Inside Russell Wilson's Up-And-Down Relationship With Coach Pete Carroll

While drama inside Hollywood seems to be the typical tea people love to hear about, the sports world can be just as petty, just as backstabbing, and just as entertaining behind the scenes as our favorite celebrities. There are legendary sports feuds between teams, like the Chicago Bears and the Green Bay Packers, and there's legendary beef between sports icons, like Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez's potential feud. The bigger the player or coach, the bigger the ego or expectations of treatment there are. Sometimes it's reasonable, and other times it's definitely based on perception and pride. For Denver Broncos quarterback, Russell Wilson, there's talk of a feud between him and his former coach on the Seattle Seahawks, Pete Carroll.

The Seattle Seahawks selected Wilson in the quarterback position in the third round of the 2012 NFL Draft. He led the team to a Super Bowl championship win in 2013 and brought them back in 2014 for back-to-back Super Bowl appearances. He played with the Seahawks until 2021 when he played his last season with the team. He was traded in a very lucrative deal, but there are rumors that more tension behind the scenes led to Wilson's departure.

In February 2023, The Athletic claimed that Russell Wilson asked the Seahawks management to fire coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider for the 2022 season. The quarterback supposedly felt like Carroll and Schneider didn't do enough to help the team gain wins, for the team and for Wilson, personally. This purportedly led the Seattle-based team to trade Wilson to the Denver Broncos. Interestingly, the report also noted Wilson wanted to replace Carroll with Sean Payton, who ended up being Wilson's coach anyway in Denver.

After this report came out, Wilson fought back on Twitter, writing, "I love Pete and he was a father figure to me and John believed in me and drafted me as well. I never wanted them fired. All any of us wanted was to win. I'll always have respect for them and love for Seattle." Wilson's attorney also refuted the claims by The Athletic.

According to Sports Illustrated, it's normal and expected for owner and coach relations to switch up at a popular player's request (or just because). "Basically: This is one of the most cutthroat businesses in the world, and almost everyone is willing to get someone else fired to save their job, their legacy, their creature comforts or some combination of the three," Conor Orr wrote. Basically, there isn't trust between franchise components, and that's the case with a lot of major leagues; it's all very political.

This isn't the first back-and-forth rumor about a strained work environment between Russell Wilson and his NFL coach. Back in 2021, CBS Sports reported on rumors that Wilson wasn't happy with the Seattle Seahawks and had his agents listing places he wanted to be traded to if it came to that. Wilson then said that this was actually "blown out of proportion" and there wasn't a request to be traded. In a show of camaraderie, Wilson stopped Carroll during a press conference and put his arm around his coach, saying they were "still friends."

Then, after Wilson was traded to the Broncos and Carroll stayed in Seattle, the Seahawks' new quarterback, Geno Smith, started getting better stats. In a press conference at the end of the 2022 season, Carroll seemed to take shots at Wilson's former work. "If you notice, Geno's going off the wristband, and that's a big help," the coach said. "It's smoothed things out, sped things up, cleaned things up. And that's part of it, too. We never did that before. There was resistance to that, so we didn't do that before." When Wilson was asked about this, he said that he won a lot of games without a wristband. "I didn't know winning or losing mattered if you wore a wristband or not," the Broncos quarterback said. Wherever they stand, there definitely seems to be no love lost between Wilson and Carroll.