Hello, welcome to PFF fantasy football podcast. I'm your host, Ian Harteds. And today we continue our fantasy final series with the look at Russell Wilson, Mr. Unlimited,

remember the hell was other weird nicknames are it's freaking rust one of the best quarterbacks in the national football league and one of my worst single worst early kind of writing career takes came from evaluating Russell Wilson.

And I was a little more you know as someone that grew up Bill Simmons favorite writer, I felt like I needed to try to make you know some absurd, you know, just comparison every article and I thought it was way to clever and funny and this and that. And the midst of just some atrocious early life writing for myself.

One of the things one of the guys I really attacked was Russell Wilson because he left a lot of things out there to be made fun of member of the you know him basically implying they had this magic water that helped you with his concussions we had the time where he throws four interceptions against the packers and the NFC title game throws the game running touchdown OT after freaking the one Packers tight and lets the onside kick bounce off his chest.

And people are trying to say like oh Russ you know made the big play when it counted and it's like I don't know maybe he could have played a little decent the entire game and not done that.

The whole thing for the first four years of Russ's career it was hard to always separate how great is he and how great is just the rest of the sea hawks team because literally 2012 2013 2014 and 2015 the sea hawks posted number one ranked scoring defense and look again I'm not even saying I was right at the time I was wrong at the time I was not you know.

It was a terrible take by me and I'm sitting here saying that and I've obviously come around on this a long time ago but it's even easier to see now when we can again zoom out on what Russ has accomplished from 2012 to 2020 since those that stretch we had a weird year in 2016 where Russ took a little step back 18th ranked scoring offense number three ranked scoring defense for the sea hawks since then though it's been sea hawks offense over their defense every single year overall Russ has only that one.

Time in 2016 not engineered a top 12 scoring offense last three years specifically he's gone six nine and eight while the defense have gone 11 22nd and 15th in scoring so.

Russell Wilson someone that you know a lot of people gave flat to this past all season when he said he considers himself a top five quarterback ever or at least that was you know a quote leaked out by his agent or whoever so no I'm not trying to say that but I'm not trying to say that but I'm not trying to say that.

But in terms of coming into the league I think Russell Wilson certainly holds that you know banner as just being a top five QB during that time and it's wild to me how his career kind of stacks up with Tom Brady a little bit because Russ he's only had one season just like Brady where he didn't get you didn't win 10 games I'm not counting Brady's you know 10 snap 2008 campaign or ever was so healthy seasons they both only had one year without plent without winning at least 10 games.

Brady's came in 2003 they wanted to one sorry came 2002 he still led the league with 28 passing touchdowns tells you about the times 28 passing touchdowns leading the league but Russ also in his one year where he didn't get 10 wins 2016 or she's been 2017 he led the league and passing touchdowns with 34 on the 97 Seahawks so again even the worst version of Wilson and Brady like the worst teams we've seen them produce we still have a lot of time.

We still had anyone's idea of one of the better quarterbacks in the league so the question now becomes like what should we expect going into 2021 because as I've you know spelled out for you guys over the past few years these are no longer the leezon of boom Seahawks that just dominate with defense and also happen to have a great offense and how they really need to try to win some shootouts because no they did not fix their defense in the second half of last year if you just look at it or kind of remember fondly

them run the ball a little bit better down the stretch yeah absolutely in the defense did play better but the defense played better for a very specific reason their final six quarterbacks they faced were doing haskins Carson once Jared golf C.J. Bethard sand Arnold and Colt freaking McCoy they were 28th and points became allowed before that stretch looking at what they've done this all season not much and you know how even Jamal Adams were now having issues getting him side and I know that he's not during James he's not this incredible coverage safety but

this is already a defense having enough problems generating a patch rush Adams did help solve a lot of them and now for having questions about him being with the team long term we're giving up a significant amount of the cap to enable him stay in there it's just not looking great on that side of the ball so the question again becomes can Russ look more like the guy that we saw in the first half of 2020 compared to the second half because as great as the defense playing better against these back quarterbacks was it was more so a tale of what we're going to do is we're going to do a little bit more of the same thing

that's what the next one was it was more so a tale of Russ and weeks one through 10 last year he was averaging 28.5 fantasy points for game season that was weeks one through 10 that was only a point off Kylo Murray's pace in that same span where Kylo was on pace to have the most fantasy points ever the best season ever has been Lamar Jackson with 27 points seven fantasy points for game in 2019 I know we can you know take these small splits here and there and unlike Kylo rusted and have some injury that like really for the game

that really forced him to play the game definitely last year just realize like we don't have too many quarterbacks in the league that we can look at in the past couple of years and say oh here's a two months stretch of gains where they were putting up some of the biggest numbers we've ever seen from the position we can say that

Russ again as recently as 2020 overall in weeks one through nine Russ had a 92.5 pf passing grade average 8.6 yards per attempt in at 9.1 big time throw rate percentage weeks 10 through 17 73.6 pf passing grade 5.4 big time throw rate 6.4 yards per attempt as I do a lot on these podcasts I will reference one of my employees

Seth Galinas excellent analysis on just some of the real life problems that made it issue for us over here in fancy land and the big issue was Russ is just magnificent ability to make the most of these unstable plays the deep balls the off script plays outside the pocket

it fell off I mean he completed 11 of 37 of his past is done at least 20 yards down field during his final nine games compared to 18 of 38 and weeks one through nine I mean that's almost 18% drop off people in terms of what we were seeing him completion wise and then also outside the pocket 78.4 passing grade on plays outside the pocket over the first half of the season just 66.0 grade in the second half of the year

and then the living on these unstable plays and once you know you got to play the Rams three times and brand stale just says hey we're going to take away your deep ball take whatever else you want underneath this offense just wasn't built to do that I mean D came that calf spelled out better than pretty much anyone could direct

from meccaf we've been running deep plays ever we've been running deep past ever since Pete got their play action run the ball run the ball run the ball run the ball go deep teams just said we're just not going to let you all go deep so hey

Russell Wilson was awesome last year the kite through 40 touchdowns 4200 yards you had 500 rushing yards to I mean this was the overall fancy QB 5 QB 7 and fantasy points for game like yeah he got a lot of it done the first half

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