Article about former Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson aged horribly

To be sure, and not to be unfair, there were halcyon days for Russell Wilson and the Seattle Seahawks. He was the starting quarterback for a team that made the Super Bowl in two of his first three seasons. Was he solely the reason those teams had a chance to win a championship? Definitely not, but he was a reason.

Seattle had a legendary defense and that is the biggest reason Seattle was so good in 2013 and 2014. Those were the seasons the team went to back-to-back Super Bowls. Had Wilson not been part of a play near the end of the second part of those Super Bowls, Seattle might have had two Super Bowl champions instead of just one. But the play wasn't really Wilson's fault.

The issue with him throwing an interception that for all intents ended Super Bowl XLIX and gave the victory to the dreaded New England Patriots was more the play-call than Wilson's throw. He did what he was told. That part is important.

Russell Wilson was an excellent quarterback for the Seattle Seahawks but not an all-time great

Ultimately, Wilson was the equivalent of a great jazz artist in a system meant for AC/DC. Most players needed to play the role given, directly in relation to the scheme. If the team found itself in a moment of needing a bit of magic then Wilson could do his best Coltrane and try to pull out a victory. It was when former head coach Pete Carroll and general manager John Schneider decided they should change, in essence, the scheme of the team to the Miles Davis Quintet from Australia's greatest heavy metal band ever that the issues happened.

Wilson was a great quarterback when he was young and healthy, but no quarterback wins without having a complete team around him. Patrick Mahomes is fantastic (or, in the case of an NFL.com article, the ninth-best QB in the league), but even he knows the Kansas City Chiefs need to excel defensively for Mahomes to win. Wilson appeared to think that as long as he was around his teams would win at a high level. They couldn't and now he is on his third team in four years.

But in 2019, when Wilson was good enough to lead the league in game-winning drives (5) and make his seventh Pro Bowl, NFL.com thought he was so unbelievably good that the website named him the 19th-best quarterback. Not in the league at the time, either, but of all-time. Was Wilson better than Jim Kelly and Fran Tarkenton? He was on the NFL website.

Now we all know that Wilson is definitely not the 19th-best quarterback in the history of the league. He likely is not even in the top 100. But he is the best quarterback in Seahawks history.

Also, while it is easy to put up our nose at the NFL.com article now, judging based on hindsight is never fair. 12th Man Rising (no one currently affiliated with the site was working with the site in 2012 but the article was still written) did not think much of Wilson in 2012 but he turned out to be really good. Just not an all-time best good as it relates to the whole of the NFL. Still, the Pittsburgh Steelers probably hope Wilson is terrific in 2024.

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