The Seahawks can’t win until Russell Wilson gets his groove back

Russell Wilson’s spectacular play powered the Seahawks to the playoffs. He’s off his game now, and the Seahawks aren’t good enough to overcome it.

Let me preface this by saying I am not knocking Russell Wilson. Far from it. In fact, I’ll say that without him performing at the top of his game, the Seahawks are barely a playoff team. All you have to do is look at Seattle’s record over the past month to see that. In fact, we’ll look at the entire season to show just how closely the Hawk’s results mirror’s Wilson’s.

Look at the first half of the season. In those eight games, Russell Wilson eclipsed a passer rating of 110 six times. The Seahawks won all six of those games. In those six wins, DangeRuss averaged a passer rating of 130.1. This spectacular stretch earned him a lot of MVP talk, deservedly so. Despite this run of amazing performances, Seattle’s total margin of victory in those six games was just 32 points. More than half of those points came in the 17-point win over Arizona, and three of the wins were by less than a field goal.

Wilson kept his insane level of play going in Week Nine against the Buccaneers, but it still took overtime to pull out the win. He had a passer rating of 133.7 in the game. After that, the hammer dropped. Beginning with the Week Ten contest in San Francisco, Russell Wilson has only eclipsed a passer rating of 100 once in the past six games. It should come as no surprise that the Seahawks offense rolled on the Panthers as Number Three posted a passer rating of 137.7. The fact the badly depleted defense got scorched in the fourth quarter has nothing to do with the quarterback.

Seattle Seahawks

Over those past six games, Wilson’s passer rating has been a very pedestrian 91.2. If you drop his performance against Carolina, the average drops all the way to 81.9. To put that into context, the former rating is barely better than the Jaguars Gardner Minshew 89.8. The latter number drops Wilson all the way to the level of the Steelers Mason Rudolph. No one is calling Jacksonville or Pittsburgh to work a deal for those guys. Basically, those are the guys who’ve been calling the signals for the Seahawks the past six weeks.

Considering how poorly Wilson has played lately, I have to think something is wrong with him. Take a look at his game logs. He’s only had two stretches like this in his career. That is, six games with only one featuring a passer rating over 100. There’s one thing that gives me a bit of hope in these records. The Seahawks went 3-3 in both of those previous instances, the first in 2012 and the second in 2014. Seattle is 4-2 in this latest run of, say, less-than-stellar performance. It feels much worse because they’ve lost two of three, and looked completely lost in both of those games.

Again, I’m not criticizing Wilson. Is he fighting through an injury? I’d say the answer is yes. Whatever the problem is, Seattle’s record while he’s struggled points out just how important he is to the team’s success. The Seahawks have the lowest margin of victory of any 11-win team in the league. The average margin of victory is eight-tenths of one point. By all rights, Seattle should be 8-7. There’s one reason they’re headed back to the playoffs, and it’s named Russell Wilson. But if he can’t get back in his groove, we’ll see another quick playoff exit.