With Russell Wilson now officially a member of the Denver Broncos, his decade-long stint with the Seattle Seahawks has come to an end. This end had been foreshadowed with trade rumors each of the last two seasons, but that's enough about that. What are the moments Seahawks fans can look back on with fond memories and rose-tinted glasses?
Russell Wilson's best Seahawks moments
Super Bowl 48
There's truly only one place to begin, and it was at the end of his second season in the NFL. Sure, his rookie campaign in 2012 featured moments like the infamous Fail Mary in Week 3, a playoff win against a red-hot Robert Griffin III and Washington, among others, but the culmination of half a decade's worth of roster building by the Seahawks would come at the end of the 2013 season with a 43-8 trouncing of Wilson's future team in the Broncos.
Wilson finished 18-for-25 with 205 yards and two touchdown passes to Jermaine Kearse and Doug Baldwin, while the Legion of Boom did the rest of the work against a Peyton Manning-led offense that had just finished one of the greatest statistical seasons an offense has ever had in the NFL.
Enough cannot be said about the complementary football the Seahawks were playing during this early stage of Wilson's career, with both sides of the ball clicking on all cylinders. It seemed as though few teams could stop Seattle, with the Seahawks reaching at least the Divisional Round in each of Wilson's first six seasons.
2014 NFC Championship Game
A conference championship game for the ages against Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers, the Seahawks were actually stuffed on offense for the majority of the game. Through the first three quarters, the only points Wilson's offense mustered were off the back of a fake field goal touchdown pass from punter Jon Ryan. The Packers answered with a field goal in return, leaving the Seahawks down 19-7 with just over 19 minutes to play in the fourth quarter.
It would take them almost until the two-minute warning when a short touchdown run from Wilson brought them within five. After one of the most infamous onside kick recoveries of all time at the expense of Packers TE Brandon Bostick, Wilson was left with a short field and weapons all over. He engineered a four-play, 50-yard touchdown drive culminating in a 24-yard touchdown run from Marshawn Lynch, who strolled into the end zone with the ease of a retired grandfather on the beach.
That wasn't enough, though, as the Seahawks needed insurance, and a pass to Luke Willson from Russell Wilson gave them the extra two points they needed. Green Bay managed a field goal to tie with 14 seconds left, and the game headed to overtime.
That, however, would be the final time the Green Bay offense took the field. After gaining a net of 17 yards on the first four plays of the Seahawks' first drive in overtime, Russell Wilson found Doug Baldwin for a 35-yard gain that got the Seahawks down to the Packers' 35 yard line. If you like one 35-yard pass, how about another? With Jermaine Kearse running a deep go route down the middle of the field, Wilson perfectly placed the pass to send Seattle to a second consecutive Super Bowl:
Scramble and throw to Doug Baldwin @ Arizona, Week 10, 2017
A lot of Russell Wilson's mystique during his time with the Seahawks revolved around his almost mythologically magical abilities to sense and escape pressure. No play in Wilson's entire career better illustrates this than his 54-yard completion to Doug Baldwin late against the Arizona Cardinals in Week 10 of 2017.
Allow me to set the scene. It's second-and-21 from the Seahawks' 44-yard line. The Seahawks currently lead 15-10, and there's a little over 13 minutes to go in the fourth quarter. Wilson lines up in the shotgun with J.D. McKissic on Wilson's left. There's three receivers in Tyler Lockett, Paul Richardson and the aforementioned Baldwin to the left, with none to the right.
The play is a fake sweep to McKissic, with Lockett and Richardson sent on clear-out routes deep across the middle of the field to create an opening in the zone for Baldwin, who's on a block-and-release against Karlos Dansby. Dansby gets by a little too soon, and Wilson has to scramble. Tyrann Mathieu also comes for Wilson at this point, causing Wilson to abort the run at the 40-yard line. He runs backwards, and spins and loses both just long enough to heave one for Baldwin, who wins the jump ball against a stumbling Antoine Bethea and takes it down to the 2-yard line:
On the next play, Wilson finds Jimmy Graham for a touchdown to seal the win for Seattle. Pure magic.
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