Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson put on another show Sunday afternoon.
Wilson matched a career and season high by throwing five touchdown passes, three to Doug Baldwin, in a 35-6 victory over the injury-riddled Baltimore Ravens. Seattle has won six of its last seven games.
There are the analytics of quarterbacks like Wilson and the soulfulness of quarterbacks like Wilson. The analytics get you into the Hall of Fame; the soul gets you into two Super Bowls in your first three seasons of professional football.
First, the analytics.
Wilson has thrown 16 touchdown passes with no interceptions in his last four games. Sunday’s game was the 22nd time in Wilson’s career that he has thrown multiple touchdowns without an interception in a game, the most of any player in his first four seasons since 1970.
Those are the analytics. The soulfulness is that Wilson is once again finding ways to win games.
He is driven and motivated. We disagree on the source of the drive and motivation.
After New England lost its second consecutive game last week, I realized I had been focusing too much on what I was calling the Tom Brady revenge tour. After an offseason during which his name had been tarnished by an NFL investigation into deflated footballs, Brady and the Patriots began the season with a vengeance.
But who could possibly be more motivated than Seattle, Wilson and Seahawks coach Pete Carroll?
From the Patriots’ 1-yard line in last season’s Super Bowl, a touchdown would have secured Wilson’s second consecutive championship, silenced the critics and positioned Wilson among the game’s elite winners.
Instead, Carroll called the wrong play and Wilson threw an interception.
From that one bad throw through the Seahawks’ first six games this season, of which they lost four, Wilson heard familiar criticisms: He is too short, he can’t function from the pocket and he is a game manager at best.
In the last six weeks, Wilson has been hotter than any quarterback except Carolina’s Cam Newton and Arizona’s Carson Palmer.
During this past season’s World Series, a number of Kansas City Royals players said that what had sustained them, what had picked them up when they were down, what had grounded them when they became too full of themselves was the memory of being 90 feet away from a chance at a World Series championship in 2014.
Royals owner David Glass said not a day had gone by during the season when he had not thought about Game 7, which ended with the Royals’ tying run on third base against the San Francisco Giants.
Royals outfielder Lorenzo Cain said the loss had ruined his offseason, as he thought about that 90 feet every day, but he said he felt that in the long run, the defeat brought the team closer.
However, no Seahawks player or coach I spoke with Sunday felt that anything good or inspiring had come from their devastating Super Bowl loss.
“We’ve tried to move past it as much as we could,” said Richard Sherman, the Seattle cornerback, whose contorted face was broadcast after the interception.
There was no silver lining, nothing gained from it.
“It’s more of just remembering who we are,” Sherman said.
Carroll conceded that the way his team had lost threw the Seahawks off-kilter.
“It took us some time to make sure to leave that behind,” Carroll said. “We don’t need that to be motivated.”
He added: “We had to work our way through it, and it took us awhile and that’s the farthest thing from our talk, minds right now. It has nothing to do with nothing.”
Carroll said that the team was “just getting ready each week now from this point forward.”
I would argue that the first six weeks of the season were about regaining their balance.
Wilson said he did not believe in mission theology when it came to professional football.
“I don’t think you erase it completely,” Wilson said of the Super Bowl loss. “Every year’s a new year. We don’t have time to look back.”
Wilson said that the team had won a lot of games and “done a lot of special things” because the next week’s game had always been the focus.
Perhaps the perspectives of Glass and Cain are the difference between football and baseball. The difference between a long, meandering baseball season and a 16-game NFL season in which every play may be your last and every game is important. One minute Sunday, running back Thomas Rawls was carrying the weight of the Seattle offense, the next he was being carried off with a broken ankle.
Beyond that, baseball is a game of introspection and history, a game drenched in nostalgia.
Football is a game with no memory. It cannot have a memory; it must not have a memory. That’s the only way we can watch the brutality and still live with ourselves. That is why NFL football has become our national pastime: We do not like to look deeply at our past, either. Too troubling. Best to focus on the here and now — on tomorrow. Until tomorrow becomes part of the past.
Perhaps it’s better to have amnesia. For the Seahawks, at least, it works for now.
“We can’t look too far back,” Wilson said. “All we have is now.”
