Russell Wilson

How exactly did we go from April 17, 2019, when Russell Wilson proclaimed, "I want to be a Seahawk for life" to March 8, 2022, when he was traded away?

It’s thought one reason Seattle didn’t sign Colin Kaepernick in 2017 was out of concerns whether Kaepernick might prove a threat to Wilson’s standing in the locker room, with Wilson at the time coming off his worst season. “I think what I agree with is, find a way to win the game, whatever that is,” Wilson said. “The guys I’ve always admired in sports, the guys that played at (their) locations for 15-20 years, guys like Derek Jeter, I want to be like that,” Wilson continued. I think that’s the key to our football team, always believing that you can.” The move to Wisconsin, though, worked out perfectly for Wilson. Regarded as a middling NFL prospect at best at the time, Wilson set a college football record in passing efficiency in his one year with the Badgers in leading them to the Rose Bowl and ending up a third-round choice of the Seahawks the following spring. I know how to win a lot of those games. As the years progressed, some around the team grew tired of the constant rumors swirling around Wilson’s future and rumblings of his discontent with the team, and that every game seemed to increasingly be viewed as a referendum on how the team was using him. And you’re not going to win every single one of them. But as a six-part podcast by 99.9 The Fan in Raleigh, North Carolina, last year detailed, the issue was far more nuanced and the parting a result of a relationship between Wilson and O’Brien that frayed over several years due not only to Wilson’s desire to play baseball but also long baseball-related absences from the team and subsequent communication issues between the two, and O’Brien questioning Wilson’s commitment to the football team. The Seahawks were blown out the following week at Minnesota, Wilson was hurt two weeks later against the Rams, and a season that Seattle hoped would end in the Super Bowl — and mend any lingering wounds with Wilson — instead devolved into the worst of the Wilson era. — Wilson’s agent, Mark Rodgers, giving the team an April 15 deadline on April 2, 2019, to get a new contract completed, a move that caught some as needlessly contentious given that the Seahawks had every desire to get a contract with Wilson done that year anyway. On April 17, 2019, after signing a new four-year contract that made him the highest-paid player in the history of the NFL, Russell Wilson stood with his family at a celebratory news conference at the VMAC in Renton wearing a Sonics jacket and proclaiming “I want to be a Seahawk for life.”