Stop Forgetting How Good Russell Wilson Was

He may be a punchline now, but Wilson was one of the NFL’s best QBs in Seattle — and we shouldn’t let his late-career struggles erase that.

The strange, sudden evolution of Russ’ career.

‘Tis the season for Russell Wilson slander right now, after the former Super Bowl-winning quarterback was benched by the New York Giants last week in favor of rookie Jaxson Dart (who promptly won his debut start). On Thursday night’s Amazon Prime broadcast, HOF tight end Tony Gonzalez and Wilson’s ex-Seahawks teammate Richard Sherman both piled onto Wilson — questioning not just his skills in the present, but also his value in the past.

Gonzalez openly wondered if Wilson had “played himself out of the Hall of Fame,” while Sherman argued that Wilson was only ever truly successful when he had the Legion of Boom on the other side of the ball. “He was a winning football player in Seattle,” Sherman said. “Now you get to go on your own and prove ‘I’m this great quarterback, I’m this guy that’s gonna be dominant’… and it just hasn’t worked out that way.”

Putting aside however personal Sherman’s comments were about his former QB — the two were rumored to have a chilly relationship for years — it is remarkable how quickly Wilson’s reputation has fallen off a cliff since leaving Seattle after the 2021 season. A quarterback who won one Super Bowl, went to another, and was the fastest in NFL history to win 35+ games to begin his career is now at risk of being remembered more for cringe memes, horrible trades and a generally stunning mid-career decline from Pro Bowler to journeyman backup.

But is that really fair?

Certainly, the drop-off for Russ in recent seasons has been steep. Among QBs with at least 350 total EPA above replacement (pro-rating shorter seasons to 17-game schedules) through age 31, only Steve McNair — who retired after his age-34 season and had died by age 36 — produced less value from ages 32-36 than Wilson has:

In that sense, Wilson is a bit like Andruw Jones or David Wright — to borrow a few baseball examples of players whose promising Hall of Fame candidacies were detoured by mid-career fall-offs. The self-styled “Mr. Unlimited” has become quite limited recently, to the joy of everyone he’s rubbed the wrong way over the years. But letting Wilson’s late-career nosedive define him also risks historical revisionism about how genuinely good he was at his peak — and how important that was to the Seahawks’ success in the mid-2010s.