Russell Wilson has had a very bad year, and this stat puts it into context.
The Seattle Seahawks continue to look fairly prescient for getting out of the Russell Wilson experience, and the Denver Broncos look foolish.
Optically, the current era in Denver has been interesting since it started. While the corny-ness of the “Let’s Ride” era could have been tolerated if it came with wins, that has not been the case.
The Broncos sit at 3-6 and are just a game better than the last-place Las Vegas Raiders who are last in the AFC West, a division that was supposed to be highly competitive.
Wilson’s decline is palpable this year, but Pro Football Focus’s grading system shows just how precipitous his fall has been over the last two seasons.
Stat showing Russell Wilson’s fall is depressing
Sam Monson put Wilson’s rough season into context:
Wilson dropped from the best QB to top-5 to 16th to 32nd. Assuming there were 39 qualifying quarterbacks each year, Wilson’s percentile in the league went like this:
- Top 3%
- Top 13%
- Top 41%
- Top 82%
Extremely rough.
Pro Football Focus’s grading has come under fire at times for putting logic behind itself when grading, but on the whole, it’s a fairly good system that codes qualitative performance into one specific, easy-to-understand number for each player.
It needs to be said that Wilson has been playing through some injuries, though it’s worth asking why the Broncos didn’t shut him down early on in the season to get him healed and back on track.
In the end, though, Wilson kind of wins either way. The Broncos are the ones who look really bad for buying on this declining asset. They gave him a contract extension before the season began that guaranteed him over $165 million, a financial circumstance that has forced the team to make tough choices with other talented players.