Victor Cruz and Rob Ninkovich explain how Russell Wilson has led the Seahawks and why he is in the MVP conversation behind Lamar Jackson. (1:40)

I'D LIKE HIM to say he harbors a secret fetish for vandalism. Instead, Russell Wilson says he loves graffiti for the only reason Russell Wilson could like graffiti: It's sometimes pretty to look at.

This line of inquiry begins shortly after Wilson walks into the large meeting room at the Seahawks' practice facility a few miles east of downtown Seattle. On top of the podium sits a pair of specially designed neon cleats for the league's "My Cause My Cleats" initiative. Wilson designed the shoes with Jeff Jacobson, a Seattle-based graffiti artist known as Weirdo. They are emblazoned with familiar Wilsonian slogans in street mural style: Why not you. Dream big. Anything is possible.

"I love graffiti, ironically. You guys probably wouldn't know that about me," Wilson says, standing some few feet behind an aw-shucks deference he occasionally likes to deploy.

"What do you like about graffiti?" I ask.

"Just how it looks, how people think," he says. Then he keeps going, quickly guarding against any notion that he might enjoy something naughty. "Sometimes, obviously, it's people trying to mess up a location or whatever."

I want to interrupt him and yell that beauty and disfigurement aren't necessarily contradictory prerogatives! What about the recontextualization of public spaces?! What about the vandalism?!

I ask, knowing the answer, "Have you ever graffitied?"

"No," he says, laughing lightly. "I'm not a good painter. That's why I admire from a distance."

Wilson's "My Cause, My Cleats" featured familiar Wilsonian slogans in street mural style: Why not you. Dream big. Anything is possible. John Cordes/Icon Sportswire

Admittedly, it might seem I'm making more of this two-minute interaction than I should. But bear with me.

Russell Wilson is having a historic season. He seems to break a different record every game. In Week 12, he became the first quarterback to start his career with eight straight winning seasons. In Week 13, he joined Peyton Manning as the only quarterbacks to start their careers with eight straight 3,000-plus-yard and 20-plus-touchdown seasons. In Week 15, he became the winningest quarterback over his first eight seasons in league history and the quarterback with the most multiple-touchdown and no-pick games over his first eight seasons.

Oh, and he's never missed a game. Oh, and in April he became the highest-paid player in football.

And yet ... he's not quite placed in the exalted company of this era's other star quarterbacks. Part of the reason for that is the team he walked into as a rookie in 2012 -- a squad filled with names like Marshawn Lynch, Richard Sherman, Earl Thomas, Kam Chancellor and Michael Bennett, players who would become some of the most dominant personalities of the decade.

And part of it is the graffiti thing. That's why I've come to Seattle, to see for myself what it's like to share a locker room with Saint Russ, to hear what his team mates have to say about him and the culture of capital O Optimism around the Seahawks -- and to grapple with my own skepticism. I keep looking at Wilson's relentless good-think and right-speech, the do-gooderism, and can't suppress the suspicion that it's phony.

It's the alarming sensation of watching someone hold a smile so long its starts to look manic. The feeling, in short, that one is confronted by a cornball.

IN EARLY DECEMBER, Seattle plays the Vikings in a Week 13 game that is paradigmatic Seahawks 2019: Everything that can happen will happen -- and will probably work out. Five turnovers. A bizarre sideline interception by Tre Flowers that comes out of, not off of, the hands of Stefon Diggs. A fake-punt fourth-down conversion; a pick-six for Vikings safety Anthony Harris that's a result of Wilson trying to bat down his own deflected pass; a 60-yard bomb to David Moore answered later in the game by the Vikings' own 58-yard touchdown to Laquon Treadwell.

Seattle wins 37-30, the ninth of its incredible 10 one-score wins this season. After the game, though, the result seems less interesting than any of the three subjects generating most of the online chatter: the viral Russell Wilson as Baby Yoda meme created by Seahawks Twitter personality @Cablethanos; the delightful New Edition dance by Moore and fellow receivers Tyler Lockett, DK Metcalf and Jaron Brown; and Wilson being miked up.

Positive reinforcement is one thing, but these sound bites sound nearly cultish.

"Great confidence! Great belief!" "Why not!" "Clear heart! Clear mind! Clear eyes!" "Unwavering language! Unwavering belief!"

It rings too precise, too practiced. It is exactly why people find Russell Wilson so hard to believe. And so I spend the next couple of days asking teammates and coaches if this is how Russell really talks.

First, I ask a group of offensive linemen gathered around the locker of center Joey Hunt. "He says that stuff every day; he's straight positivity," offensive tackle George Fant says.

"The stuff he said during the miked-up is stuff he be saying," says Germain Ifedi, another offensive tackle. "People who thought it wasn't genuine, that's crazy. He's the same dude every day, consistent as hell."

I call Cliff Avril, a stalwart of those Seahawks defenses that dominated the first half of the decade when Wilson was a young quarterback.

"I've known him for seven years -- it's hard to fake the funk for seven years," Avril says. "It's hard to put on a show for seven years. So yes, how you see him on TV and how you see him on the field -- he really lives that way, and he really is that way."

No, Wilson's teammates and coaches say, he doesn't do temper tantrums. No, he doesn't maintain standards through harsh criticism or yelling or cursing.

Positive affirmation and self-expression: two key tenets of coach Pete Carroll's philosophy, the oft-lauded and scrutinized "culture" around the Seahawks. Joe Nicholson/USA TODAY Sports

This is a key tenet of coach Pete Carroll's philosophy, the oft-lauded and scrutinized "culture" around the Seahawks. (The once mandatory yoga has receded, as has the parade of gurus, motivators and TED talkers.) The emphases remain positive affirmation and self-expression.

"Coach Carroll created an environment for everybody to be themselves," middle linebacker Bobby Wagner says. "So whoever you are, try to be the best version of that. If you're a loud guy and talk trash [Sherman], then you be that. If you're a quiet guy that hits a lot of people very hard [Chancellor], then you do that. If you're a guy from Texas and you wear your emotion on your sleeve [Thomas], then you do that."

Carroll, having spent years proselytizing for his particular vision (what linebacker K.J. Wright describes as "the good news"), now has a triumvirate of veterans -- Wilson, Wagner and Wright, who were all key starters in the back-to-back Super Bowl runs of 2014 and 2015 -- to whom he can entrust it.

Wagner embodies the Seahawks' holistic ethos more than almost anyone. In a span of three weeks in December, the league's leading tackler is named one of Forbes' 30 under 30 for negotiating his own contract extension (he's the highest-paid middle linebacker in the NFL) and for his interest in venture capital, and then named a finalist for the NFL's Walter Payton Man of the Year Award.

He is also a locker room butterfly who exerts a stoic and vaguely parental authority over this young team, gliding from one clutch of players to the next, adding to the laughter here, the common sense there, smoothing out all the rough edges.

On a recent Thursday, tight end Luke Willson, by far the most entertaining player in the Seahawks' locker room -- tall and crowned with a white bucket hat, all Summer of Love mustache and aspiring beach-bum locks (disheveled and yet expensively shampooed) -- shouts throughout the room from a megaphone (its provenance a mystery): "Don't trust [him]; he's a locker room rat."

"Congrats!" he yells at another reporter. "You're sober today." He's kidding, and this isn't unusual, so teammates not in his vicinity hardly pay attention, and the reporters and Seahawks staffers mostly smile and shake their heads.

Into these proceedings silently marches Wagner. He walks from the other side of the room directly to Willson, who hands him the megaphone with a playful wince and a "Sorry, Bobby."

Wagner takes the megaphone and, impassive, stows it away in a locker adjacent to Willson's. Without a word, playtime is over.

Bobby Wagner, the league's leading tackler, embodies the Seahawks' holistic ethos more than almost anyone. AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

A few minutes later, I spy Wagner next to Wright, who is holding court in front of his locker with a group of journalists and teammates arguing about the suspension of a San Francisco radio host who made controversial comments about Ravens sensation Lamar Jackson.

At one point, Wagner, who has throughout been playing the role of a mediator who hones and amends everyone's points in turn so as to achieve some common understanding, says to Wright, "You think when two people are talking someone has to be right or wrong, and I think two people can just have a conversation."

Wagner then turns to look down at me, poised in a catcher's squat just beyond the group of reporters and players, and extends one of his disproportionately large action-figure arms in explanation. "See, I'm the human interpreter."