Huard: Seahawks’ Russell Wilson won’t be considered top-tier QB until he wins MVP award
Aug 9, 2016, 2:48 PM | Updated: Aug 10, 2016, 12:01 pm
Seahawks QB Russell Wilson looks "fine" and "normal" following the bye week, according to Pete Carroll. (AP)
(AP)
In the eyes of NFL coaches and evaluators, the Seahawks’ Russell Wilson is still a “Tier 2” quarterback.
ESPN senior NFL writer Mike Sando released Wednesday his third-annual QB tier ranking column, where he speaks with dozens of coaches and scouts who place the NFL’s starting signal callers in any of five potential performance tiers. Wilson landed at No. 6, still outside of the first tier but a jump of two spots from 2015.
The list has New England’s Tom Brady and Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers tied for the top spot, with Pittsburgh’s Ben Roethlisberger rounding out the Tier 1 performers. Tier 2 consists of 12 QBs: Cam Newton, Drew Brees, Wilson, Andrew Luck, Philip Rivers, Eli Manning, Carson Palmer, Tony Romo, Joe Flacco, Matt Ryan, Matthew Stafford and Andy Dalton.
Here is how Sando describes the top three tiers:
Tier 1: Can carry his team each week. Team wins because of him.
Tier 2: Can carry team sometimes but not as consistently.
Tier 3: Legit starter but needs heavy run game/defense to win.
Here’s a snippet of the explanation for Wilson’s ranking:
“Wilson proved last season he could produce at a high level without running back Marshawn Lynch. Like Newton, Wilson will ascend into the top tier more universally if he puts together a strong season from start to finish. Wilson had a 25-2 TD-INT differential over the Seahawks’ final eight games last season. That was enough to convince some.
‘Watching how bad their offensive line was last year and watching him have to overcome it and consistently make plays with his feet and arm is what convinced me,’ a personnel director said. ‘Who are his weapons? Marshawn was beat up last year. Jimmy Graham got hurt. They have an average corps of wideouts with a competitive, gritty, tough slot receiver who he trusts. So it’s not like he has elite weapons, and that is what got me over the hump.’
… ‘He knows, ‘Hey, I can punt and I’m fine,'” another offensive coordinator said. “It is going to be that type of game, and it plays to his strengths. If he played on a bad football team and had to throw it to stay in games and shoot it out, some things would show up.’”
Sando told “Brock and Salk” last month that talent evaluators have very firmly entrenched in their mind what you have to do to be a great quarterback, which comes back to hurt him in these types of rankings.
Brock Huard said, on the surface, ranking Wilson outside of the top five is unfair. However, put in the context of being in front of “tremendous franchise quarterbacks” like Flacco and Romo diffused some of his anger.
“None of the people you just mentioned are really elite,” Mike Salk countered. “… If the reason he is behind Drew Brees is just the long-term respect factor for Brees, and recognizing what he’s done through his whole career, I can live with that.”
Huard said the rankings don’t properly explain the disrespect leveled at Wilson, a Super Bowl champion who has improved and taken on a bigger role in Seattle’s offense every season.
“When I read a paragraph that he still can’t carry a team, I don’t know what else he has to do,” Huard said. “He’s just got to win an MVP. Until he wins an MVP, he will not be a top five quarterback in this league when people vote on it.”
Seahawks defensive lineman Michael Bennett, who joined the show and spoke about a variety of topics, agreed with the top three quarterbacks in the rankings but said Wilson should be in front of Brees and that Palmer was also misplaced.
“Carson Palmer should be higher than Phillip Rivers and Drew Brees, too,” Bennett said. “That’s one thing I don’t like about quarterbacks – they always go historical, they don’t go as what happened recently. I think we should go by the best.”
