The 4 events that got Russell Wilson away from Pete Carroll and the Seahawks, to Denver

Russell Wilson wasn’t getting traded until Pete Carroll changed his mind and agreed to it.

That was the fourth and final event in a 13-month process that turned Wilson from a Seahawk for life into a Denver Bronco.

“I was hoping that it would all work out, that we’d be able to figure all the details out,” Wilson said Thursday from Colorado.

“And we weren’t able to, and didn’t.”

NFL sources on both sides have detailed to The News Tribune over the last few months the four key points from February 2021 into March 2022 that made Wilson — and Carroll, Seattle’s ultimate football authority — realize a trade to Denver was best for the star and for the Seahawks.

The four points are why Wilson is playing against the Seahawks Monday night at Lumen Field in the season opener, instead of for them for the 11th consecutive season.

“It was an mutual divorce that was a long-time coming, a divorce sought by both sides,” a league source told The News Tribune.

“It was a litany of events, small, little dots that connected together to cause the mutual divorce.”

1. Feb. 5, 2021: NFL television filming, Raymond James Stadium, Tampa, Florida.

It’s well-known that Wilson sat in a suite with his wife Ciara at Super Bowl 55 chafing at watching Tom Brady win his seventh Super Bowl. Wilson has hopes his legacy would someday match Brady’s. He was now six NFL titles behind.

That happened weeks after Wilson finished Seattle’s 12-4 season with the NFC West title, a career-high 40 touchdowns against just 13 interceptions in the 2020 season. But a first-round home playoff loss to the Los Angeles Rams kept the Seahawks outside the conference title game for a sixth consecutive year. Wilson had started that season with Carroll and offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer agreeing to “Let Russ cook,” to use the popular online phrase. He led the league in passing and likelihood of winning his first NFL Most Valuable Player award. But Wilson’s spate of turnovers, culminating with four of them in a blowout track meet at Buffalo in early November, convinced Carroll to rein in Wilson’s throwing and get back to the run.

“Let Russ cook” was cooked in Seattle.

So, yes, Wilson was ticked. He was 32. He felt his window to win more rings closing.

“When I’m at the Super Bowl, watching the Super Bowl, I should be pissed off,” Wilson said, uncharacteristically, in June 2021.

That was while he was explaining his even more uncharacteristic, team-knocking comment, “I’m frustrated with getting hit too much.” He said that about the Seahawks’ iffy offensive line while he was on a league-sponsored Walter Payton Man of the Year Award conference call with Seattle reporters Feb. 9, 2021.

Duane Brown, Wilson’s left tackle and best protector, particularly didn’t like Wilson saying that.

All that’s been known.

What’s been unknown is what happened two days before Super Bowl 55. It was the first indication Wilson and his camp perceived as a possibility his time in Seattle could be ending.

On the Friday night before that Super Bowl in Tampa, Wilson was on Raymond James Stadium’s field taping his acceptance of winning the NFL Walter Payton Man of the Year Award for the 2020 season. The filming would air during CBS’ Super Bowl pregame show Sunday.

A league source told the TNT that during the Friday night taping, multiple national NFL reporters began calling those close to Wilson asking about rumors Seahawks general manager John Schneider was “in conversations” with the Jets about perhaps trading the quarterback to New York. Wilson’s agent called the quarterback during the taping. Wilson was surprised, to say the least. He had a no-trade clause in his four-year, $140 million contract he signed with Seattle in April 2019.

He called Schneider. Seattle’s GM denied the rumors to Wilson.

But the jolt began the 13-month process during which Wilson began thinking about the possibility of playing for someone other than the Seahawks.

Agent Mark Rodgers sought to be proactive, rather than have the Seahawks potentially talk trade to teams to which Wilson would have no interest in going. He studied 16 teams, half the league, to see where Wilson might fit best in the future.

Three weeks after the Jets rumors on the field in Tampa, Rodgers told Schneider that Wilson intended to play for Seattle — but there were four teams Wilson would accept being traded to, if Seattle wanted to trade him: the Cowboys, Saints, Raiders and Bears.

With that, Rodgers succeeded in creating a market for Wilson that hadn’t existed, because of his no-trade clause. Teams got the perception they maybe could acquire Wilson if they gave Seattle the right price. Schneider was staring at re-upping a quarterback entering his mid-30s who’d just been slowed and hurt for the first time, at about $50 million per year.

Thursday in Colorado, Wilson told Denver reporters the Seahawks sought to possibly trade him multiple times.

“Definitely. They tried to a couple times and tried to see what was out there,” Wilson said. “It’s part of the business, and it’s part of being a professional and everything else.”

Still, Carroll didn’t want to trade Wilson. And because Carroll outranks the GM Schneider — hired him, in fact — and team chair Jody Allen backs her coach on all such big matters, Wilson wasn’t getting traded.

2. March 2021, Seahawks letter to 2021 season-ticket holders.

It seemed much ado about little at the time. But combined with what had happened the month before in Tampa and what would happen after, the letter signed by Seahawks president Chuck Arnold sent to the team’s season-ticket holders for 2021 also made Wilson’s side wonder how much his team was interested in its quarterback for the longer term.

The letter mentioned Seattle winning 12-plus games for the fifth time in franchise history. It mentioned the Seahawks winning the division and scoring a team-record 459 points in the 2020 season.

It mentioned DK Metcalf, Tyler Lockett, Jamal Adams, Jordyn Brooks, Carroll, Schneider, new offensive coordinator Shane Waldron, even new run-game coordinator Andy Dickerson, both in from the Rams that offseason.

Conspicuously, the letter did not mention Wilson — nor Bobby Wagner, for that matter.

To some around the league it seemed petty. Sophomoric, even.

And purposeful.

“There were tea leaves being thrown our way,” is how one person in Wilson’s camp put it.

3. Summer 2021: Contract statuses of Brown and Wagner. Oh, and the offensive line.

Wagner was the franchise’s co-cornerstone, with Wilson. The All-Pro linebacker’s Seahawks contract was ending a year before Wilson’s. Wagner was entering the next-to-last year of his deal in the summer of 2021. He was 31, the age veterans as supremely accomplished as Wagner seek assurances for his future.

Brown was even more urgent in wanting assurances. The Seahawks’ Pro Bowl veteran left tackle and Wilson’s best pass protector was turning 36 before the 2021 opener. He was entering the final season of his contract.

Brown “held in” during the Seahawks’ 2021 training camp. He showed up on time to avoid league-mandated daily fines, but he refused to practice. He wanted a new contract before the 2021 season, for beyond that year.

The Seahawks didn’t give him one. Brown reluctantly accepted the team turning per-game bonus money into more guaranteed cash up front. He agreed to that days before the 2021 opener.

Wilson had mended with Brown over the comment about tired of getting hit. He was startled to see the Seahawks had no longer-term plans for Wagner and Brown.

“That wasn’t great for Russ, especially with Duane Brown,” a league source told the TNT.

Wilson and his camp didn’t know at the time — and maybe Carroll and Schneider didn’t, either — that the Seahawks were months away from drafting two new starting offensive tackles. Left tackle Charles Cross and right tackle Abe Lucas, first- and third-round picks this May, will start against Wilson’s Broncos Monday night.

Wilson’s years-long wait for Seattle to improve his offensive line never happened before he got traded March 8. Ten days after they traded Wilson, the Seahawks finally upgraded the center position they’d neglected for years. They signed former Rams Super Bowl starter Austin Blythe in free agency.

Cross, Lucas and Blythe represent 60% change in the Seahawks’ starting offensive line. The changes all happened after the team traded Wilson.

4. Early offseason, winter 2022: Carroll changes his mind.

The Seahawks’ 2021 season ended with Wilson having missed the first games of his 10-year career due to injury. He broke his finger banging it into the helmet of the Rams’ Aaron Donald during a game Oct. 7. He returned in mid-November after surgery and missing just three games, in half the time his doctors said he should miss. Even those in his camp told him he came back too soon.

Wilson believed he could rally the Seahawks back into the playoffs. But in his first game back he threw the ball poorly and got shutout for the first time in his career, 17-0 at Green Bay. The night strongly suggested he indeed returned too quickly. Seattle finished 7-10 and out of the playoffs for only the second time in 10 seasons.

After last season ended in early January 2022, soon before the coach left for the NFL’s annual scouting combine in Indianapolis that began March, Wilson talked extensively with Carroll to discuss his and the Seahawks’ futures.

“What I can tell you is, we definitely talked several different times,” Wilson said Thursday. “You know, I was trying to figure out what the plan was, and what we were going to do with guys, what the plan was with Bobby, what the plan was with Duane and me and just everything, and the next 10 years of my career.

“And if you know Pete and if you know me, we always have hope. We always have belief. Unfortunately, there was a — I think around the combine time it just kind of changed or whatever, maybe even a little before then.”

That was the ultimate turning point for Carroll. What he learned right before the combine from the quarterback and what he knew he wanted for his direction of the Seahawks past 2023 — no Wagner, who got waived the day Seattle traded Wilson, no Brown, who they let go without re-signing — finally convinced the coach the Seahawks had little choice but to seek a trade of Wilson.

That realization from talking to Wilson put the Seahawks, in the later words of Schneider, “under the impression” Wilson was not going to sign a third contract extension with Seattle when he current deal ended with the 2023 season.

Asked it’s true Wilson informed the Seahawks that he wouldn’t sign another contract to stay beyond 2023, Schneider said in March: “I don’t know if those were the exact words, but we were under the impression that there wouldn’t be a long-term extension.”

Schneider then accelerated his talks with Broncos general manager George Paton at the combine in Indianapolis. Carroll chose words carefully saying there the Seahawks had “no intention” of trading Wilson.

“To me, it’s not about blaming anybody or forcing the issue in any way in particular,” Carroll said of the trade. “Everybody had to agree to this eventually, and we did. It opened up some doorways that we didn’t think existed early at the time.”

The trade for tight end Noah Fant, defensive tackle Shelby Harris, quarterback Drew Lock and first- and second-round picks to Seattle in the 2022 and ‘23 drafts was done March 8, days after Carroll, Schneider and the Seahawks returned from the combine.

Wilson and his camp vehemently deny the QB and the Seahawks ever talked about his contract beyond 2023 before the trade.

Maybe they didn’t have to.

Carroll, Schneider and the Seahawks’ top salary-cap and contract-numbers executive Matt Thomas had dealt with Rodgers through two new contracts at the top of the quarterback market. They knew the agent was going to use Aaron Rodgers’ latest contract with the Green Bay Packers as the benchmark for Wilson’s new deal. Though Rodgers has won four NFL MVP awards to Wilson’s none, both QBs have won the same number of Super Bowls (one). Aaron Rodgers, 38, is five years older than Wilson.

When Wilson signed his new five-year contract with Denver last week that averages $49 million annually and guarantees him $165 million up front, that was the bottom-line reason Wilson is no longer with the Seahawks.

Even with the salary cap ballooning in coming years with new NFL media-rights deals, Schneider never got into paying that much of his cap to his quarterback who would go past 35 years old during the deal.

Instead, Seattle’s investing $1.26 million in base salary this year and up to just $3.5 million total with possible incentives in its successor to Wilson, his previous backup Geno Smith.

“You know what? At the end of the day...just having the gratitude to be able to play for 10 years under Coach Carroll and the organization, just everybody, I cherished every moment of it,” Wilson said.

“I was hoping that it would all work out, that we’d be able to figure all the details out. And we weren’t able to, and didn’t. It’s like one of those things you’ve got to be able to move on with joy, and I still get to play this game.

“And now I get to play with the Denver Broncos...for hopefully the rest of my career. ...

“I’m just grateful. I’m grateful for the whole experience of it all.”