Goodbye & Good Luck, Russell; You're Gonna Need It
Years of Pete Carroll's personnel incompetence ends a Seahawks era, while Russell Wilson possibly sets himself up for a big fall.
This morning I was minding my own business when what should come across what Jim Cornette calls “the Twitter machine” than the following from Adam Schefter:
Blockbuster: After weeks of negotiations, in one of the largest trades in NFL history, the Seattle Seahawks and Denver Broncos have agreed to terms for a deal involving Super-Bowl winning QB Russell Wilson, sources tell ESPN. Trade is pending a physical and Wilson’s approval.
Evidently, unlike last offseason, Seahawks CEO Pete Carroll has finally listened to Seahawks General Manager John Schneider: They're blowing it up.
And thus, the rebuild every last 12 was adamantly denying needed to be, was being, or every would be done is now officially underway.
What do 12s think of the Jamal Adams trade *now*? Because it seems crystal clear that without it and the resulting hemorrhage of draft capital, there's no need to desperately replenish it by unloading Russell Wilson now.
Of course, if Pete Carroll was any kind of competent judge of draft talent and wasn't hyper-allergic to big free agent moves, the Seahawks wouldn't have been in this position in the first place. Which means that the haul that Seattle got from Denver will almost certainly be squandered on still more draft busts and "trading back" to build another war chest of seventh rounders to "upgrade special teams".
Pity Jody Allen won't ship Pete out of town next.
I always wondered what it would take to finally penetrate Pete Carroll's Teflon P.R. armor in Seattle. Becoming "the man who traded away the greatest - and only Super Bowl-winning - quarterback in Seahawks history" at the end of his freefalling tenure just might be enough.
On the other side, there's significant risk to Russell Wilson in accepting this trade. Denver is bringing him in to be the next Peyton Manning. The expectations there are going to be nothing less than Super Bowl or bust. Under former Packers offensive coordinator and Matt Lafleur disciple Nathaniel Hackett, they're going to "let him cook".
But now he's in the AFC West, with Patrick Mahomes and Jake Herbert and even Derrick Carr. He's jumped from a fire of a division into a frying pan of one, where the chances are good to overwhelming that the Broncos will be better, but still finish second or third every year, just like the Seahawks did the past seven seasons. And remember that Wilson is no longer an elite quarterback, one that jumped the shark a season and a half ago. It will wind up in retrospect looking like a lateral move and that Denver traded away a king's ransom of draft capital for a souped-up Teddy Bridgewater, whom they'd already had. Will John Elway be able to survive such a PR disaster? Hard to see it.
As for Russell, his legacy is now fully, frontally on the line. There will be no excuses that he himself doesn't start to make. If he really is on the same lofty tier as Brady, Rodgers, Manning, et al as he still fervently believes, he'll take the Broncos to being the winningest team in Super Bowl history. He'll HAVE to, because otherwise he'll prove to the whole world that he was past his prime when he arrived, and maybe never truly was an elite quarterback all along.
I hope I’m wrong about that, as at this point I’m far more of a Russell Wilson fan than a Seahawks fan and would love for him to be 2022 Comeback Player of the Year and for Super Bowl success in the Mile High City to indelibly underscore why Pete Carroll should have been fired four years ago at the end of the LOB era, to say nothing of hastening his overdue retirement in the hear & now. Maybe it will. But I don’t think Bronco fans should be counting on it.
It’s interesting that the one who may wind up having the last laugh from all of this, however pyrrhic, will be John Schneider. And when all is said and done, 12s will only be able to ponder and wonder how much better the past seven years would have turned out if Pete Carroll had been reporting to him for all this time instead of being the one calling all the shots. Because if, say, the aforementioned Matt Lafleur at been coaching the Seahawks instead of the Green Bay Packers, hired in early 2018 after Pete Carroll’s dismissal by the same John Schneider who was a disciple of legendary Packers general manager Ron Wolf, it may have been Russell Wilson who rejuvenated his career instead of Aaron Rodgers, and Seattle which posted a 39-9 regular season record with two NFC Championship Game appearances - and maybe another Super Bowl - over the past three years instead of Green Bay.
And Russell Wilson would still be the Seattle Seahawk starting quarterback, today would have seen no sports media firestorm, and there’d have been an Adam Schefter tweet to overturn my morning.
We’ll never know.
But the future of the Seahawks over the next five years at minimum we do know. Because for those of us 12s who’ve followed this team from its founding nearly fifty years ago, it’s the vast majority of its miserable, mediocre history.
I told my son on the eve of Super Bowl XLVIII to enjoy that run on top, because it would never come again in my lifetime.
Hopefully that won’t also be true of his.
But I….well, we’ll see.