The February Dynasty update can be a bit awkward for me because for the most part, it's just correcting where I'd guessed wrong on my early 2022 projections. To be clear, I don't put too much weight into those projections this early in the offseason, but they are a factor -- one I was estimating back in my January update. At quarterback, there was no bigger misstep in those estimations than Russell Wilson.
The easiest way to explain it was that I let Wilson's finger injury impact my opinion on his 2021 season. That has been corrected.
If you look at the 11 games Wilson played fully healthy, you'll see a quarterback who looks very much like the one we saw in 2019 and 2020. In both of those seasons, Wilson finished the year as QB6 on a per-game basis. In 2022 he was QB7 from Week 1-4 and QB7 from Week 12-18. The outlier over the past three seasons seems to quite clearly be when he tried to come back too early from the finger injury he suffered in Week 5.
Now I view Wilson as a low-end QB1 in both redraft and Dynasty. There's still some uncertainty regarding a potential trade this offseason, but Wilson has control over that situation and I find it unlikely he chooses a situation that is worse for his Fantasy value.
There were two other players who moved in this update that were unrelated to 2022 projections, and they went opposite directions.
Deshaun Watson is a player I've tried not to talk about too much in this space because of all of the uncertainty. But there has been enough smoke over the last month about a potential resolution to this saga that I'm feeling more confident he'll play somewhere, for at least part of the season, in 2022. I want to stress, that's just my feeling and I don't know anything more than you do about the situation at this time. But I feel comfortable putting him in that Trey Lance part of the rankings, where he could be on your bench or he could be a league-winner in 2022.
Aaron Rodgers, who is directly behind Watson, fell a little because I don't think I was accurately assessing the risk that 2022 (or even 2021) is his last season in the NFL. He'll be 38 when the next season starts, which means he should have only been on the roster of a contender anyway, but I don't think even a contender should feel "set" at quarterback if Rodgers is their only potential starter. Like Watson, we don't actually know very much...and it's that lack of knowledge that needs to be accounted for.
Here are my updated Dynasty quarterback rankings:
