Why did Russell Wilson get benched?
I'm going to explain this for everyone from a 5-year-old all the way up to a pro-football sophisticate.
A couple weeks after Seattle traded Russell Wilson to Denver, a certain left-handed former co-worker asked my opinion on what drove the trade.
This wasn’t exactly a personal request. I was one of 50 people that Brock Huard reached out to, and while it was a questionable decision to include me among the people whose opinion on football he respected, I was happy to respond. My answer is blue:
Brock said he giggled, but only after Googling Icarus. I went back and looked up that exchange on Wednesday after hearing that Wilson was being demoted in Denver. While I’m not going to deny that it feels good to be correct, I want to be very clear that I was wrong about how Wilson would play this season.
I thought Wilson was going to really struggle under Sean Payton. I thought he was going to try so hard to do exactly what Payton wanted when he wanted that he would rush himself into bad decisions instead of leaning into his strength, which has always been extending plays and throwing downfield. I saw a disaster.
Instead, Wilson has been all right if not actually good. Maybe not as great as he was in Seattle. Maybe not good enough to warrant everything Denver gave up to get him not to mention the five-year contract extension, but he has thrown 26 touchdown passes, tied for sixth-most in the NFL. He has the second-highest passer rating. And now he’s being replaced by Jarrett Stidham.
So what happened? Well, let’s start simple, and then we’ll get more complicated.
Explain it to me like I’m … 5 years old.
You remember the Little Engine That Could? Well, there was a little quarterback in Seattle who believed he could do anything, and after 10 years of hauling freight for a super happy silver-haired conductor in Seattle, the little quarterback got impatient because the train kept running out of steam in mid-January so the little quarterback insisted on getting a new conductor who would let him go faster on a trickier track waaaaaay up in the mountains. Except the little quarterback crashed. Repeatedly. And then he got another new conductor who was really mean and yelled at him a lot before parking him in the station. Meanwhile, the silver-haired conductor in Seattle found a new quarterback who hauls freight from September through December before petering out in mid-January.
Explain it to me like I’m … 10 years old.