One NFL owner admits he still regrets passing on Russell Wilson during the 2012 NFL Draft

It’s been 10 years since Russell Wilson fell all the way down to the third round in the 2012 NFL Draft, and even though a decade has now gone by, one NFL owner still has major regrets about the fact that his team passed on Wilson after eyeing him in the weeks leading up to the draft. 

That owner is Philadelphia’s Jeffrey Lurie, and he recently admitted that missing out on Wilson is something he’ll “always regret.’

“[Wilson] is a player we didn’t get, and I’ll always regret it,” Lurie said at the NFL’s annual league meeting last week, via DelawareOnline.com. “It was someone I really wish we had drafted in the second round and didn’t wait. But we really didn’t think that anyone would jump us and take Russell, so that was that.”

When teams start talking about star players they missed out on in drafts of the past, there can sometimes be some revisionist history involved, but that definitely isn’t the case here. In the lead up to the 2012 NFL Draft, the Eagles had been eyeing Wilson, and since they had two second-round picks that year (46th and 59th), they thought they would be able to get him. However, once the second-round of the draft rolled around, the Eagles felt like they needed to beef up their defense, so they selected Mychal Kendricks and Vinny Curry with their two picks. 

One reason the Eagles did that is because they thought Wilson would still be available when they went on the clock in the third round with the 88th overall pick. Unfortunately for Philly, Wilson wasn’t unavailable because the Seahawks snuck in and took him with the 75th overall pick.