Russell Wilson says it’s ‘super critical’ he’s involved in Seahawks offensive coordinator search

Russell Wilson has enjoyed a level of offensive coordinator stability not afforded to most other quarterbacks. Through nine seasons with the Seattle Seahawks, Darrell Bevell and Brian Schottenheimer are the only OCs he’s ever known, but with Schotty gone and year ten creeping up he wants input on the next hire.

“I think it’s vital,” Wilson told reporters at Thursday’s Zoom press conference (via Seattle P-I). “It’s critical, super significant obviously that I’m a part of that process. Coach and I have definitely been talking about that. John (Schneider) too as well. We’ve had some super long dialogues about the thought process of who we want and kind of that idea of a leader, thought process, innovator, all that kind of different stuff that you want.

“I think that’s a super critical thing at this point in my career to be able to (be involved).”

Unsurprisingly, Wilson revealed during that presser he wasn’t in favor of firing Schottenheimer and sung his praises greatly. I don’t think there’s ever been an inkling from Russ that he wanted to move on from Schotty, so that move was clearly Pete Carroll’s call.

“I think that he’s going to be an amazing coach for somebody else, for some other team here so hopefully,” Wilson said (via ESPN). “I think he’s going to be a head coach. I think he has that type of leadership ability. Unfortunately for us, I think that in Coach’s eyes, it was kind of time to see if we could make a change. We were the best offense in football for the first middle part of the season. He was a major part of that.”

By the way, stop me if you’ve heard this before:

You may have noticed that the Seahawks went from seemingly getting their offense in gear with plenty of time left on the play clock to the more familiar setting of repeatedly sending it down to 0 towards the back-end of the season. Wilson has been a proponent of a faster tempo offense for seemingly years and Seattle has only been in the top-half in situation-neutral pace once in his career. Darrell Bevell got fired right after that happened, by the way.

Wilson has three more seasons left on his contract and by the time we reach the late stages of the 2021 campaign, he’ll be 33. This is indeed a critical juncture for Wilson’s career and the length of the Seahawks’ window of title contention. “Philosophical differences” between Pete and Schotty is why the latter was canned, but one can only wonder how serious the philosophical differences are between Wilson and Carroll.