Column: Russell Wilson and NC State; It's complicated

Originally, this column was going to be a once-and-for-all rehash of Russell Wilson’s departure from NC State and subsequent transfer to Wisconsin, which just passed its five-year anniversary in April but was thrust back into the news with Wilson’s commencement speech to graduates at Wisconsin over the weekend.

That column was approaching 1,500 words (without getting into some important details) before a different thought began to emerge: Why is this speech bothering NC State fans so much?

Without question — and it’s been well documented already — Wilson exaggerated some details, embellished facts and omitted important nuggets to fit his narrative. A lot of analysis has focused on the baseball story where he got just about the entire tale wrong with the exception of hitting the game-winner against UC-Irvine.

Here’s another memory Wilson had that, at least partially, conflicted with reality: He talked of how former NCSU coach Tom O’Brien told him that he was out of the quarterback competition during the 2008 preseason camp and was moving to safety.

Wilson a few days later went back into O’Brien’s office and brazenly told him that he was destined to be one of the great quarterbacks of all time, and three days later O’Brien named him the starter.

There were five quarterbacks competing for the job that year: Wilson, Mike Glennon, Daniel Evans, Harrison Beck and Justin Burke. The truth is that the latter two received a clear picture early on that, at a minimum, they lagged behind the other three. Burke announced his transfer to Louisville well before camp was over. Beck lasted only one more season before moving on.

In the last scrimmage held before naming a starter, the program allowed selected guests to watch what was otherwise a closed-to-the-public (and media) event. One eyewitness reported that afternoon when the scrimmage was over to The Wolfpacker that Wilson exclusively took all the snaps with the first-team offense.

But what good storyteller does not do what Wilson did? The best ones would say, “Don’t let the facts get in the way of a good tale.”

The bigger-picture items actually did have some truth in them. Wilson implied that he was, frustratingly, not getting any playing time in baseball. He certainly embellished the degree of his lack of at-bats, but the truth is that he was also only a part-time player in the Wolfpack uniform throughout his career on the diamond.

He mocked a seemingly harsh O’Brien using a Southern drawl (despite the fact O’Brien is from Cincinnati, Ohio, and does not have such an accent), claiming that the coach dismissively tried to get Wilson to give up on his unrealistic NFL dreams.

Truth is O’Brien has admitted that, despite what he personally thought, he did not think NFL scouts viewed Wilson as a pro quarterback. O’Brien was also right. If Wilson was a sure-fire NFL quarterback, he could have gone pro that year and saved us from all of the drama, but he was not. Even after a year at Wisconsin, he was a mid-third round draft pick for Seattle, not far ahead of where Jacoby Brissett was recently picked by New England.

In other words, NFL scouts did have doubts about Wilson as a quarterback. Seattle intended for him to be the backup to high-dollar free agent acquisition Matt Flynn as a rookie. They were pleasantly proven wrong, as were a lot of coaches, scouts and analysts.

And it is likely O’Brien shared those views with Wilson. Knowing O’Brien, who is not exactly Mr. Sensitivity, he probably even delivered it in rather blunt fashion.

After all, this is the same O’Brien who once told a jovial Pack locker room after a thrilling come-from-behind win over Pittsburgh in 2009 that they were not a good football team. (State subsequently went on a four-game losing streak, so they must have taken O'Brien's postgame remarks to heart.)

So why did Wilson’s speech anger many in Wolfpack Nation so much? It could have been just one straw too much for them.

Watching Wilson wow the nation for Wisconsin was painful around Raleigh. He was touted as if he was some no-name before arriving in Madison when in actuality he was the first freshman first-team All-ACC quarterback in league history.

The NC State athletic department, with O’Brien’s blessing, even launched a Heisman campaign for Wilson his redshirt junior season after four games during which he completed 59.9 percent of his passes for 1,112 yards and 11 touchdowns with only one pick, helping NCSU to an impressive 4-0 start that included road wins at Central Florida (which won 10 games and beat Georgia in a bowl that year) and Georgia Tech, the defending ACC champion.

Seeing him seemingly almost favor the Badgers in the years since, whether true or not, hurts more. Wilson spent most of four years in Raleigh compared to probably about six months in Madison. The truth is NC State probably had (a lot) more to do with Wilson being who he is than Wisconsin.

One example: Dana Bible. Bible was his offensive coordinator and position coach at NC State. Wilson is on a list that includes Erik Kramer, Tim Hasselbeck, Brian St. Pierre, Quinton Porter, Matt Ryan and Mike Glennon that had the tutelage of Bible before embarking on NFL careers. That was all in a little over two-decades span.

It is very likely Bible had more to do with Wilson being an NFL quarterback than anyone, including those at Wisconsin.

Another example: NC State was the only school besides Duke to offer him a football scholarship out of high school — and, at least when he picked NCSU originally, Duke wanted him for football only. The Pack gave him the added option of playing baseball.

Hearing him tell his story this past weekend though makes many in Red and White just plain mad because it is tough enough to have to share Wilson. Whether intentional or just as a storyteller trying to make a larger point, he came across as putting down NC State in front of the Wisconsin audience.

Watching him leave was hard enough. Catching glimpses that he favors Wisconsin added to the disheartening nature of what happened. Listening to his tales in that commencement address apparently proved too much for some.

Although it is clear he has no love lost for O’Brien — and he probably enjoyed having an opportunity to rub his success in the coach’s face — knowing Wilson, he probably did not purposely intend for his speech to come across as it did to many around Raleigh. Baseball coach Elliott Avent reported that Wilson, unsolicited, texted him to make sure there were no hard feelings.

It would have been nice however for Wilson (and to that matter, his supporters who defend Wilson as if he was 100 percent faultless in the messy parting) to take some accountability as well. Acknowledge for instance that O’Brien was in a tough spot. He did what coaches get paid millions of dollars to do: made a hard decision. Whether he made the right call is certainly debatable, and whether he handled it well is also fair to discuss.

But Wilson chose to play baseball in the spring of 2011 (he even walked on football’s Senior Day at the end of the 2010 campaign). That has as much to do with why he never played a snap again at NC State as anything. A simple admittance to that in his speech probably would have saved a lot of headaches.

Or Wilson could have gone a different route to make the same point. Why not discuss how he was overlooked in the NFL Draft, for instance, including by the very same team paying him $20-plus million annually to now be its quarterback?

At a minimum, he could have possibly shared some of the many things NC State provided other than giving him the chance to head off to Wisconsin.

But it’s also time for NC State and its fans to fully accept that the best they are going to get is sharing Wilson — as painful, perhaps unfair and even maddening as that may be.

In the quarterback's defense, Wilson has gone out of his way to insist and show that he maintains a large place in his heart for NCSU.

He still brings his football camps to Raleigh every year. He has been to a pair of former players’ reunions. He came back to have his jersey number honored. And probably out of awareness to the confusion and disappointment from his speech emanating from Raleigh, he reiterated his love of NCSU on Twitter.

That is better than nothing.