Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson has been playing all year due to a sprained ankle and, thereafter, a sprained knee. And he clearly hasn’t been the same guy because of it.
So how bad was it? Bad enough that the team considered sitting him out — but not bad enough to force him off the field.
“[T]hey tried to talk to me about the idea of not playing,” Wilson said, via Sheil Kapadia of ESPN.com. “There was no chance. I was playing. There was no chance I wasn’t playing. That was kind of my thought process.”
As coach Pete Carroll explained it, the team believed that if he was taken out at all, he’d have to be out until he completely healed.
“Had we sat him down,” Carroll said, “we would have had to sit him down for about five weeks for him to recover from everything, had we said, ‘Let’s wait for him to feel good.’ We’re at that point right now. Five or six weeks or whatever that is.”
But giving the guy a week or two off to heal early in the season doesn’t mean he couldn’t have come back before he was 100 percent. No matter what Wilson or Carroll would say about the player’s current health, Wilson hasn’t looked like his usual self — presumably due to the lack of mobility arising from his multiple injuries. Even now, it would make sense to give him a game or two off in the hopes that he’ll be the guy he was last year (and previously) for the stretch run and the postseason.
As it stands, whatever gains he makes during the week are undermined by playing a full game of football. So whether it’s two steps forward and one step back or some other more complex formula, Wilson has yet to fully recover, probably because he has kept playing.
The problem is that the only alternative to Wilson is undrafted rookie Trevone Boykin. With no veteran quarterback other than Wilson on the roster, an impaired franchise quarterback is better than a healthy but far less accomplished and talented player.
So why not bring in Mike Vick for a couple of weeks and let Wilson focus fully on getting healthy? The reasons for not doing it don’t matter; the Seahawks have no plans to sit Wilson, and he has no plans to comply.
Barring new injuries or significant aggravation to his current ones.