Wilson’s way wins battles for Seattle Seahawks
The former minor-league ball player was asked on the day slugger Josh Hamilton signed a $125-million contract with the Los Angeles Angels if he regretted quitting baseball.
“Nah,” Russell Wilson smiled. “I’m glad I’m here.”
Here with the Seattle Seahawks. Here as the rookie starting quarterback on an 8-5 team crackling with possibilities as it travels today to Toronto for Sunday’s National Football League game against the Buffalo Bills.
And yet, Russell Wilson is hard to see.
He is 5-11, which behind the Seahawks’ mammoth offensive line is like a tail behind an elephant. He is hard to see because this is the season of Indianapolis Colt Andrew Luck and Washington Redskin Robert Griffin III, whose Hall-of-Fame candidacies were being measured last April when the quarterbacks were chosen first and second in the draft. Wilson is hard to see because he is a third-round pick — the sixth quarterback chosen and even that was higher than expected — who came quietly to the NFL’s remote Northwest outpost.
But Wilson is getting bigger by the week and so, it seems, is his team. As the Seahawks practised Thursday at their magnificent facility on the shore of Lake Washington, Wilson is already a giant with teammates.
“He has already evolved as one of the leaders of this team,” Seattle receiver Golden Tate said. “I’m very proud of him, but I’m not surprised. I knew this would happen, but I didn’t know when. ”
Offensive tackle Russell Okung said: “My first thought: ‘Yo, this guy is short, man.’ I thought he was one of the receivers. But you see how he went out there each day, and how he approached each day, you couldn’t help but give him respect even if he was a rookie. ”
While the football cognoscenti obsessed this week over a knee injury to Griffin and whether the NFL’s “it” rookie will play Sunday in Cleveland, Wilson has helped orchestrate four wins in his last five starts and set a rookie quarterback record with a passer efficiency rating above 125 in three straight games.
During that time, he has thrown 10 touchdowns against a single interception and climbed to seventh in the NFL with an over-all passer rating of 94.9, even if he is only 25th in passing yards (2,492) because he hands the ball so often to outstanding running back Marshawn Lynch.
Remember, Wilson was supposed to be the third-string QB, the gifted prospect learning behind Flynn and Tavaris Jackson. Instead, Flynn is earning his $19.5-million contract on the sidelines and Jackson is in Buffalo.
Wilson’s father, Harrison Wilson III, was bright enough to attend Dartmouth and become a lawyer, and athletic enough to go to training camp as a receiver with the San Diego Chargers in 1980. His mother, Tammy Wilson, is a legal nurse trained in heart surgery.
Heavily recruited out of high school in Richmond, Va., Russell Wilson played football and baseball at North Carolina State and was a fourth-round Major League draft pick of the Colorado Rockies in 2010, the year his father died after battling diabetes.
Wilson spent his first summer of pro ball across the mountains from Seattle with the Tri-City Dust Devils in Pasco, Wash., the Rockies’ Class-A affiliate in the Northwest League, which includes the Vancouver Canadians. When Wilson announced he would play baseball again in 2011, NC State football coach Tom O’Brien released the quarterback from his scholarship. O’Brien was fired last month.
Wilson transferred to the University of Wisconsin for his senior season, set school records and led the Badgers to the Rose Bowl.
“I always expect greatness and always expect an opportunity,” Wilson told reporters here.
That doesn’t seem to be a problem. He quickly won over Seahawk teammates with his work ethic, his extra hours of preparation, his maturity. Wilson turned 24 in November.
“We’re both from Richmond, Virginia,” veteran fullback Michael Robinson, a Seahawk captain, said. “He used to watch me when I was in high school and he was in elementary school. I remember hearing about him.”
Russell Wilson is going to be in Seattle a while. He said he is “drastically” better now than when the season began.