PHOENIX -- Russell Wilson is a marketing executive's dream, the antidote to all that bad stuff you keep hearing about Roger Goodell's NFL. It is a shame the commissioner could not travel the country this season with the quarterback of the Seattle Seahawks by his side, using him as a human shield from every poisonous dart fired his way.
If inquiring minds wanted to ask about the Ray Rice videos, the Adrian Peterson case, the Mueller report, and whether the historical standings of Tom Brady and Bill Belichick have lost more than two pounds of air pressure over the past nine days, Goodell could have disarmed one and all with this same response:
Excuse me, but have you had the pleasure of meeting Russell Wilson?
He is the approachable Super Bowl champ who visits sick children every Tuesday, his only off day, and by all accounts he's no more likely to end up in a police report on Goodell's desk than Belichick is of buying Super Bowl tickets for Bill Nye the Science Guy. So there aren't many opportunities to say that the player who has won more regular-season games (36) in his first three years than any quarterback dead or alive is, you know, full of it.
Wilson was full of it at Super Bowl media day, even though he kept his cool while a credentialed puppeteer, of all things, demanded that he step down from his assigned podium and pose for pictures (Of course the quarterback obliged; he is Russell Wilson after all). It was when Wilson addressed his victory over Peyton Manning in last year's big game, and his potential victory over Tom Brady in this year's big game, that he sounded nothing like the raging competitor hidden within.
"To win the Super Bowl last year," Wilson said, "to go against a great quarterback in Peyton Manning, who I have so much respect for, plays the game the right way, does it better than anybody could probably ever do it, and then to face Tom Brady this year, [they're] two guys that I've looked up to since I was a little kid. It's a tremendous honor to be on the same field and to play two of the greatest guys, the greatest players to ever play the game.
"It's one of those things you'll never forget. It's history. I'm just grateful I get to be on the same field."
All wonderful, respectful things for an undersize, 26-year-old quarterback to say about a pair of towering legends, and who would expect anything less from Wilson. But anyone who knows him and his track record knows Wilson does not merely thank his lucky stars because he gets to be a prop on Manning's or Brady's stage. The Seattle quarterback didn't just prove it against Manning in the Meadowlands in Jersey; he proved it when talking to his aunt, April Woodard, a journalism professor at Hampton University and former Inside Edition reporter, in the days before Super Bowl XLVIII.
"I'm going to win this game," Wilson told her in a private conversation.
He's almost certainly going to say the same thing to a family member or friend about Brady and the New England Patriots, if he hasn't already.
"Russell has spent his entire life competing against the odds and defying those odds," Woodard said Tuesday by phone. "If he wasn't as competitive as he is, he wouldn't be successful. You can respect people and beat them at the same time."
A 5-foot-11 quarterback picked in the third round of the 2012 NFL draft, the Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III draft, Wilson didn't sweat the fact that Brandon Weeden and Brock Osweiler were selected ahead of him, or that Matt Flynn and his $10 million guarantee were near-mortal locks to claim the starting quarterback's job in Seattle. Wilson was earning a $390,000 wage when he forced Pete Carroll to effectively eat Flynn's contract and put him behind center.
As a reward, Wilson has won six of seven postseason games, including the absurd comeback victory over Green Bay that advanced the Seahawks to the desert for a shot at the league's first two-peat since Brady's back in the day. Wilson was positively dreadful for the vast majority of that NFC Championship Game. He threw four interceptions and restarted the talk-radio narrative that painted him as the beneficiary of a fierce defense and a punishing running back, Marshawn Lynch.
None of it mattered. After every wayward pass, Wilson imagined a heroic mulligan to come. "I'd turn back toward the huddle, close my eyes and think of a table in an empty room," he wrote on Derek Jeter's website, The Players' Tribune. "On that table was a big red RESET button, just like in the movies. I'd imagine pressing the button. Boom. I can honestly say that even when we were down three scores, my mind was never wavering. I believed we were going to win."
He threw the clinching touchdown pass in overtime to Jermaine Kearse, his target on those four interceptions, and then broke down and cried.
By beating Aaron Rodgers for a third time, Wilson raised his record against Super Bowl-winning quarterbacks -- including the two Mannings, Drew Brees and Brady -- to 10-0. He'll likely never put up the numbers posted by those veteran stars, or by Luck for that matter. In fact, a pattern could be developing with the two young guns, Luck and Wilson, that reminds of a bygone baseball rivalry between former friends.
Like Alex Rodriguez in Seattle and Texas, Luck is the bigger, stronger, more physically dynamic player (minus the PEDs, of course) who puts up crazy stats while being burdened by an inferior cast around him. Like his website boss, Jeter, in New York, Wilson is the intangibles guy who can't keep up with Luck on the long ball but who is a perfect fit inside a team-centric culture designed to win multiple titles.
He's got the genes for more rings, too. Wilson's late father, Harry B. Wilson, was an accomplished wide receiver at Dartmouth and the president of his class at the University of Virginia's law school. Wilson's 89-year-old grandfather, Dr. Harrison B. Wilson, was a star basketball player at Kentucky State, a wildly successful coach at Jackson State who defeated college teams featuring Earl Monroe and Willis Reed, and later the president of Norfolk State.
"I'll never forget the first time I saw Russell play [in high school]," Dr. Wilson told ESPN.com before last year's Super Bowl. "He made a throw from the middle of the field to the sideline, a bullet, and the receiver caught it and ran for a touchdown. The only quarterback I'd seen make that throw was Johnny Unitas."
While recovering from a near-fatal bout with a MRSA infection, Dr. Wilson watched from a Virginia nursing home as his grandson performed his miracle against Green Bay. The old man told his daughter, April, that he'd never seen anything like it in his life.
"And yet that game still brought out all the non-believers again," Woodard said. "You heard it on the radio, people saying, 'This is what we were worried about with Russell Wilson. The way he played most of this game shows that he's vulnerable.'"
Vulnerable? Maybe Wilson sounded a bit like that Tuesday when he all but held a Canton induction ceremony walk-through for Brady and Manning.
But when asked if his 10-0 record against the NFL's lords of the rings proves he elevates his game when matched against greatness, Wilson briefly opened a window on his competitive soul.
"I think you always want to rise to the occasion," he said. "I look forward to it. I don't shy away from it. I'm never afraid to excel."
Russell Wilson is never afraid to win, even when he feels honored to share the field with the towering legend on the other side.