2020 Russell Wilson Fantasy Football Player Profile

As we gear up to the start of the NFL season, Football Absurdity is going to bring you a comprehensive breakdown of every notable player that will be available in fantasy football drafts. We only look at the past three seasons for a player. Russell Wilson passed for 30 touchdowns for the third-straight year and topped 4,000 yards passing for the first time since 2016. He has one of the best one-two punches in the league with Tyler Lockett and D.K. Metcalf. Will this be the year that the Seahawks finally unleash Russell Wilson?

Russell Wilson ADP and AAV:

Draft Price: QB5, 59 overall
Average Auction Value: $12

Russell Wilson Statistics:

(aDOT+ is the QB’s average depth of target compared to league average)

Russell Wilson Overview:

If you close your eyes and picture a Russell Wilson season—4,000ish yards, like 390 touchdowns, just a handful of picks and like 300 rushing yards and a few scores—that’s almost exactly what Russell Wilson did for fantasy owners last year. The only problem with that is that Lamar Jackson and Patrick Mahomes spent 2019 and 2018, respectively, powering up those numbers. Lamar was going for 4,000 passing yards and 1,000 rushing yards and Mahomes going for 5,000 and 200. That’s not to say that time has passed Russell Wilson by, but his skill set has become ubiquitous to the game and Mahomes/L-Jax took it to the next level.

Russell Wilson is still good. He had his best completion percentage ever last year! And with one of his highest yards per attempt! Wilson is just hampered by Brian Schottenheimer’s insane and asinine Rule of 53, which leads to too many rush attempts for Wilson to truly shine. Here’s the thing, though: despite the blowout season from Patrick Mahomes two years ago and the breakout last year from Lamar Jackson last year, guess who’s been the Steady Eddie with the third-most fantasy points over the last two seasons? That’s right, our good friend, Russell Wilson.

Russell Wilson Draft Strategy:

Russell Wilson Auction Value: $6
Draft Ranking: Find out for your league settings in a Beersheet! (coming late June)

If you absolutely have to spend a top-five round pick on a quarterback, you could do a whole lot worse than Russell Wilson. He’s currently QB5 off the board, going #57 overall. That’s two picks behind Kyler Murray, whose ADP is mostly based on hype, not a track record of production. Wilson, on the flip side, has been a top-12 QB in literally every season of his career and has been top-five in four of the last six seasons. And all this was without both Tyler Lockett and D.K. Metcalf wrecking shop on his behalf.

Wilson is as steady as it gets for an upper-middle-class quarterback, and there’s arguably an incredibly massive drop off between his tier (which includes QB6, Dak Prescott) and QB7, Josh Allen. He and Dak are your last shots at getting a top-flight quarterback, and once Prescott’s contract gets squared away, he’s leapfrogging Wilson. Once draft season rolls around and Prescott has his contract in place, Wilson will represent your last shot at an elite-though-not-Mahomes-and-L-Jax-S-Tier quarterback.

Best Case Scenario:

D.K. Metcalf and Tyler Lockett absolutely wreck shop as Brian Schottenheimer realizes the Rule of 53 is stupid. Wilson rushes for five touchdowns and 400 yards and returns as a top-three quarterback.

Worst Case Scenario:

We find out exactly why Pete Carroll’s been chewing all that gum for all these years: to create a sticky trap to ensnare Russell Wilson to keep him in his basement forever.

[Header Image Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Russell_Wilson,_Marshawn_Lynch_with_Lombardi_Trophy_(cropped).jpg, edited under CC BY 4.0]
[Statistics are sourced from pro-football-reference.com and airyards.com]