Seattle knows when to move on from winning quarterbacks

Published 9:30 am Tuesday, September 30, 2025

Teams have a hard time moving on from winning quarterbacks. The Seahawks have done it twice and lived to tell about it. What’s the key?

Geno Smith’s run as Seattle’s starting quarterback from 2022-24 proved the team was correct in trading franchise icon Russell Wilson, whose career subsequently unraveled.

The first four weeks of this season suggest the Seahawks might have picked the right time to trade Smith and sign Sam Darnold.

These were high-stakes moves driven by general manager John Schneider in an era when many teams pay upper-tier money for mid-tier quarterbacks, for fear of the unknown.

If Smith had bombed and Wilson had flourished in Denver, the stakes could have been high for Schneider. But in correctly evaluating Wilson’s career trajectory and what Smith could offer as a replacement (Pete Carroll also deserves credit here), Schneider earned the opportunity to make the call on Smith three years later.

“Most of the league makes fear-based decisions,” another exec said. “They think, ‘I have to draft a high-round quarterback or I have to have a placeholder, and the placeholder I know is better than the one I don’t.’”

Making the right evaluations is one key. Having the conviction to spearhead trades unloading two starting quarterbacks is another. That second part carries risk that not all GMs are willing to assume.

“The thing about Seattle is, they have survived the rebuild multiple times,” a third exec from another team said. “There is something to that. Because they won games in the midst of all that, they don’t fear the same things that other guys fear.”

Smith’s production, like Wilson’s production, had plateaued. Some of that was beyond Smith’s control. The offensive system Seattle implemented in 2024 put undue stress on the quarterback. A case could be made that Smith carried the offense disproportionately. But Smith was also approaching his 35th birthday in October. Darnold won’t be that old until 2032.

Darnold has been both efficient (No. 2 in yards per attempt) and explosive (No. 1 in explosive pass rate) despite the Seahawks’ run game struggling to jell so far. Smith’s aggressive style has hurt the Raiders more than it has helped to this point, as he leads the league with seven interceptions, including three Sunday.

Both Wilson and Smith wanted out of Seattle, which made the Seahawks’ decisions easier. But it’s also true to some extent that those QBs wanted out because the organization had reservations about committing to them. Wilson wanted the offense built around his passing. Smith wanted a better contract one year ago. Seattle resisted both.

“The contrast is, you are seeing other teams double down on guys like Tua (Tagovailoa) and Trevor Lawrence,” the first exec said.

Sherman is no Russell Wilson cheerleader

Richard Sherman will not be leading the Russell Wilson Hall of Fame campaign. How much should the last few years affect Wilson’s case for Canton now that he’s been benched?

Testimonials from former teammates tend to carry less weight with Hall of Fame selectors than testimonials from rivals, on the thinking that former teammates feel obligated to endorse their friends. What else is a former teammate going to say, right?

Well …

Sherman’s comments about Wilson, his longtime former teammate in Seattle, slammed into the recently benched QB’s candidacy with the force of laser-guided missiles.

“You gotta judge his career off when the Legion of Boom was there, he had a legendary defense, an all-time defense, and how much success he had, and then without that legendary defense, the success he had,” Sherman said during the Amazon Prime Video pregame show Thursday night.

Sherman then moved in for the kill.

“Without that legendary defense, he’s been 4-11, 7-8, 0-3 to start with the Giants,” he said. “He was a winning football player, and people said, ‘Hey, winningest football player,’ all this good stuff, all these accolades. Now, you get to go on your own and you get to prove, ‘Hey, I’m this great quarterback, I’m this guy who is going to be dominant,’ and it just hasn’t worked out that way.”

As a Hall of Fame selector, I think Wilson’s candidacy will benefit from the five-year waiting period after retirement before players can be considered for enshrinement. His inability to succeed outside Pete Carroll’s framework in Seattle is part of the calculus, but so is the 2012-21 run he had with the Seahawks.

The table below compares Wilson’s Seattle tenures to the most illustrious runs other dual-threat quarterbacks made before earning enshrinement.

Steve Young’s 1991-99 starting run with the 49ers, Fran Tarkenton’s second run with the Vikings (1972-78) and Roger Staubach’s starting run with the Cowboys (1971-79) came to mind because, like Wilson, all three were highly efficient winners on teams with elite coaches and/or elite defenses.

As for Sherman’s pointed comments, there were well-documented hard feelings between some Legion of Boom-era Seahawks defenders regarding how much credit Wilson got for the team’s success, and how much credit Wilson was happy to accept. It’s still a remarkable departure from established etiquette. Has an all-time great defensive player ever torpedoed his own quarterback’s Hall case in such a manner? Worse for Wilson, Sherman’s Hall of Fame broadcast teammate, Tony Gonzalez, bordered on flippant in dismissing Wilson’s candidacy.

Have we seen the last of Wilson?

“Honestly, I hope we have,” Gonzalez said on the broadcast. “And I say that, just looking at him in his career, his legacy, if ever there was somebody who played himself out of a Hall of Fame, it’s Russell Wilson.”