30 NFL players you won’t believe never won an award

8. Russell Wilson
Pro Football Hall of Fame: Still Active

For a long time, Russell Wilson was the catalyst for “best player to never receive an MVP vote.” He had plenty of seasons where he seemed like one of the top players in the league, but too often, he was the second-best player in a year where there was one clear best. He was driving the bus of the Seattle Seahawks resurgence. This was a franchise that’s always been kind of good or kind of bad, but they were never true contenders. That changed when the Seahawks selected Wilson in the third round out of NC State.

This is currently Wilson’s 13th season in the NFL. If we completely ignore those two disastrous seasons in Denver, he’s been an incredibly consistent quarterback. Even ignore his current season in Pittsburgh (as of this writing, he has a career high 111.9 QB rating), he has had a QB rating of at least 100 in seven seasons, including a league leading 110.1 in 2015. 

Even in his most impressive season, where he did things seemingly out of the norm, he felt like he couldn’t get all the way over the hump for the voters. Wilson had 31 touchdowns and just five interceptions in 2019. He did this while also driving the Seahawks to four fourth-quarter comebacks and five game-winning drives. Both of those were league leading stats. Another league leading stat was the 48 sacks he took, showing he was doing this without much help.

Despite the production, Wilson didn’t get an MVP vote. He finished second-team All-Pro, as Lamar Jackson broke on the scene to win the MVP and the first-team All-Pro. Wilson has always been behind the eight-ball when it comes to awards, and he’s just slightly behind the very best of this era. We still expect him to be a Hall of Famer, but this is the greatest QB era of all time. It takes an immaculate season to take home hardware.