaii and sit down with Pete there. Maybe I’ll catch the flight with him or something like that,” Wilson said.
“Yeah, of course, Pete and I obviously have a great relationship, so I will definitely talk to him and John and all that stuff, too, and we will chop it up and have some good times together.”
Wilson said what Carroll did this past week, that he and the only NFL coach he’s had remain “on the same page.”
“Yeah. I think we have always been on the same page. And that same page is to do whatever it takes to win,” Wilson said.
“That’s been our focus. It’s always been our focus since I got here. I remember coach calling me up on draft day, the day they drafted me (in the third round in 2012), and said, ‘Hey, you’re going to compete for this thing now.’ And I just always remember that.
“So that’s what we’re all competing for to try to be better. And that’s our focus.”
The finger
Wilson injured the middle finger on his throwing hand Oct. 7 in Seattle’s loss to the Los Angeles Rams. He had surgery the next day.
His surgeon said he would likely miss eight weeks. Wilson came back to practice in four.
He and the team suffered with that return Wilson has since acknowledged was before he was fully ready to play. They lost their first three games after Wilson got back in mid-November.
Wilson had his first shutout loss in a game he finished in his NFL and college career Nov. 14 at Green Bay.
He lost to Arizona at home the next week when the Seahawks scored just 13 points.
The week after he and the Seahawks went three and out on five consecutive drives and lost 17-15 at a losing team in Washington. That Washington loss left the Seahawks at 3-8 entering December, basically done for the season.
Now, 12 weeks after surgery, Wilson said the finger and his health are back to 100%. It looked that way for much of Sunday’s win at Arizona.
“I think my hand is doing pretty good,” he said. “I think that it was disappointing just to have my finger broken in several different places. It was a tough challenge.
“But you know what it was? It challenged me in new ways that I had never had before. I have had a lot of dings and things that have slowed me down here or there, and I’ve fought through them. But this one I couldn’t. ...
“I think to not waver on my confidence and not waver on what I know I’m capable of and knowing that I feel 100%, knowing that people are going to say this or that and you may miss one every once in a while, just like pitchers throw a ball every once in a while. Hitters, sometimes they swing and miss. And sometimes great free-throw shooter miss, too.
“So for me, I just knew that I am going to keep shooting, and I am going to keep playing. I am going to do everything that I can to get better.
“And my best days are ahead.”
Wilson was asked following Sunday’s season finale how will spend his offseason, and if he will have any surgery.
He looked surprised.
“Surgery?” Wilson said, incredulously. “No, I feel great, man.”
Then he joked again, about his past as a Class-A middle infielder for the Tri-City Dust Devils in the summer of 2010.
“I may play baseball. Maybe I’ll go to Tri-City. Maybe I’ll go to the Yankees. I’ll go somewhere. I’ll do something,” Wilson said.
Again, he was joking — JOKING — lest there are national Wilson rumors upcoming about that.
Wilson said he would go home to spend time focusing on the three young children he and Ciara have.
“I’m going to drive them to school, maybe a few times a week, maybe every day for the first couple weeks,” he said.
Then, he went back into his football, No-Time-To-Sleep mode.
“But, I’m going to get back to work. Come (Monday) — watch the film from (Sunday),” he said. “It’s time to go, 2022 starts tonight.”
For Wilson it’s onto, yes, another Seahawks season.
“That’s just how my mind has always been,” he said, “and always will be.”
This story was originally published January 10, 2022 at 8:11 AM.
