Enemy Reaction Special Edition: The Seahawks draft Russell Wilson

On Friday, April 27th, 2012 at approximately 6:52 PM PT, the Seattle Seahawks selected Russell Wilson with the 75th overall pick in the NFL Draft. With Seattle having already signed Matt Flynn to a three-year, $20.5 million deal, Wilson outperformed the ex-Packers backup QB in preseason, earned the starting job, and the rest is history.

In this special offseason edition of Enemy Reaction, we’re going to bypass the usual mocking of pundits who relentlessly bagged on Seattle’s 2012 draft as it happened, and instead see how fans across a handful of other SB Nation NFL blogs reacted to Wilson becoming the face of the franchise.

Let’s actually start things off at home, with the overwhelmingly excited response from Field Gulls.

And now it’s time for the NFC West rivals. Kudos to a few of them for forecasting that Wilson would be the eventual starter.

San Francisco 49ers (Niners Nation)

St. Louis (now Los Angeles) Rams (Turf Show Times)

Arizona Cardinals (Revenge of the Birds)

Next up are the Green Bay Packers fans at Acme Packing Company, who were definitely taken by surprise given that Seattle poached Flynn away in free agency.

Now it’s off to Chicago and the folks at Windy City Gridiron, some of whom were annoyed at the amount of TV time Wilson was getting while he was waiting for his name to be called.

“Julius [Peppers] is going to smash his little body”

Yeah, how did that work out?

Next up are the Philadelphia Eagles (Bleeding Green Nation), who were ready to choose Wilson at pick #88 (they ended up with Nick Foles) before Seattle snapped him up. Could you imagine how Wilson would’ve fared under an Andy Reid offense, handing it off to LeSean McCoy and throwing it to DeSean Jackson and Jeremy Maclin?

Wilson’s first career regular season win came against the Dallas Cowboys, with a touchdown pass to Anthony McCoy breaking the game open in the third quarter. When Russell got drafted, reaction from Blogging the Boys was quite mixed.

You could argue that the biggest non-NFC West rival for the Seahawks in the Wilson era is the Carolina Panthers. Wilson’s first career road win came in the same state where he played his college football before transferring to Wisconsin. At least one fan at Cat Scratch Reader had the foresight not to care too much about Russ’ height.

Let’s move over to the AFC. The New England Patriots (Pats Pulpit) should know a thing or two about getting a franchise QB in the later rounds, so how did they view Wilson? Well I have to say that bostonsportsguy17 deserves some props for sticking up for him in a subthread about Russell either playing wide receiver or switching to baseball.

The Denver Broncos acquired Peyton Manning prior to the draft, then chose Brock Osweiler in the second round. One year later, Wilson would hoist the Lombardi Trophy at Denver’s expense by the beautiful scoreline of 43-8. Wilson would then engineer a flawless overtime drive in the 2014 rematch to deny Denver a dramatic comeback at CenturyLink Field. There was one Mile High Report commenter who was glad they didn’t take Wilson, and frankly I’m also glad they didn’t.

Lest we forget about the Cleveland Browns. Russell Wilson is currently 28 years old and entering his sixth year in the NFL. Cleveland used its second of two first-round picks on Brandon Weeden, who was already 28 years old. Some at Dawgs By Nature were a little perplexed by Pete Carroll and John Schneider’s vision for the franchise.

Finally, we finish off with a single comment from this Jaguars fan over at Big Cat Country. You may remember that the Jags already picked Blaine Gabbert in round one of the 2011 draft, so they figured he’d be the face of the franchise (spoiler: he wasn’t). Jacksonville selected punter Bryan Anger at pick #70.

Anger is now with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who one-upped them in the 2016 draft by trading up to draft placekicker Roberto Aguayo in round two.

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Well that was fun. I genuinely didn’t see any of these reactions until I pulled down the screenshots on Monday, so it was an enlightening experience to see the various opinions and predictions.

We’re going to do this again later in the week for Earl Thomas. That should be a good one. Until then, thanks for reading and go ‘Hawks!