Russell Wilson’s next: What’s the Seahawks GM’s relationship like with the QB’s agent?
Wild Russell Wilson rumors rage on.
Did you hear the one about Washington supposedly offering the Capitol, The White House plus the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials for the Seahawks’ quarterback?
Yet the reality hasn’t changed.
It was February 2021 Wilson told Seattle reporters “I’m frustrated with getting hit too much.” Then his agent told ESPN four teams Wilson would waive his no-trade clause to go to — if the Seahawks wanted to trade him, which they didn’t. That sparked the national talk of trading Wilson, creating the perception by some of a market that didn’t exist.
It still doesn’t.
What was true 13 months ago remains true now: Russell Wilson isn’t getting traded, because the Seahawks don’t want to trade Russell Wilson.
“We’re not shopping the quarterback,” Pete Carroll said last week at the NFL scouting combine that ended Sunday in Indiana.
Seattle’s coach said that is general manager John Schneider’s “standard response” to teams that call because “they think something is going on.”
So let’s move on, shall we?
There is a relatively unknown dynamic in play that will more determine Wilson’s future in Seattle beyond 2022 than any of this speculation about supposedly potential trades.
What’s the Seahawks’ relationship like with Wilson’s agent?
Do John Schneider and Mark Rodgers get along well?
The TNT asked Schneider and Rodgers that question this past week.
“Well, it’s interesting because Pete, we really over, I would say, the last two, I’d say two years, basically, Pete, (it’s been) player and coach kind of together,” Schneider said, “and then agent (and) executive ... the two of us have been working together.
“So it’s good. We’ve had real good open lines of communication.”
When Wilson was a college quarterback and baseball middle infielder at North Carolina State and fourth-round draft pick of Major League Baseball’s Colorado Rockies in 2010, he had hoped his father Harrison Wilson III, a lawyer, would become his agent. But his dad passed away two days after the Rockies drafted Wilson.
A former Dartmouth football and baseball player who got a preseason shot with the 1980 San Diego Chargers, Harrison Wilson died at age 55 of complications from diabetes in June 2010.
So Russell Wilson called Rodgers. Wilson liked that Rodgers had represented football-baseball players Jeff Samardzija and Doug Johnson. The agent also was friends with an assistant baseball coach of Wilson’s at N.C. State.
Wilson eventually hired Rodgers.
“He’s really like a father figure to Russ,” Schneider said.
“And, yeah, it’s good,” the GM said of his relationship with the agent.
In April 2019, the day after Wilson and Rodgers finalized with Schneider the then-NFL record $140 million Seahawks extension, Wilson called Rodgers “a Father Figure in my life and being an inspiration to me. Always encouraging me. You came into my life right when my dad passed away and I know my dad sent you in my life from Heaven.”
The next deal
This time next year, the Seahawks and Rodgers will be talking about a fourth contract for Wilson.
His current deal ends after the 2023 season. The team has gotten its previous two extensions with Wilson done before the start of the final season on his existing contract.
One leveraging objective the last 13 months of trade rumors have achieved is the Seahawks realizing it’s no guarantee the 33-year-old Wilson will just keep re-signing and playing for Seattle his entire career. He’s said he’d like to play at least until he’s 45.
He’s got his legacy in mind. He measures that legacy by winning Super Bowls. He’s constantly assessing his best paths to do that.
That makes negotiations — and thus the relationship — between Schneider and Rodgers this time next year paramount to the Seahawks’ future.
Rodgers politely declined an interview request last week from the TNT about that relationship.
The sticking point was contract length during the first extension he negotiated with Schneider for Wilson, in 2015 beyond the QB’s rookie deal as a Super Bowl champion. The Seahawks wanted five years. Rodgers wanted Wilson to have four, to become eligible for free agency sooner. When Schneider and the team acquiesced to four years, the then-record deal got done.
The second Wilson extension Rodgers negotiated with Schneider, they got stuck on Rodgers’ innovative idea to have Wilson’s salary escalate corresponding to annual increases in the league’s salary cap. Schneider said no way. He did not want to be the first GM in NFL history to set that precedent and alter the finances for the entire league.
When Rodgers dropped that demand, Wilson got his record four-year, $140 million extension at his self-set deadline of April 15, 2019 — actually a few minutes into April 16, just after midnight.
A third extension with the Seahawks would go beyond 2023, the year the cap is expected to skyrocket with the NFL’s new media rights kicking in. Leveraging for those negotiations began with Rodgers giving the four possible teams to ESPN 13 months ago.
It continues.
Schneider was asked if he wondered about the source of the media reports that are prompting teams to call the Seahawks about Wilson.
“Well, I mean, it’s out there,” Schneider said. “So, I don’t know.”
Asked if he’s spoken to Rodgers about the reports, the Seahawks GM said last week in Indianapolis: “Yeah. I’m not going to get into the specifics of our conversations. There have been many.
“And so I’m not going to get to that, what we talked about.”
Unique structure
Rodgers negotiates with a unique leadership structure in Seattle. It presents a challenge to anyone outside it.
Schneider is Wisconsin native and former Packers executive. He is 12 years into his first GM job. He is the Seahawks’ chief negotiator on contracts with players and agents.
To determine the numbers the team is willing to spend, the GM leans on the expertise of Matt Thomas, Seattle’s vice president of football administration and salary-cap guru.
Late owner Paul Allen hired Carroll to be the executive vice president of football operations and coach in January 2010. It was Allen and then-team CEO Tod Leiweke giving Carroll final and top authority on all football matters that got the coach to leave the dynasty he had restored while with that same power at USC through the 2000s. The New York Jets and New England Patriots coach in the 1990s has said many times without that promise of complete authority in Seattle, he would never have agreed to return to the NFL.
With these Seahawks, the coach hired the GM, not vice versa. Ultimately, Carroll has the final say.
The 70-year-old coach has been all in on Wilson, has staked his entire Seahawks tenure upon him since making Wilson the franchise quarterback from the third game of his rookie preseason in the summer of 2012.
Schneider likes to say the two most important people in any football building are the head coach and the quarterback.
Carroll says his relationship with his QB has never been better.
“He’s determined,” Carroll said last week of Wilson following Seattle’s 2021 season, its first losing one 2009. “He’s disappointed that we didn’t do better. We’ve been together too long to not kind of share that.
“And he’s ready to get back at it. He can’t wait to get playing again.”
Jody Allen, the sister of the late owner and chair of her brother’s Seattle-based Vulcan Inc., took over as chair of the Seahawks after Paul Allen’s death in October 2018. She remains a relative unknown about Seahawks matters.
Except to Carroll and Schneider.
The coach describes Allen as impressively competitive, big into football analytics and supportive of Carroll’s changes such as a new approach and coaching staff on defense following Seattle’s 7-10 season in 2021.
“We’ve met. We’ve talked a number of times,” Carroll said last week off the podium at the Indiana Convention Center. “I just wish you guys knew who she was. I just wish you did, because she’s amazing. She’s amazing. And it’s because she’s such a competitor, it’s really what it gets right down to.
“She just keeps bringing the mentality of keep pushing the edges and keep finding the ways to keep moving forward and keep growing and never taking steps back and pushing and being tough about it and all of that, all the tough decisions. She’s just remarkable.”
Carroll said Allen “didn’t like losing.” Seattle in 2021 missed the playoffs for only the second time in Wilson’s 10 seasons.
“She’s not trying to have all the answers. She wants the experts she’s hired to have the answers,” Carroll said. “And you better get them. You better come up with them.
“So that’s what we’re tasked with.”
The task
In the two extensions so far, agent Mark Rodgers has used Green Bay quarterback Aaron Rodgers as the benchmark for Wilson’s Seahawks deals. Those were favorable comparisons to make. Aaron Rodgers and Wilson have each won one Super Bowl. Their statistics had been comparable into 2019. And Wilson is five years younger than the Packers passer.
Since Wilson signed his last deal, the gap has grown in career accomplishments between Rodgers and Wilson. Last month, Green Bay’s star was named the NFL’s most valuable player for the 2021 season. That was the fourth time he’s won it. He is just the second player to win NFL MVP more than three times.
Wilson famously has never received a single MVP vote.
While Rodgers was having a fourth MVP, Wilson was having his worst. Wilson missed three games with a broken finger, the first games missed to injury of his career. He returned in mid-November. He lost the first three games back, including the first shutout defeat of his career, against Rodgers and the Packers.
In December, Wilson acknowledged he wasn’t fully healthy when he returned to playing the previous month.
How Wilson and Seattle responds on the field in the 2022 season will largely determine how next offseason plays out for the QB and the team.
Patrick Mahomes’ annual average of $45 million per year from the Kansas City Chiefs re-set the market on NFL quarterback salaries above Wilson in 2020. Buffalo’s Josh Allen averages $43 million per year and Dallas’ Dak Prescott $40 million per season. They signed their extensions in 2021.
Rodgers reportedly agreed Tuesday to a whopping new contract with the Packers: $50 million per year for four years, with $153 million guaranteed. That is the richest deal in NFL history.
Wilson and his agent absolutely noticed that.
Wilson has two years left on his deal from 2019 that averages $35 million.
He said late last season his goal is to win three more Super Bowls. That is on top of the one he earned leading the Seahawks through the 2013 season.
“My plan is to win Super Bowls. And my plan is to win them here. It’s that simple,” Wilson said in early January.
“There’s nothing, really, else, other than that.”
This story was originally published March 7, 2022 at 12:16 PM.
