Watson, Wilson and Wanting Out
The 2021 offseason is about to get all kinds of weird
Let’s be honest for a moment. The 2020 NFL season was very weird, but also very not weird at the same time.
Sure, Brady and Gronk were Buccaneers, the 7–9 Washington Football Team made the playoffs and Josh Allen decided it was time to morph into a hyper-accurate quarterback.
These things were very weird.
But Brady and Gronk won a Super Bowl, the NFC East was a dumpster fire and Stefon Diggs was an elite wide receiver that raised the ceiling of his quarterback’s play.
These things were very not weird.
So yeah, 2020 was a weird but also normal year for the NFL. The 2021 offseason, however, is anything but normal.
Chaos Is a Ladder
Deshaun Watson and Russell Wilson are two of the best quarterbacks in the NFL, and there’s a good chance one or both of them are on different teams at the start of this season.
Quarterbacks this good don’t move teams. It just doesn’t happen, and it certainly doesn’t happen like this.
Sure, Drew Brees went from the Chargers to the Saints, but he wasn’t Drew Brees back then. Favre went to the Jets and the Vikings, sure, but that was old, un-retired Favre.
Wilson is 32, Watson just 25 — players with time and talent on their sides, playing for franchises that could be (and probably are) holding them back.
Their movement, or potential lack thereof, would represent a monumental shift in the balance of power between player and team. We’ve seen this shift in the NBA with James Harden forcing his way out of Houston, and with Dak Prescott winning a battle of wills in Dallas as well, the stage is set for NFL superstars to start wielding more power than the GMs that drafted them.
This is probably a good thing, and would go a long way to addressing the gross imbalance of power we see currently stacked in favour of the franchise.
But listen, I’m not here to get into seizing the means of (early-downs) production. I’m here for one thing: chaos.
Let’s Rebrand The NFL
Give me an NFL where elite players force trades and decide where they’re signing every two or three years. Give me all the helmet swap photoshops, all the fake Schefter bait tweets, all the videos of fans burning jerseys.
Give me Russell Wilson in Chicago, Deshaun Watson in Pittsburgh, Devante Adams teaming up with DeAndre Hopkins in Arizona — give me all of it.
Abolish the trade deadline. Give Pete Carroll unlimited challenges. Give a team a point if they kick through uprights on kickoff. Make taunting legal and stick it in the ProBowl as a mini-game. Give Week 17 playcalling duties to Madden e-sports champions.
Although to be honest, at the end of the day, I’d rather just see John Schneider sign Corey Linsley to protect Russ.
He just signed with the Chargers, you say?
Of course.
Burn it all down.
