Seahawks fantasy focus: Projecting Russell Wilson

Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson has been a solid fantasy quarterback since his rookie year. 2016 looks like the year he finally is the best fantasy QB in the league.

The Seattle Seahawks have restrained Russell Wilson’s fantasy value from the very beginning. They run the ball more than just about everyone in the league. They also operate at a deliberately slow pace which limits the number of possessions for Wilson and the offense. Only SF has been slower of the last few seasons.

Despite the team’s desire to run the football and avoid risks, they have slowly allowed Wilson to attempt more passes each season. There’s no reason to suspect that will change for 2016.

In fact, change in passes attempts has increased linearly, which makes for a very easy projection for his 2016 numbers.

The regression line suggests that Wilson’s pass attempts will end up at around 512 this season. I tend to think he’ll land under that slightly. At some point, Pete Carroll’s run-first philosophy is going to cause Wilson’s attempts to plateau. For the purpose of this projection, I’ll elected to use 500 pass attempts as a target for this season.

Of course, just having more attempts doesn’t mean he’ll score more fantasy points. That depends on what he does with those attempts. Again, there are some easy to tends from his previous seasons.

If you look at his yards per attempt, his touchdown percent, and his interception rate, Wilson has been fairly steady the last couple of seasons. Again that makes a projection easy.

500 attempts at the average of those rates leads to 4000 yards, 32 TD and 10 interceptions. Not too shabby. (And by “not too shabby,” I mean “really really good!”)

Those numbers also don’t include the impact that Wilson will make on the running game. With the exception of 2014 when the Seahawks lacked passing weapons, Wilson’s rushing stats have been surprisingly consistent. Even as the passing attack becomes stronger, he isn’t running less.

That leads to an easy projection of 100 carries, 550 yards and 4 touchdowns. That creates a nice bump to Wilson’s fantasy value.

Put those stats together, and it means that Wilson projects to get 411 points in NFL.com standard scoring leagues, according to the calculator at simulated football. 411 points would have been the highest point total of any QB last season.

Basically, this projection indicates that with a modest increase in pass attempts, Wilson will become the top fantasy QB in the NFL this season. That’s pretty damn impressive.

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Last season Wilson was the No. 3 fantasy QB in the NFL behind only Cam Newton and Tom Brady. As the team continues to loosen the reigns and let him throw the ball more, Wilson’s fantasy value will only increase.