Denver Broncos cornerback Chris Harris declared Sunday what quite a few Seattle Seahawks fans have been saying for some time, that Russell Wilson is simply better than Andrew Luck, no matter what evaluators thought about them heading into the 2012 NFL draft.
"He's the best quarterback we've played so far," Harris said of Wilson, two weeks after the Broncos faced Luck's Indianapolis Colts in Week 1. "I don't know why they keep saying Andrew Luck is better than him. He's not better than Russell Wilson."
This offseason I had 26 league insiders rank every starting quarterback in the NFL by assigning them into tiers, 1-5 (1 being the best, 5 the worst), and later I asked several players to perform the exercise. Harris' comments Sunday marked the first time I'd heard anyone in the NFL say they think Wilson is better than Luck.
That isn't meant to be a knock on Wilson -- after all, he tied for eighth in the rankings, to Luck's fifth -- but it does frame this discussion rather definitively: If given the choice, most (if not all) NFL decision-makers would take Luck over Wilson to start a franchise, and players have tended to agree -- until Harris weighed in on Sunday.
Why so much love for Luck? Let's take a look, including at least one area in which Wilson may have an advantage.