For the better part of the last 10 years, Russell Wilson has been one of the NFL’s very best quarterbacks. His detractors have come out in droves lately.
The NFL offseason is as much a time for bulletin board material as anything else. Everyone is making their opinionated lists and rankings one last time or two before the season begins.
Lists aren’t uncommon. Disagreements about those lists are even more common.
What’s becoming far too common? Russell Wilson slander.
Wilson, for essentially the first time in his NFL career, missed games due to injury last year. People feel like they saw or have seen some decline in his game to the point that, in a recent post put together by Mike Sando of The Athletic, Wilson has been dropped from Tier 1 to Tier 2 at the QB position (according to 50 interviewed executives and coaches).
2022 Quarterback Tiers is live!
— Mike Sando (@SandoNFL) July 25, 2022
Josh Allen, Justin Herbert & Joe Burrow take their places among the elite
Russell Wilson with something to prove
Aaron Rodgers remains king
What to do with Deshaun Watson?https://t.co/5izN22bWrg
Although Sando’s QB Tiers post is behind The Athletic’s paywall, the top two tiers were revealed on Colin Cowherd’s show as they discussed why Matthew Stafford was included in Tier 2 after one of the best and most successful seasons of his NFL career to date.
.@SandoNFL tells @ColinCowherd why he put Matthew Stafford as a tier 2 QB... pic.twitter.com/P4p85jL3Dy
— Herd w/Colin Cowherd (@TheHerd) July 25, 2022
There’s no telling exactly who Sando is interviewing in this post, but he has covered the Seattle Seahawks for a really long time (since 1998) and it’s reasonable to assume that some of the people he interviewed are (or were) coaches/executives for Seattle.
Being ranked the 8th quarterback overall in the NFL is nothing to be ashamed of, to be certain. Being dropped from Tier 1 to Tier 2?
That’s a little over the top for a guy that was a legitimate MVP candidate just two years ago. Not only that…
https://twitter.com/NFLonCBS/status/1551657630891909120
Some of the things written about Wilson by the executives/coaches interviewed in this piece included concerns over whether he can play at his current weight (a clear shot at Russell Wilson’s thiccness) as well as Wilson being “high maintenance”.
What’s more, Wilson received some Tier 3 votes for the first time in the history of this particular post being made.
Everyone’s entitled to their opinions. Everyone’s got a different QB rankings list and that’s fine.
Wilson might be the 7th or 8th best QB in the NFL right now, but is he a Tier 2 QB? Is he no longer a QB that teams win because of?
I think he most certainly is. We have seen it time and time again, even last season.
Just to maybe validate the idea that some of these opinions are off base, one of the defensive coordinators interviewed in this piece had some very choice words for Lamar Jackson, who is constantly the subject of scrutiny and criticism of his game.
https://twitter.com/ESPNNFL/status/1551623651467853830
The scathing reviews of the anonymous source are always amusing, 100 percent of the time.
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Even if some are perceiving a decline in Wilson’s game over the last couple of seasons, that doesn’t mean anything now that he’s getting a fresh start in Denver.