The whispers and rumors of an impending Russell Wilson contract extension were quashed by separate reports over the weekend by Mike Florio and Jason La Canfora, but John Schneider told reporters at the NFL Owners Meetings that he wants to get a deal done before the 2015 season starts.
I continue to hear talks between Wilson and the Seahawks have gone nowhere and that there has been no real progress made and no sense that anything is necessarily on the horizon beyond a belief that it would be great if something was able to get done.
But, as Schneider told reporters today, there's a timeline that the Seahawks have liked to utilize in doing their contract work, and that involves knocking primary free agency out first. Then once that's over (and it's nearly over now), focus shifts to future deals.
"He knows we are basically in phase two of free agency," said Schneider of Russell Wilson, via Bob Condotta of the Seattle Times. "His people are aware that we want to be able to help our club as much as we possibly can, and then we will get into talking about trying to retain guys that will be free agents next year. Bobby Wagner is a strong leader as well. Russell Okung, Bobby — we are going to try do help this club right now. Obviously we have to be very careful how we step with our cap moving forward because we know those guys are such instrumental pieces.''
Careful wording from Schneider, who makes a point to say that the team has a multi-pronged approach to keeping the team at a championship-caliber level. This is, of course, aimed at Wilson's reps.
"Last year, we went through this, we went into free agency basically kind of have to make a tough decision between Michael Bennett and Golden Tate and we went with a pass rusher. So this year we were able to re-do as part of what we view as free agency, K.J. (Wright) and Cliff (Avril) — those guys were huge deals for us to be able to get those guys done. Now we feel like there are certain things we want to do to help our franchise and help the organization move forward and we are in that period right now. Things are calming down a little bit, if you will, on the unrestricted front, so are hoping to get with those guys and their representatives fairly soon.''
Overall though, the main takeaway here is that now that unrestricted free agency is all but over, the Seahawks can turn their attention to future contracts for Wilson, Wagner, and a few others. Whether a deal gets done with Wilson remains to be seen, but I don't think it's worth reading too much in to the fact that there is no apparent progress on that front at this point.