Dear Seattle Seahawks,

Pay Russell Wilson. Just do it. Please get it done.

I know. I get it. You guys don’t want to pay all that guaranteed money. Frankly, I don’t want you to either, but sometimes we have to do things that we don’t like doing. That’s exactly what my father said to me when I was about four years old, and he bent me over his knee behind our church when I was being unruly during Sunday service. Sometimes, we have to do the things that suck to do. Truly, we do.

And look, I totally get it that it sucks having to pay so much top dollar for a quarterback on a team that prefers to run the ball, and likes to spread the wealth around so much on its defense. I get that. I don’t want to see Jarran Reed and Frank Clark go bye bye, either. But here’s the thing that I see staring down at all of us; Russell Wilson is a really, really, really good quarterback in this league, and players like him are really, really, really, really hard to come by. So, pay him.

Be like Nike, and just do it. He’s earned it, and it is what the market demands for top quarterbacks. Like Starship Captain Jean Luc Picard would famously repeatedly say; make it so.

And, you know, I get one hundred percent what some are saying about teams that pay quarterbacks top dollar not making the playoffs, but I say, also look at it this way, too; there are plenty of teams out there that don’t pay jack squat all for their quarterback and their team doesn’t reach the playoffs either because their quarterback sucks, or he is a rookie and too wet between the ears, or both. Russell Wilson has been in the league seven years now and has see a lot of football as a seven year starter. This is the time when Russell Wilson is likely to go from being really, really, really good to be really, really, really great. So, pay the man.

I know. You’re looking out for the best interests of your team, and I appreciate that. That’s what I want you to do. I don’t want you to blow up your cap, either, but frankly, I trust you to draft and develop defensive linemen more than I do quarterbacks, and I’ll be frank, and just throw out the names Rick Mirer and Dan McGuire as a couple examples of why my trust wavers some in that department.

So, pay Russ. I give you my permission.

And, I want to say that I’ve given this a lot of thought, and I’ve gone back and forth plenty. At some point, a team has got to say “enough is enough” in regards to these ludicrous escalating costs of franchise QBs. I get that merit, and I support it. I just don’t want it to be your team that does it.

You see, over the past week, I’ve found myself entertaining moving on from Russ because of all that, and I found myself fantasizing about all the players you could draft if you traded him to the Giants or Raiders for a bunch of first round picks. I’ve even allowed myself get carried away with the idea that Seattle could bring in Jacoby Brissett from the Colts to start in Russell’s place and be just fine, and you can find that on this here blog site from a couple articles ago. I was legit selling the notion. Now, I’m kind of taking a step back off that a bit.

Hey, I get it, we all want a screaming deal. I want to pay peanuts for greatness, too. I want to pay $25 for a perfectly fine leaf blower at a garage sale. It’s human nature, or as my dad would say, it’s Dutch nature.

We all hope that the 1972 Plymouth Barracuda sitting behind our grand uncle’s barn just needs a little tune up and a new paint job and he’ll give it away to us if we offer $500 and trim his laurel hedge that hasn’t been touched since 1998. But we know the real deal, if we step far enough back to actually see the whole beast. That 340 8-cylinder engine under the rusted out hood will need a major overhaul just to get it running. It will also take forever to search for replacement bucket seats and once you find some, they will cost a fortune to get them shipped from North Dakota, and there is simply not enough disinfectant in the world to get the dead rat smell out of the back seat of that old ride. $500 and chronic back pain from that hedge is not worth that car sitting in the back of your own garage for the next twenty years before your own grand nephew is stupid enough to offer you a deal for it. So, just take a hard pass on dealing away Russ and bringing in Jacoby.

Pay Russell Wilson.

We know what we got with Russ. When the game is tight, he can keep us in it, and has the uncanny ability to make the ridiculous big play in the waning moments of a critical game. We have seen it happen too many times. Dude can be scary good in those moments.

And guess what? Defenses know how good he is, too. They got that knowledge in the back of their minds the whole game long. Each time they are loading up the box to stop the run, they know perfectly well that Russell is fully capable of torching them with a big play action pass. Russ + run game = defenses having to play honest.

How do you think they will play our run game with Jacoby Brissett, or Dwayne Haskins at quarterback? They won’t send eight, they will send nine or ten. Dwayne Haskins never had to deal with that kind of pressure his one season quarterbacking for Ohio State. Jacoby Brissett wasn’t horrible in his one year as a starter for the Colts, but he didn’t exactly torch up the league, either. If I’m a defensive coordinator, I’m not scared of those guys, but if I have to call a game against Russell Wilson? Yeah, I’m thinking about that one. I’m telling my guys “watch for this, watch for that.. when he does this do that, do this so he will do that, and don’t let him do that, or he will do this.” Yeah, my guys are feeling my nerves when it comes to Russ.

So, pay Russell Wilson. Meet his deadline. Get it wrapped up on April 15^th, and then focus on having an excellent draft the following week. Get another pass rusher, another pass catcher, and rest your minds that you don’t have to worry about quarterback.

Rest our minds, and pay Russell Wilson.

Unless, of course, he is asking for an insane baseball type of escalation clause in his contract on top of all the guarantees he wants, or what he really wants is to play elsewhere and the only way to get him to play in Seattle is to pay through your nose and blow up your salary cap, as Mike Florio is now reporting. Then, I say stick to your guns, and yeah, maybe even trade is *ss because if he’s going to play you like that, there ain’t no way you can sign him to that kind of deal and then have him look at the 52 other players on your roster and convince them that he is “all in.” They’re going to stare back at Russ and know that he’s all into himself, and thus your fish starts rotting at its head. We don’t want that.

But, you know, pay Russell Wilson, if you can.

Sincerely,

Curtis Eastwood, 12^th Man for Life.