Moore: Russell Wilson getting MVP love is great, but Seahawks better off if he doesn’t win
Sep 24, 2020, 12:19 PM
(Getty)
We wake up this morning to see that Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson is now the favorite to win the NFL MVP award, ahead of both Super Bowl winner Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson, last year’s MVP.
Moore: Seahawks have NFC’s best case for No. 1 ranking
I think we all fully understand why Wilson is the favorite. He has thrown nine touchdown passes and has completed 82 percent of his passes, the best rate in NFL history after two games.
There’s another great reason to think Wilson will win the award because it appears that the Seahawks are in fact – ugh, gag me – letting Russ cook, pleasing all of the cooking people who think they know more about coaching football than actual football coaches.
If they let him cook all season and let him fling it around more often earlier in games than he used to, well, Wilson could have crazy crooked numbers that warrant winning MVP awards.
Speaking of crazy, the craziest thing about this award isn’t that he hasn’t won one during his Hall of Fame-bound career, it’s that he hasn’t even gotten a single vote along the way. So now it’s pretty cool to see that he’s being noticed nationally after years of being overlooked, thought of as a game manager or too short or incapable of posting big passing numbers on a run-first team. Everyone who has watched every game in his career knew differently.
But just to be clear, I hope Mahomes or Jackson or someone else wins the MVP award. Let Wilson finish second or third, and if it’s controversial, if 12s think he got jobbed, so be it. History tells us that would be a better outcome for the team.
Get this – in this entire century, there has not been a team that has won a Super Bowl with a player who was NFL MVP. You have to go back to 1999, when Kurt Warner was MVP with the St. Louis Rams, to find a double dip with a player being the MVP and his team winning the Super Bowl.
In 54 years of Super Bowls, only eight players have walked away with MVP and Lombardi trophies. That’s a batting average of .150.
Last year, I remember Bob Stelton and Dave Wyman saying it’s a coincidence, that there’s basically nothing to it – Dave probably called it a fun fact.
I don’t agree. There’s something to it if it’s been 21 years since it happened. Why turn your nose up at history? A trend is your friend.
On the surface, you’d think that having the best player in the league would increase your chances of winning the Super Bowl, but that hasn’t been the case. Is it because many of those players typically make so much money that it prevents teams from plugging holes elsewhere? You could maybe say that about Wilson this year. If he were making $3.5 million instead of $35 million, the Seahawks could have made a bold move to solve their pass-rushing issues by bringing in a high-priced free agent.
Whatever the reasons, why buck history? Just let history be. Let Mahomes win the award and beat his Chiefs in the Super Bowl. Let Jackson win it and watch the Ravens flame out in the playoffs again. Let Wilson lose the award and listen to everyone squawk about it while his team goes on to win the Super Bowl.
Report: Former All-Pro DT Damon ‘Snacks’ Harrison to visit Seahawks