The Storylines of Last Season That Will Define Next Season | The MMQB NFL Podcast

Should Russell Wilson try his luck with another team? Does the Packers’ success mean Rodgers will return? The coaching diversity crisis, and more.

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As the 2021 NFL season and Super Bowl LVI become but a faint memory in our collective consciousness, Conor and Gary take one last trip through the biggest developments of the season past and spin them forward to project how they’ll affect football in 2022.

For a second straight year, a veteran quarterback found his way to a new home and immediately won the Super Bowl—was Russell Wilson paying attention? Does the Packers’ success in 2021 all but guarantee Aaron Rodgers is coming back for (at least) one more run? With the Rams punting their draft capital in order to bring in proven veterans, will other teams consider taking a similar route? And will the NFL, always too late to react on these matters, find a proper way to handle its coaching diversity crisis?

Plus, why the new approach to defending superstar quarterbacks will make edge rushers as valuable as ever. And—did you hear?—running the ball is cool again!

Have a comment, critique or question for a future mailbag? Email themmqb@gmail.com or tweet at @GGramling_SI or @ConorOrr.

The following is an automatically generated transcript from The MMQB NFL Podcast. Listen to the full episode on podcast players everywhere or on SI.com.

Gary Gramling: Hello and welcome to The MMQB Monday Morning NFL Podcast, I'm Gary Gramling.

Conor Orr: And I'm Conor Orr.

Gary Gramling: And Conor, this is officially our first offseason show of the 2022 offseason. And we're going to try and understand the future by looking at the immediate past if that makes sense. It's kind of like a bad sort of off-brand back to the future type of approach we're taking. And we're going to see how it goes.

Conor Orr: Well, if you don't study history, you're doomed to repeat it. Unless you're the Bengals, which you just do the same thing for so many years, and then all of a sudden you make the Super Bowl.

Gary Gramling: The lesson is either change everything or change nothing... and then get Joe Burrow at some point.

Conor Orr: And get Joe Burrow yeah, that's the big one.

Gary Gramling: All right, we're gonna look at six storylines from the 2021 season and spin them forward to 2022 here. See how they are going to affect what happens over the next couple of months. And we're starting with the most obvious one. We've talked about this a ton and quite frankly, we're going to continue to talk about this quite a bit over the next couple of seasons. We had Tom Brady go to the Bucs and win the Super Bowl in his first season in Tampa. The Rams go out and get Matthew Stafford, they win the Super Bowl in his first season in LA. If you are Russell Wilson right now, and you are maybe a little bit on the fence, you're loyal to the Seahawks organization, but also you're kind of looking at this and being like, oh, I remember when we used to play in the Super Bowl, that was a lot of fun, that's when we had all those All-Pro guys on the defense and it worked out really well. Do you really want to stay around there in Seattle and go through what is at the very least a mini rebuild and a mini rebuild being done with not so many assets at this point? Or do you want to go out there and find your Bucs/Rams?

Conor Orr: I think that we all thought last year that Matt Stafford was kicking off something that was commonplace throughout the NFL. And I think what he did unwittingly was just kick off the idea that like, hey, someone might actually do this. Because who was the next move? It was Aaron Rogers, and then Aaron Rogers sort of made his push, and then he got concessions in return. And even now as we tape this podcast, the Packers just hired Tom Clements to replace Luke Getsy, it seems like he's still getting concessions for this. And so there's one of two ways you can play this. You could actually leave, which is difficult. Or you could use this to really find out what your organization thinks about you, what they're willing to do for you and just improve the situation that you have. And so we have a bunch of these scenarios now where Aaron Rogers has a chance to go somewhere, Russell Wilson has a chance to go somewhere, maybe Kyler Murray wants to go somewhere at some point, and Matt Stafford has made this possible. And he's also made it now quite glamorous, which is a very interesting sort of double specter there because with Brady, I think you have to put him in his own class. Like, I don't think there are any quarterbacks who saw what he did in Tampa and said, okay, no problem. But when Stafford did it, I think everyone was probably looking around being like, okay, I can make it work.

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