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Galina: While unquestionably elite, Russell Wilson has taken a unique path to get there

Patrick Mahomes makes sense to me. The plays he makes out of structure might not seem human, but when you drill down to the different aspects of his game, his play from the pocket is exactly what you’d expect from an elite NFL quarterback. It may look unusual, but he plays the game in structure like a veteran quarterback. He can read any route concept at any part of the field and throw the ball with timing and accuracy.

Russell Wilson does not make sense to me. Considering he is unquestionably an elite quarterback, you’d expect him to behave like all the other elite quarterbacks. He does not. Wilson exists on his own plane of reality. Nothing about his game should work on a consistent basis, and yet, here we are after Week 2 of the NFL season with another #Russ4MVP movement beginning to take shape.

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Many years ago, an article was written on shorter quarterbacks and how they process information. The article is lost in the deep crevices of the internet, but Wilson’s response was that he often doesn’t actually see his receivers running the routes. In turn, he makes a series of educated guesses based on the pre-snap and quick post-snap look of the defenses, and he trusts his receivers will be where he thinks they'll be. As it turns out, it’s a pretty good process.

In a post-Legion of Boom world where Wilson has had to take on a lot more responsibilities, his 92.7 passing grade ranks second in the NFL over the past two seasons plus first two weeks of this one. Only Drew Brees ranks higher.

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