Seattle Seahawks Fantasy Football 2021: What to Remember

Russell Wilson did the unthinkable and missed games this season. The Seattle Seahawks had an okay season going before Wilson suffered a “mallet finger” which the broadcast kept showing, despite nobody wanting to see his fingertip flopping around. Wilson then proceeded to do what he does best (be an over-the-top try hard) and came back too early, cementing the Seahawks’ fate as the worst team in a good division. What should we remember from this run as we look forward to 2022?

There’s been much ado about if Russell Wilson will even be a Seahawk in 2022. There’s also been much ado about his finger injury that cost him his first games missed due to injury of his career. I’ll spare you the injury, but he couldn’t straighten his finger on his throwing hand, and it takes about eight weeks to recover from if you don’t push it. Russ pushed it, and returned after missing three games. It went how you thought it would. In the five games prior to Wilson injuring his throwing finger, he averaged 240 passing yards, 2 touchdowns per game, and had just one pick. Once he returned (too early) he threw for 210 yards per game, with one touchdown and 0.66 picks per game from weeks ten through sixteen. Then, like he had some sort of injury that healed, he went back to throwing 3 touchdowns per game, with just one pick in three contests to close out the year.
Missed opportunities, thy name is D.K. Metcalf. There’s plenty to like about Metcalf. He’s young, ascending, built like a you-know-what brickhouse, and (at least for now) he’s tied to one of the best quarterbacks in the NFL. He’s also the most frustrating guy to have on your roster. And that’s literally quantifiable; D.K. Metcalf led the league in unrealized air yards, a metric that measures passing yards that did not result in completions. This makes him, despite him already being a top-ten wide receiver, a candidate to take a massive step forward in 2022.
I’m not even sure what to make of Tyler Lockett at this point. He basically just goes as Russell Wilson goes, and we have seen that Russ is one of the crazily inconsistent quarterbacks in the league (his regular-season quarterback rating for his career falls every month starting with 103.9 in September and ending with 99.6 in December). From 2018 – 2021, Tyler Lockett averages 76 yards per game in the first four weeks of the season, which drops to 68 yards per game in weeks 5 through 8, 65 yards from weeks 9 through 12, before dropping below 60 yards per game (58.8) in the remainder of the season. The proper move seems to be drafting Tyler Lockett and then trading him in late September.
He finally did it! Rashaad Penny came back from the dead to light the world on fire. Penny, who had missed 26 games from injury in his career, got his first six starts and four of them went about as well as you could have imagined. He finished with over 135 yards in four of those six games, showing why the Seahawks made him their first-round selection way back in 1872… actually, no, it says it was 2018, it just feels like we’ve been waiting since 1872 for the breakout. And it’s here! The only question, as always, with Penny: health. He missed seven games in 2021, despite the late-season breakout.
Chris Carson suffered a neck injury that might be career-threatening. But, here’s the thing: he was sneakily not that great before suffering the injury. In the first four games of the season, he played more than 45% of snaps just twice, and he averaged 15 touches for 65 yards per game. If he comes back healthy, I’m still not drafting him. Both he and Penny have injury concerns, but Penny regularly cracked off games that were double Carson’s average 2021 output.