In the annals of Seattle sports history, this will forever be the flashpoint: Where were you when you heard Russell Wilson was being traded to the Denver Broncos?
Oh, it had been floating as a possibility since two Super Bowls ago, with far more substance to it (obviously) than many people wanted to acknowledge. And yet the finality of the midmorning tweetstorm hit with the impact of Kam Chancellor’s hit on Vernon Davis.
You could call it the most shocking Seattle sports transaction since Ken Griffey Jr. was traded to the Reds in February 2000, yet that had been openly chronicled for months and was a foregone conclusion. The Wilson trade was always a shadowy concept, lurking in the realm of possibility but seemingly too complex and too fraught with danger to actually be pulled off.
And yet here we are: An audacious, practically unfathomable decision by the Seahawks on Tuesday to trade the most successful and dynamic player in franchise history, the quarterback who brought them their only Super Bowl title and was widely viewed by many analysts as a necessary component if they were ever to land another one in the near future.
Here’s my knee-jerk, bottom-line reaction: They had better be right.
For all the ways you can make sense of this trade, the rationales you can use to wrap your head around it, there can’t help but be trepidation, a sense of genuine dread, at trading a sure-thing quarterback such as Wilson. So many teams have fallen into an endless morass of mediocrity — or worse — simply because they couldn’t find an adequate QB to round out an otherwise playoff-caliber team.
It is a justifiable move when you get into the complexities of the salary cap and the ultimate Catch-22 of the modern NFL: You can’t win a Super Bowl without a great quarterback, but great quarterbacks make such a high percentage of the cap you can’t build a team around them to win a Super Bowl.
It is also defensible in the context of a Seahawks team with numerous holes to fill and a lack of draft capital to fill them, all the while looking at a division with nothing but playoff teams — and the Super Bowl champion — above them. That’s in part an indictment of Seattle’s poor drafting as well as what is shaping up increasingly as an ill-advised trade for Jamal Adams … but that’s where they were.
When you add in the undeniable tension that had developed between Wilson, his camp and the Seahawks, it adds another element that helped grease Wilson’s departure from Seattle.
Some had interpreted the recent comments from coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider at the NFL combine as shutting the door on trading Wilson. Yet if you parsed their words, complete with qualifiers and a notable absence of definitive door-slamming on trade rumors, you should perhaps be less shocked at the outcome.
All the smoke from the past 15 months — the voiced and unvoiced dissatisfaction by Wilson over his protection and how the Seahawks’ offense deployed him, the list of acceptable trade destinations given to Schneider last year by Wilson’s agent and subsequent trade talks, the disappointing 7-10 season in 2021, the serious recent pursuit of Wilson by the Washington Commanders and perhaps other teams — was obviously indicative of accompanying fire.
Then add in the fact that although Wilson has two years left on his contract, the timetable for working on negotiating a new one was rapidly approaching. And believe it or not, the one-time landmark deal Wilson signed in 2019, making him the highest-paid player in NFL history at $35 million annual value, is now looking like a relative bargain.
The timing may well have been coincidental, because this trade appears to have been in the works for a while. Yet Aaron Rodgers agreeing to a massive new contract with the Green Bay Packers on Tuesday, a few hours before the Wilson trade was announced, has obvious ramifications for Wilson.
If Rodgers receives $50 million annually, as reported, you can bet Wilson will want something in that ballpark. Remember, when Wilson got his first extension, it was for $21.9 million annually — $100,000 less than Rodgers’ $22 million. Wilson’s next contract, for $35 million annually, notably leapfrogged Rodgers’ $33.5 million.
So look for that little competition to play out again — and the quarterback-starved Broncos will no doubt be happy to accommodate their new franchise player, who they see as the elusive missing link that will lead them back to the promised land.
And now the Seahawks will have to show they can forge their own championship path without Wilson. It’s what Carroll and Schneider effectively staked their futures on Tuesday with the trade heard ‘round the world. Carroll has steadfastly declared since the end of last season that the Seahawks won’t be going into rebuilding mode. Quite the contrary, he practically shouted it from the rooftop: “We have a championship nucleus.”
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Now they have sent away what is inarguably the most vital element of that nucleus for a slew of draft picks and three players, including a quarterback in Drew Lock who was deemed insufficient in Denver.
The Seahawks as we’ve known them for the past decade have been inalterably transformed. A franchise that under Carroll adopted the motto “always compete” has bet everything that this is a better path to success than the one they had with Russell Wilson, who won more games in his first 10 years than any quarterback in NFL history. They will commence some measure of a rebuild with a coach who will be 71 in September.
It’s bold. It’s daring. It’s audacious. It’s even courageous. And the Seahawks, specifically Carroll and Schneider, had better be right, or what happened Tuesday will be the albatross they’ll carry forever.
