Russell Wilson convened his team just after the end of the season, the sixth straight that finished for the Seahawks before conference championship weekend, to come up with a comprehensive plan for the months ahead.
Those in on the discussions sensed it right away.
Wilson’s 32. He’s got nine NFL seasons in the books, and is now seven years older than he was when he and the Legion of Boom won Super Bowl XLVIII. Just one Seahawk, pending free agent K.J. Wright, predates him in Seattle, and Wright and fellow linebacker Bobby Wagner are the only two others left from the franchise’s back-to-back NFC title teams.
As Wilson articulated to those around him, and after taking stock of a 2020 season that started hot and ended with a thud, he sees this as the start of the second half of his career. And working through the plan for it meant working through the mundane things a quarterback needs each the offseason—from strength-and-conditioning to field work to film work to nutrition to sports psychology elements most of us would need a translator to understand.
Then, there was this: Wilson wanted to take as much control of his football future as possible. More than anything, it was clear he wanted a team truly built around him.
Now, I can’t say how Wilson expressed that desire to Seahawks coach Pete Carroll or GM John Schneider. But I can imagine how they might react to it—since they’ve spent the better part of a decade bending over backward to accommodate their franchise quarterback, like a lot of teams in their position would.
They’ve traded for big-ticket offensive players like Percy Harvin, Jimmy Graham and Duane Brown. They’ve fielded a generational defense. They’ve fired the offensive coordinator they won a Super Bowl with. They’ve made other staff changes to try and improve what was around the quarterback. They’ve twice made Wilson the game’s highest-paid player, doing so most recently just 22 months ago.
So what exactly, Carroll or Schneider might ask, does Wilson want that he isn’t getting? And is it possible that the best conclusion for everyone might be that he gets it somewhere else? Would they actually trade Wilson?
My answer would reflect the quarterback's relationship status with the team that drafted him in the third round nearly nine years ago: It’s complicated.
