The Two Players Who Are Breaking the ‘No-Fun League’

Jackson, the Baltimore Ravens’ second-year quarterback, began the season with his credentials as a viable starter still in question, at least in some pockets of the NFL community. Thirteen games into the Ravens’ campaign, he’s been nothing less than a one-man revolution. In a win against the Buffalo Bills on Sunday, Jackson became just the second quarterback ever to rush for 1,000 yards; with 3 games left to play, he is 22 yards away from Michael Vick’s record. He has also put up a 79.8 mark in ESPN’s Total Quarterback Rating this year, the highest in the league. In the way of great players across sports, he reduces football to pick-your-poison simplicity. Teams load up against Jackson’s running ability, and he hands the ball to a back for an easy gain or chucks it over their heads for a big play downfield. They drop back, and he runs for 20 yards. Jackson’s 35 total touchdowns, 28 passing and 7 rushing, are more than 18 entire teams have put up this season.

The production is one thing, the style another. The run that gave Jackson his 1,000th rushing yard, Sunday afternoon, came on a broken sequence; the Bills’ defense had brought a blitz that had seemed to bottle everything up. But with a linebacker in his face, Jackson chopped his feet and spurted out to the right. The defender toppled, and Jackson got to the edge, leaned his long frame forward, and wrung seven yards from a play that should have gone backwards. “That’s God-given,” Jackson said after the game when a reporter asked about the move.

Where the buzz around Jackson comes in part from his being a relative newcomer to the league, Wilson is by now an entrenched figure. At 31, he has won one Super Bowl and lost another, been named to six Pro Bowl rosters, and reached the playoffs six times. But his greatest successes came when he played a complementary role: to the Seattle Seahawks’ notorious “Legion of Boom” defense of the mid-2010s and to the bruising running back Marshawn Lynch. Now, with Lynch and almost every key defensive figure having left in recent years, the team rises and falls with Wilson. Even after a blowout loss to the Los Angeles Rams Sunday night, and despite a minuscule average point differential that suggests a roughly .500 team, he has led Seattle to a 10–3 mark, many of those wins coming in the final moments by way of Wilson’s crunch-time dramatics.

Like Jackson’s, Wilson’s numbers sparkle. The Seahawks quarterback has thrown 26 touchdowns and run for three more against just five interceptions, all the more impressive considering that his passes often come on the run, with defensive linemen bearing down. Also like Jackson’s, Wilson’s numbers fail to get at the weekly experience of watching him. In an overtime win against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in November, Wilson set up the winning touchdown with a 29-yard throw down the sideline to a receiver, the rookie D.K. Metcalf, who couldn’t have been less open; Wilson lofted the ball to a point over the sideline, just outside of Metcalf’s shoulders, where only he could catch it. The next week, at the end of another overtime game against the league-best San Francisco 49ers, Wilson broke out of the pocket and ran 18 yards to push the Seahawks in range for the winning field goal. The now-routine performances—Wilson has a league-best five game-winning drives on the year—amount to an argument. Tactics get you so far, but talent wins out when it matters most.