Russell Wilson has enjoyed an offensive coordinator stability level unmatched by most other defenders. Over the course of nine seasons with the Seattle Seahawks, Darrell Bevell and Brian Schottenheimer are the only OCs he has ever met, but with Schotty out and year ten approaching, he wants information on his next signing.
“I think it’s vital,” Wilson told reporters at Zoom’s press conference on Thursday (via Seattle PI). “It is critical, obviously super significant for me to be part of this process. The coach and I definitely talked about it. John (Schneider) too. We had some superlong dialogues about the thinking process of who we want and the kind of leader idea, thinking process, innovative, all that kind of different thing you want.
“I think it’s a super critical thing at this point in my career to be able to (be involved).”
Unsurprisingly, Wilson revealed during that presser that he was not in favor of dismissing Schottenheimer and sang his praises a lot. I don’t think Russ ever realized that he wanted to move from Schotty, so that change was clearly a decision by Pete Carroll.
“I think he will be an incredible coach for someone else, for some other team here, I hope,” said Wilson (via ESPN). “I think he will be the head coach. I think he has that kind of leadership ability. Unfortunately for us, I think in the coach’s eyes, it was kind of time to see if we could make a change. We were the best attack in football in the first half of the season. He was an important part of that. “
By the way, stop me if you’ve heard this before:
Russell Wilson: “We have to do everything well … we have to be able to throw into the field”, and throw shorter, and screens, and run the ball, and at a faster pace.
“I want to do everything well.”
– Gregg Bell (@gbellseattle) January 14, 2021
You may have noticed that the Seahawks went from seemingly hitting their attack with plenty of time left on the game clock to the more familiar setting of repeatedly sending it to 0 at the end of the season. Wilson has been an advocate for a faster-paced attack for apparently years and Seattle has only been in the upper half at a neutral pace once in his career. Darrell Bevell was fired shortly after that, by the way.
Wilson has three more seasons left in his contract and when we reach the final stages of the 2021 campaign, he will be 33 years old. This is really a critical moment for Wilson’s career and the length of the Seahawks’ title dispute window. “Philosophical differences” between Pete and Schotty is the reason why the latter was canned, but we can only ask ourselves how serious are the philosophical differences between Wilson and Carroll.