Most of Zach Whitman’s co-workers know that he is an avid Seahawks fan, so talking football with him on the job isn’t out of the ordinary. He noticed a difference in those discussions in January 2019, though, after Seattle suffered a season-ending playoff loss to Dallas. For the first time he could remember, Whitman was presented with commentary about how the Seahawks lost — and whose fault it was.

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“People that before would never have that level of interest or say in commenting on play calling were coming in and telling me, ‘Man, they really screwed it up,’” said Whitman, a local structural engineer.

This feeling grew legs and walked its way into Pete Carroll’s exit news conference, the first question of which addressed the criticism around first-year offensive coordinator Brian Schottenheimer and his insistence on running the ball. Carroll scoffed at the idea and took the blame as the mastermind behind Seattle’s run-first mindset, doubling down on the belief that even with a superstar quarterback in his prime, pounding the pigskin was the best way to do business.

“That’s us,” Carroll said. “That’s how we do it.”

That was the problem.

Fast forward to Week 3 of 2019, and not much had changed. Seattle was fresh off a Week 2 win over Pittsburgh, a key factor of which was Russell Wilson’s success throwing the ball on early downs despite playing one of the best defensive lines in the league. Yet here Seattle was, getting whipped by a Drew Brees-less New Orleans team, frantically trying to erase a 20-point deficit.

That’s when Whitman, whose Twitter handle is @zjwhitman, sent the first of a series of tweets that would lead to one of the strangest and perhaps most important movements in Seahawks history. In it, he wrote: “Let Russ cook.”

1. Build Russ a dome
2. Let Russ cook

— reinstate josh gordon (@zjwhitman) September 22, 2019

NBC has a production team that monitors social media ahead of its “Sunday Night Football” broadcasts. Before Seattle’s epic showdown with the New England Patriots in Week 2, that staff found a preseason storyline about letting Wilson “cook.” After Wilson lit up the Falcons using the most pass-heavy offense in the league in Week 1, the storyline resurfaced. NBC decided that if Wilson played well against New England, “Let Russ Cook” had to be part of the broadcast. Color analyst Cris Collinsworth felt the same way, incorporating it into his pregame chats with Wilson and Carroll.

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After Wilson threw his fourth touchdown pass of the night, a crossing pattern to rookie Freddie Swain, the NBC broadcast cut to commercial. On the way out, they showed a graphic featuring Wilson joyously stretching his arms, a football in his right palm. Across the screen in a bright font were the words “LET RUSS COOK.”

During the fourth quarter, Collinsworth kept driving the point home.

“This Patriots defense has allowed four passing touchdowns to wide receivers tonight,” he said. “They allowed four all of last year, to give you some idea of what happens when you let Russ cook. He is cooking again.”

The movement had officially gone mainstream.

“That was crazy. It was surreal,” said Whitman, who is a huge Collinsworth fan and received a bunch of texts when the graphic aired. “It’s so crazy to watch something go from your stupid tweet to the TV. It’s not in my greatest achievements by any means, but it’s one of the weirdest, most notable things that sticks with you. There’s not many times when you tweet something and it ends up on your TV.”

Whitman wasn’t the first person to tweet Let Russ Cook. One of the earliest references came from Chris Torres, a longtime Seahawks fan whose handle is @DJNphared, who expressed the sentiment in Week 2 of 2014 during Seattle’s loss at the Chargers. “You see how Russ has been the more efficient QB,” he wrote. “LET THAT BOY COOK.” Others have even tweeted the words directly at Carroll’s account. But Whitman’s tweet, and the two that followed over the next seven days that also included the words “Let Russ Cook,” provided the slogan for what would become a rallying cry for Seattle’s vocal, analytically inclined fan base.

It wasn’t until Week 5 of the 2019 season that Whitman’s words started to pick up steam. On Thursday night against the defending NFC champion Rams, Wilson officially entered the MVP conversation, throwing for 268 yards and four touchdowns on an efficient 17-of-23 passing with a quarterback rating of 151.8. As Wilson continued to set the league on fire, throwing 22 touchdowns against one interception through nine weeks, the notion that Wilson playing in a run-first offense was borderline criminal began to dominate the Seahawks-related conversations.

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“That’s when more feedback started and I started getting photoshops of him in the kitchen,” Whitman said, “with the chef’s hat and all that stuff.”

One year later, it’s nearly impossible to have a conversation about the Seahawks without hearing the phrase: a plea for Carroll to adopt an offensive strategy that prioritizes “establishing” Wilson earlier in games rather than the run game — a formula that has led to some frustrating losses and far too many Wilson-led close-call fourth-quarter comebacks. It’s not a suggestion for the Seahawks to run the NFL version of the air raid offense, or even abandon their run game entirely; it is an understanding that because Wilson is uber-efficient — and by far Seattle’s most talented offensive player — the offense should be built around maximizing his skill set.

Carroll has, for most of his career as Seahawks head coach, opted against using such a strategy — because his way has worked. Seattle had some of the best offenses in the league from 2012-14 because of a Beast Mode-led rushing attack. But in the post-Marshawn Lynch era of Seahawks football, Wilson has proved capable of leading a pass-heavy, high-powered offense.

The problem was, starting in 2018, Carroll began overcorrecting. The run game stunk in 2016 and ’17, so he fired the coaches in charge of it, hired Schottenheimer and offensive line coach Mike Solari and produced one of the most run-reliant offenses in modern NFL history. And while Seattle had an elite run game and returned to the playoffs that year, stubbornly sticking to that way of life in the wild-card loss to Dallas caused a significant faction of fans to feel the coach had lost his way.

“The game was the point when the numbers-friendly crowd really got fed up with the Seahawks and Pete Carroll’s philosophy and Brian Schottenheimer,” said Ben Baldwin, a contributor to The Athletic who has become one of the most prominent data-driven voices of Seahawks Twitter. “It all came to a head during that game when the Seahawks had Russell Wilson playing as good as we’ve seen Russell Wilson play and they kept the throttle on him until the very, very end and they lost a very winnable playoff game and that was the end of their season.

“That was the background of the frustration of the Let Russ Cook crowd.”

Following another postseason exit in January 2020, Baldwin fanned the flames of those frustrations after Seattle’s season-ending loss to the Packers with a column asking, “Is Pete Carroll the right coach for this version of the Seahawks?” Not only did it cause a major stir locally, but Baldwin’s column also was the subject of a segment on ESPN’s “High Noon” with Bomani Jones and Pablo Torre, bringing Wilson’s underuse into the national spotlight.

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Wilson did his part, too. He never explicitly said, “Let Russ Cook,” but this offseason he indirectly put pressure on the front office. Whether Wilson intended to or not, he was serving a numbers-friendly section of his fans who have long used analytics to argue that he’s one of the best quarterbacks in the league — and has been for a while — and is wildly underappreciated by most NFL pundits, particularly early in his career when compared with his 2012 draft classmates Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III. Seahawks Twitter is unique in that way, combining an openness to analytics with a general belief that the rest of the world isn’t paying enough attention to what’s going on in the Pacific Northwest.

Before Let Russ Cook ever became a slogan, there were Seattle-centric writers, bloggers and analysts campaigning for Wilson to be better appreciated. People like Danny Kelly, formerly of SB Nation’s Field Gulls and now at The Ringer; ESPN’s Mina Kimes, a Seahawks fan who has used football knowledge and data-based analysis to become one of the network’s most notable NFL voices; and Fox Sports’ Colin Cowherd, formerly of ESPN, who at seemingly every turn has used his platform to argue that Wilson is one of the league’s most underrated players and succeeds in spite of his coaching staff, not because of it.

Cowherd, a Washington native, has always considered Wilson to be undervalued, even when the team’s defense was the headliner. After Seattle parted with All-Pro lineman Max Unger in the Jimmy Graham trade, Cowherd was even more impressed with Wilson’s ability to thrive amid years of poor pass protection, circumstances that would destroy most NFL quarterbacks.

“I just thought early on, ‘This guy doesn’t get any love,’” Cowherd said, comparing Wilson to Hall of Famer Steve Young, whom Cowherd believes is the best QB who doesn’t get his historical due. “And I just talked about it a lot.”

In other words, the idea of letting Russ cook has long been a widely held belief, the creation of the tagline just gave everyone something succinct to latch onto.

“It sounds silly to say, but having a catchy, short thing that you can say really helps it spread,” Baldwin said, “and spread with an obvious message that the Seahawks have this amazing player and they should just let him go do what we’ve been seeing the last couple weeks.”

It wasn’t just a topic in Seattle. Prior to Seattle’s season opener at Atlanta, FS1’s “Speak for Yourself,” hosted by former athletes Emmanuel Acho, Marcellus Wiley and T.J. Houshmandzadeh, dedicated a segment to whether Seattle should Let Russ Cook. Cowherd did, too, arguing that Wilson is the only great QB in the league whose team wouldn’t “let him cook.”

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The slogan publicly made its way to Carroll when KIRO-AM radio’s John Clayton asked the coach his thoughts about it July 10. Carroll was predictably dismissive, saying that while the intent is to have Wilson control more of the game, “that doesn’t mean you throw the football all the time.”

Wilson was asked about it specifically Aug. 13. He replied that he’d like to treat every quarter like the fourth, as in operating with a sense of urgency. On Aug. 18, popular longtime Seattle KIRO-AM radio hosts Brock Huard and Mike Salk released a podcast lambasting Seahawks fans for their obsession with Let Russ Cook, arguing that the movement would lead to the demise of Carroll and Wilson’s relationship. Asked again about Let Russ Cook in the wake of Wilson’s comments Aug. 22, Carroll played coy and said we’ll have to wait and see.

Thanks in part to Pro Football Focus, Football Outsiders and the like, the social media era of sports analytics has generally been kind to Wilson, using advanced numbers to quantify his excellence. On the flip side, analytics has been unkind to Carroll, whose offensive philosophy and lack of competent pass-protecting offensive linemen have exposed him to waves of criticism.

“Everyone says they ignore the media, but they hear it,” said Cowherd, whose takes and reports about Wilson have reverberated through Seattle for years. “Pete’s getting criticized. (General manager) John Schneider’s getting criticized. I think Pete, rightfully so, this year, this offseason, really let him loose.”

No doubt, Let Russ Cook entered Seattle’s building this offseason. After the Seahawks unveiled the most pass-happy offense in the league Week 1, Schottenheimer told Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer: “I get asked that a ton. Literally, that’s what everyone talks about out here in Seattle — the whole Let Russ Cook thing.”

And that’s all anyone will continue to talk about. Wilson is playing like an MVP through two weeks of the season, with nine touchdown passes and just 11 incompletions, one that was a pick six that hit his receiver in the hands. Through two weeks, Seattle ranks second behind Arizona on our Mike Sando’s Cook Index, which measures how frequently teams are passing on early downs in the first 28 minutes of regulation. As a result, Seattle’s offense is off to one of the best starts in franchise history.

Let Russ Cook will continue to define Seattle’s season on and off the field. It’s in every other headline, every piece of offensive analysis on the Seahawks. It’s even on T-shirts. A phenomenon birthed from the frustrations of a local engineer, being endorsed by the cook himself.

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“I can definitely help us win, that’s for sure,” Wilson said Sept. 17. He has still never formally embraced the slogan, but he hasn’t shied away from either, saying recently that he’s in favor of slinging the rock short, midrange, deep — whatever it takes to win. “For us, that’s really part of the recipe.”

(Photo of Russell Wilson: Elaine Thompson / Associated Press)

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