Russ Puts In The Effort
I don’t think anything has surprised me as hard this year as the Russell Wilson downfall.
Sure, in retrospect, the signs were there. The way the Seahawks collapsed in the second half of the “Let Russ Cook” season. The way the offense looked awful last year, even before Russ jammed his finger. The subtle ways his former teammates would talk about him. It was all there, but we spent so many years with Russ doing cool Russ shit that it was easy to overlook or blame other things. After the trade, most people seemed to put the Seahawks as a #1st overall pick contender. They slammed Seattle for not firing Pete Carroll and getting rid of the hero. In the span of a month everything came crashing down.
Russ is terrible. His terrible subway sandwich commercial was such an embarrassment that it got pulled from the menu. His tryhard LETS RIDE has moved past cringy cornball to mocking meme. There is a guy on tiktok literally doing a weekly report on if Russ will throw more TDs this season than he has toilets in his house (currently, he has not). The Broncos have one of the best defenses in the entire league and the offense can’t score 18 points, which would have won them about 9 games. His former teammates have thrown shade all over social media. The team is so bad that Chiefs/Broncos just got flexed out of primetime. They flexed PATRICK MAHOMES out of primetime because his opponent is so unwatchable. Russ is playing so badly that his entire career, or at least the last few years, has started to be retroactively examined. Was he always this bad at situational football? Was he always this bad at making decisions? Was he pretty much exclusively just a guy who got by on scrambling outside the pocket into backyard football throws? Is he just dumb and now that he doesn’t have that special arm anymore, he’s cooked? Nathaniel Hackett (who still sucks) got most of the blame early this season. As it goes on, Russ is starting to show that he deserves as much, maybe even more, of that blame.
Carson Wentz, who hasn’t played since week 6 and is now benched, has more touchdowns (10) than Russ does (8). Seattle is in the playoff hunt, almost entirely based on their offensive play with Geno Smith at the helm. The Hawks also have the #2 overall pick now thanks to the trade. I can see how a new situation with a bad head coach and a ton of pressure could lead to struggle and decline. But this is week 12, and nothing has improved. I expect a bit of a house cleaning at the end of this season since Hackett was a hire from the previous regime, and his hiring was based entirely around coaxing Aaron Rodgers to Denver. They are stuck with Russ for now. Never count the guy out, but this could get even uglier before it gets better.
Broncos country, Russ died
10 out of 10 flawless
Indeed.
I do agree that Russ deserves blame for the state of the offense, though I believe that it should have been expected that he would struggle. Learning a new offense is hard. Building chemistry with a new group of receivers is also hard. It’s going to take time for Denver’s offense to start clicking like they were expected to before the season. That being said, a lot of Wilson’s bad habits are finally catching up with him. He was the quintessential example of why sacks should be considered a QB stat while he was in Seattle, and you’re now seeing what it’s like for him to try win games without relying on his athleticism to bail him out of poor decisions.
He ate a lot of very bad sacks with the Seahawks and that was when he was still extremely athletic. He’s older and slower now, so that hero ball stuff won’t fly anymore and the product looks absolutely terrible right now. I still think he can turn it around, but you’re right that things will certainly get worse before they start to get better.
They need to turn it around soon or Hackett will be gone and then Russ will be back to square one, unless they bring in someone from the same system he was on in Seattle I guess
Unless Denver wins out with above average production on offense, I cannot see Hackett returning next season. It’s very obvious that they hired him as a means to woo Aaron Rodgers away from Green Bay which didn’t pan out for them, so I doubt they feel compelled to hold onto him.
The fact that their offense has shown zero signs of improvement this late into the season is pretty telling. Brady and Stafford both had stretches where they looked just as atrocious in their debut seasons with new teams, but they at least showed flashes prior to that point and started to turn it around by this point in the season. Denver’s offense still looks just as hopeless as how they started the year and you could argue they actually look worse now. Considering how much they’ve invested in getting Wilson, I feel like they have to be really aggressive in finding the right coach for Russ.
I used to watch a lot of Seattle games and so much of Russ’s success was out of scrambling and keeping the play alive long enough for receivers to get open. Sometimes deep down field or open on crossing routes where they had plenty of field in front of them. And of course sometimes scrambling enough for long runs. Opposing teams had to game plan for that and it was always difficult to shut down. Maybe now we’re seeing age catch up to Russ where that no longer works.
Most of Russ’s success was from having a generational running back and a kickass defence.
Honestly, the Broncos being dog shit is the biggest surprise of the season for me. Russ kind of felt like he settled into a Matt Stafford-type position during the final few years in Seattle. He didn’t play extremely well all the time, but he was doing his best with a pretty depleted team that had used up most of its draft luck building the Legion of Boom. A lot of people thought he was still amongst the most valuable QBs at his position. As a part-time Seahawks fan, I was genuinely upset when he said he wanted out because he was easily the best QB in team history and came one yard shy of repeating as a Super Bowl champion.
Boy what a difference a few months makes. I’m convinced most of it is on Hackett, but who knows. As Kirk Cousins has risen from corny whiteboy to loveable corny whiteboy, Russ has turned into a generic sell-out shill. People can sniff insincerity a mile away. Unfortunately, much like JJ Watt, I think this is largely who Russ is on a personal and professional level. He’s never been good at throwing over the middle. He’s always been a gunslinger who would make as many mistakes as he did incredible plays. He’s always had the faith-driven charisma of a suburban dad fetching the paper on a summer morning. Everything’s just been amplified and it sucks. I would expect for things to get better next year, but who knows at this point.
JJ Watt got worse because of being on the IR in 4 of the past 6 seasons. And he isn’t doing bad, he’s just not as good as he once was. He went from Legendary to just above average.
Small note but the Hawks have the #4 pick right now according to Tankathon. The top five are
Houston
Chicago
Detroit (via the Rams)
Seattle (via the Broncos)
Carolina
https://www.tankathon.com/nfl
“Was he pretty much exclusively just a guy who got by on scrambling outside the pocket into backyard football throws? Is he just dumb and now that he doesn’t have that special arm anymore, he’s cooked?”
Holy shit, he’s Johnny Manziel with a better original landing spot and better marketing.
a fun troll for obnoxious SEC fans is to point out that Manziel torched their “NFL-level” defenses while making stuff up on the field drunk….
don’t forget the awful slo-mo entrance video HE HIMSELF posted in the midst of his suckage:
https://twitter.com/DangeRussWilson/status/1596894256504836096
God is saying “keep me outta this, dude…”
I read the board as “Dangereich” and was like KANYE NO!
I called Russ being cooked last February. Entirely not surprising.