NFL Open Thread: Astros Elimination Day Edition
By Let us first celebrate the best sports news of the weekend:
The mathematical playoff elimination happened in the most Guardians way possible — that is, a Homer Simpson GWRBI:
[image or embed]— Rodger Sherman (@rodger.bsky.social) Sep 27, 2025 at 7:04 PM
To the NFL, Barnwell has a good column revisiting the major trades of 2022 and 2023. With Russell Wilson possibly having started his last NFL game, I do think it’s worth noting that it will be seen in retrospect as an obvious blunder at the time, I agree that this is not really right:
I certainly liked this trade for the Broncos, who were adding a quarterback who was still playing at a high level. Wilson’s play had slipped a bit earlier in 2021 because of a finger injury, but over his final six starts in Seattle, he had posted a 103.7 passer rating and ranked eighth in QBR. The Seahawks were entering QB purgatory after choosing coach Pete Carroll over Wilson, and I didn’t like where that was likely to end up.
What happened: The Seahawks moved on at the perfect time. Wilson was markedly worse from the moment he stepped onto the field in the Denver, and while he didn’t get any help when the Broncos hired Nathaniel Hackett as their coach, the Wilson trade turned out to be one of the worst decisions of the past decade, with the Broncos giving up significant draft capital and paying Wilson nearly $123 million for two years of below-average play.
On top of that, the Seahawks landed several building blocks for their post-Wilson retooling. Cross has settled in as an above-average left tackle for a team that badly needed a solution to replace Duane Brown. The real impact of the deal has come on defense, where Witherspoon has been an All-Pro-caliber player at his best, and Mafe and Hall combined for 14 sacks and 32 knockdowns last season. All three are on rookie deals, which has allowed the Seahawks to commit money elsewhere on their roster.
Has it been perfect? No. The three players involved in the deal didn’t add much for Seattle, and the decision to prioritize Lock as part of the return didn’t deliver. The Seahawks eventually re-signed Geno Smith, who won the job in camp and was surprisingly solid in his three years as the starter before giving way to free agent addition Sam Darnold. But Seattle has gone 30-24 over three-plus seasons since the Wilson deal without winning a playoff game. There’s still some reality to the idea that making a deal like this without having a QB replacement in place can leave a team in the quarterback middle class, which is a very difficult place from which to operate.
But yeah, obviously, the Seahawks comprehensively won this trade.
To what extent the Seahawks saw something that wasn’t evident in the stats and to what extent they got lucky we’ll never know, and possibly Wilson’s game wouldn’t have collapsed to the same extent had he started his time in Denver with an NFL-caliber head coach, but at any rate it worked out extremely well for them.