Seahawks All-Time Top 5 QBs: We Want the Ball
Russ, Jim Zorn, Matt Hasselbeck and others get a chance to cook in the final installment of the All-Time Top 5 QB series.
Welcome to the final installment of the All-Time Top 5 QB series! Although there will be an epilogue. So, welcome to the penultimate installment of the All-Time Top 5 QB series!
1. Russell Wilson
Here is a list of the 2012 Senior Bowl quarterbacks:
Kirk Cousins, Michigan State
Nick Foles, Arizona
Ryan Lindley, San Diego State
Kellen Moore, Boise State
Brandon Weeden, Oklahoma State
Russell Wilson, Wisconsin
Quite a group, right? Andrew Luck, Robert Griffin and Ryan Tannehill, the three top quarterback prospects that year, did not attend the Senior Bowl. The list above doesn’t need them. It’s got two Super Bowl winners, one of them the Super Bowl MVP; a Walter Payton Man of the Year (Russ); one of the defining semi-great quasi-personalities of our era (Kirk); a current head coach, a cautionary tale about age-development curves (Old Man Weeden) and … Jackson Browne’s slide guitarist? I have no memory of who Ryan Lindley was or is.
The 2012 Senior Bowl was the first one I covered in person, during a brief phase when Doug Farrar was finding some work for me at Yahoo! Sports. It rained hammers and nails on the first day of practice, and there were tornado warnings (literal sirens) echoing through downtown Mobile. There was no indoor practice facility back then. So …
The alternative was a workout in a ballroom with a cement floor. The North lined up for practice on the northern side of the room. The southern side of the room was littered with garbage, dirty tablecloths, and stacked chairs from an event the previous night. Workers cleaned up the mess on one side. Leslie Frazier had his team practice their field goal protection assignments on the other side.
Needless to say, there was not much to take away from the North practice from a scouting standpoint. Players walked through drills in shorts and T-shirts, with the occasional hoodie. T.J. Graham (WR, NC State) wore a visor to protect him from the indoor sun glare on a rainy morning, making him look like the world's fastest accounting clerk. When players wore yellow helmet pinnies over their otherwise bare heads to indicate that they were playing offense or defense, the pinnies looked like shower caps.
Players and coaches took the proceedings as seriously as possible: There was no obvious "messing around." Still, it was hard not to laugh. Kirk Cousins (QB, Michigan State) threw a corner route to a receiver in the slot. The receiver ran straight toward the water fountains, made a tight cut toward the men's room, and was able to catch the pass and stop his momentum before running into the exhibit storage room. Russell Wilson (QB, Wisconsin) ran a 7-on-7 two-minute drill on the far side of the ballroom, and he spiked the football to stop the imaginary clock. Seriously. He was lucky the ball didn't bounce straight up into his face.
Practice ended with kickoff drills. No chandeliers were threatened: Carson Wiggs (K, Purdue) approached the ball and pretended to kick. Doug Martin (RB, Boise State) held a football and pretended to catch it before jogging through a pretend return. We pretended to watch. Anyway, there are no chandeliers, just an industrial ceiling with exposed beams and pipes. Practice ended, and players were held up at the pedestrian walkway that crosses a major highway between the convention center and the hotel headquarters: High winds made the walkway extremely risky. A handful of players were halfway across when security guards temporarily halted pedestrian traffic, and when the wind gusted, they took off at full speed for the hotel.
Unfortunately, that dash cannot be used as their official 40 time. – Me, Yahoo! Sports, January 26, 2012.
Wilson made a name for himself at the 2012 Senior Bowl. I remember reporters pressing receiver Brian Quick for details about which quarterback stood out as a leader. Quick singled out Wilson. One reporter, clearly working on a feature on a specific individual, prompted Quick to say something positive about Moore. Quick muttered something noncommittal, then praised Wilson again.