Russell Wilson refutes reports of divided Seahawks locker room

RENTON, Wash. – Russell Wilson has a declaration to make.

It has nothing to do with locker-room friction or any alleged feud with a certain, departed wide receiver.

“To be the starting quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks, come on!” Wilson said Thursday, almost scoffing at the thought that is a contentious – or controversial – position to be in.

“It doesn’t get any better.”

After the week he and his team just had, that’s saying something.

On his way out to practice at the Virginia Mason Athletic Center, Wilson was more expansive than expected while addressing a New York Daily News report from the previous day that there is a rift in Seattle’s locker room between a pro-Wilson and anti-Wilson camp and that Percy Harvin, whom Seattle traded to the New York Jets last Friday, was “an accelerant” to that divide.

“There’s no division in our locker room. There’s none at all,” Wilson said three days before Seattle (3-3) plays at Carolina (3-3-1). “If anything, I think we’ve continued to build, continued to grow. I truly believe that.

“I believe the guys that we have in the locker room believe that we can go 1-0 (each week), that we still can be a championship team. Those are the guys that we have sitting in this room every day.”

As for Harvin, a native of Virginia Beach, Virginia, who at 26 is six months older than Wilson?

“Percy and I never had differences,” Wilson said.

Wilson, from Richmond, Virginia, said he and Seattle’s now-former $11 million receiver have more in common than some believe.

“He’s a guy that we had a lot of similarities, probably, if anything,” Wilson said. “We are both guys that want to compete at the highest level, want to win every single time we step on the field, want the ball in our hands to make the big play and everything. I’m not sure why the media wants to try to blow everything out of proportion. That’s just part of it, I guess. It’s part of it and you have to deal with it.

“Like I always tell you guys: Ignore the noise.

“Percy’s a Virginia guy. I wish nothing but the best for him.”

Wilson wasn’t done there. That’s because the questions that have been bouncing around the country all week weren’t finished, either. The quarterback who last weekend in the 28-26 loss at St. Louis became the first NFL player with 300 yards passing and 100 yards rushing in a game sees the environment in which he prepares each week as the opposite of toxic.

“Our locker room is great,” Wilson said. “We have guys that are very positive, guys that really want to work and really want to win. That’s what we need. We need that, for sure. And we have that. We are relying on that, the positive mentality of the guys that we have in the room.”

Some of this is what happens to Super Bowl champions. They get more national attention. Put another way: Who was dissecting the psychology of Seattle’s locker room at this time last year? How many outside the Pacific Northwest even noticed there was an NFL locker room in Seattle at this time last year?

Wilson agrees with that.

“Especially when you’ve won a Super Bowl, especially when things have gone really well, I think a big part of it is also to be able to block a lot of the noise,” Wilson said. “I don’t watch ESPN. I don’t read y’all’s articles – no offense. I just stay away from it all.

“I think that’s a major part of it for me, because I have complete confidence in who I am. I have complete confidence in the person I am striving to be every day.”

Wilson said he has gained confidence in the Seahawks’ offense after it gained 463 yards last weekend at St. Louis. It was Seattle’s most yardage since last Nov. 10 at Atlanta.

“I believe we had 12 explosive plays against the Rams. Those are things that we can do. We have those types of players,” Wilson said.