Wilson or Carroll? The crucial choice facing Seattle after a disastrous 2021

After a period of unprecedented, sustained success, the Seahawks have bottomed out. Now, they’re at a crossroads.

Defeat to the Bears last Sunday dropped the Seahawks to 5-11 on the season. They have no shot at making the playoffs. The roster features a rotating morass of mediocrity. There are questions about the future of their franchise quarterback, head coach and chief personnel decision-maker.

Things could be about to get ugly. There remains an oft-repeated myth around Seattle that the Russell Wilson-Pete Carroll partnership turned sour once the franchise quarterback started to get paid like a franchise quarterback.

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The theory makes some sense. The Seahawks were the first team to truly take advantage of the modern Collective Bargaining Agreement that turned a quarterback on a rookie contract into the sport’s leading market inefficiency. Seattle had Wilson on the cheap, and it was able to surround him with a bevy of Hall of Famers slap-bang in the middle of their primes.

Carroll, Wilson and the vaunted Legion of Boom stomped all over the NFC on their way to two Super Bowls, winning one and dropping the other to the Brady-Belichick Patriots, falling one yard short of back-to-back titles.

It would be neat and easy if things took a sudden downshift from there; if paying Wilson was the sole reason for the decline – the expense of a $30m per year quarterback meaning talent leaking out of the roster elsewhere.

It’s also inaccurate. This year represents Carroll’s first losing season as a coach since 2011. Since the Seahawks drafted Wilson in 2012, few if any franchises have matched the pair’s success, including the period in which Wilson was signed to an extension.

Tampa Bay with Brady, Kansas City with Mahomes, and New Orleans with Drew Brees certainly had (and have) no issues maintaining a championship-caliber roster with a quarterback…