It’s unfortunate that the two most well-known Seattle Seahawks aside from Marshawn Lynch have endured long enough to see the team crumble beneath them.
Yes, it appears the Seahawks are now quite bad.
However, Bobby Wagner is still mostly good.
Even Wagner has had his part to play in the team’s demise this year, simply not moving as well as he did for eight years as a professional wrecking ball. And yet, he is on pace to break not one, but two all-time NFL records.
As if his place in the NFL’s hall of fame needed any more securing, he’s currently chasing one very sad and one very incredible record.
With 14 tackles against the Washington Football team, Wagner’s total this season is now 128 tackles.
That’s more than he achieved in 2013, 2014, or 2015.
It’s only been 10 games.
For those who really didn’t pay any attention in math class, that’s a 12.8 tackle per game average. With this being the inaugural 17-game season, plenty of volume records are up for grabs. However, 12.8 per game would give Bobby Wagner 160 tackles in the previous 16-game season.
That’s four more than the current record holder and Hall of Fame linebacker Ray Lewis.
If Wagner breaks 160 on the year, yay, I suppose, but big whoop. If he outpaces Ray Lewis, that’s another story. That’s a thing the nerds will notice, and is worth writing home about. It’s simply remarkable that his awareness and mental game is still strong enough to overcome the obvious on-film decline of certain physical attributes.
It also has come at terrific cost.
Bobby Wagner has played 100% of the significant number of defensive snaps put forth by Seattle this atrocious year. In fact the leading snap counts across the NFL is just the Seahawks secondary, playing five snaps per game more than second place. Ten snaps a game more than the league average.
This one is purely a volume record, not a good one, and is entirely Bobby Wagner’s to lose. Washington ran 84 plays on Monday, which was even ahead of Wagner’s 76 snap per game average up til then.
The NFL hasn’t been keeping track of snaps for too long, but the average across the league is between 1000-1100. Since PFF began tracking snap counts in 2006, the 1,204 snaps Malcolm Jenkins played in 2015 for the Philadelphia Eagles is the highest recorded total. After Monday, Wagner is on pace for 1,310 snaps.
He’s running away to open the new schedule format with the most time spent on the field in history, and this one I’m afraid of. At 31, with decline inevitable, I am afraid of the Seahawks simply quickening his drop-off during an entirely lost season.
They won’t sit him because he’s the captain of the defense, but man it would be nice to get the guy a break.