Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson will miss a game for the first time in his career on Sunday, ending a streak of 149 consecutive regular season games, and 165 consecutive games counting the playoffs, that Wilson has started. That was the longest active streak in the NFL.
Now the longest active streak belongs to Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady.
Brady has now started 80 consecutive regular season games, and 14 more in the postseason, for a total of 94 consecutive starts. No other quarterback in the NFL is currently on as long a streak.
If he starts six more games, Brady will have the third different 100-start streak of his career. He started 128 consecutive games (111 regular season, 17 playoffs) from his first start as Drew Bledsoe’s replacement in 2001 until his knee injury in Week One of 2008. And he started 126 consecutive games (112 regular season, 14 playoffs) from his return from that knee injury in 2009 until his Deflategate suspension for the first four games of the 2016 season. (No other quarterback has even two separate streaks of 100 consecutive starts, while Brady closes in on his third.)
Brett Favre owns the all-time record for consecutive starts, with 321 (297 regular season, 24 playoffs) from 1992 to 2010. To break Favre’s record, Brady would need to start 227 more games in a row. That would require him to play into his mid-50s. So that’s a record Brady won’t break. Probably.