The Seahawks retired the number 12 for moments like this, apparently.
For years, Seattle has taken extra pride their fans providing a true home-field advantage. And a guy who played quarterback for the home team for a decade apparently shouldn’t get an exemption. At least not in the opinion of coach Pete Carroll.
“You are either competing, or you are not, I’m leaving it up to the 12s,” Carroll told reporters on Thursday when asked how now-Broncos quarterback Russell Wilson should be received by the fans. “It’s game time and we are going for it, so however they take it, I will follow their lead on that. I’m not going to be involved in that opportunity to react, so I don’t have to make that decision. We will see what happens. I’ll leave it up to the 12s, I think they will know exactly what to do.”
In other words, Let him hear it.
The Seahawks and Wilson had a complicated relationship, to say the least. Wilson says the team tried to trade him, multiple times. In early 2021, Wilson made a power play that came to fruition one year later. It was time for the two sides to go their separate ways.
And while it likely won’t be as ugly as it was when Brett Favre returned to Lambeau as a Viking in 2009, the goal for the Seahawks will be to go 1-0. That’s the same cliche Wilson constantly recited throughout his 10 years in Seattle, each and every week. Go 1-0. For Seattle to get there, that requires the fans not being hospitable but hostile. Whoever the quarterback of the Broncos may be, the 12s need to take the sound to 11. And Carroll. in a roundabout way, has given them express permission to give Wilson the business.
Why shouldn’t Carroll do that? He wants to win. And if Wilson has to deal with deafening noise that includes personal derision directed at him, it won’t impair the effort to score an upset and win the most important Week One game of Pete Carroll’s career.
Sure, they’re all important. But the Seahawks made a strategic decision to stop paying Wilson a market-level deal and to start their inevitable existence without him on the team. They traded him to a franchise they knew would be coming to town at some point this season. No one expected it to happen right away. But it is. Which means Pete Carroll and company have a chance to prove right away that they made the right decision.
Hell yes Carroll wants to be right. Hell yes he wants the 12s to assist him toward that goal.