Carolina Panthers: Defending Russell Wilson
The Carolina Panthers face a Super Bowl winning quarterback when Russell Wilson comes to town tomorrow.
The Carolina Panthers will be taking on the Seattle Seahawks tomorrow at 1:05 PM in Bank of America. The quarterback for the Seahawks will be one Russell Wilson, who has been playing pretty well in the latter half of the year. So what does the current Wilson look like and how do the Panthers stop him?
Wilson has been completing a good number of his passes. His worse outing was the game where Marshawn Lynch got hurt against the Cardinals on November 15, but since then Wilson has not sniffed below 60% completion with the exception of the Cold Bowl last week against Minnesota. He threw two interceptions in that stretch next to twenty-five touchdowns.
The best teams that Seattle faced in that stretch were Minnesota (twice), Pittsburgh, and Arizona. Just isolating those games does not break the consistency that Wilson has been producing with. He has not had to run much in game action to pull this off. The outlier is again the Viking playoff game which affected everybody.
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Combating Russell Wilson is usually a defense designed to keep a quarterback in the pocket to prevent him from ad-libbing. Losing that contain can give up a big play or two as the Panthers saw when Wilson ran for 53 yards earlier in the year. The Panthers are bringing more to the party this time as Charles Johnson joins the defensive end rotation dedicated to stopping Wilson from escaping first. Sacks are secondary here.
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The next thing to do is eliminate his options to throw. There is no true number one receiver, but I would imagine the Josh Norman will draw the Doug Baldwin assignment. The Seahawks will no doubt try to test Robert McClain or Cortland Finnegan when they are on the field. The other thing to look out for would be medium routes to the tight ends, safe things.
The other key to stopping Russell Wilson is not letting him have the football. Since interceptions are pretty rare for him that means grinding drives on offense which will put a premium on what the offensive line can do against the athletic Seattle front. The Panthers may not want to get into a game where first mistake loses with Wilson.
That means that an early lead is gold and trailing early is worse than it should be. Maybe the crowd can mess with the Seattle offensive call. We’ll find out tomorrow.