Russell Wilson now has NFL's longest active start streak for quarterbacks

With the retirement of Philip Rivers, Russell Wilson now has the NFL's longest active start streak among quarterbacks

Philip Rivers announced his retirement after 17 NFL seasons on Wednesday, and with it his streak of 252 consecutive starts (including playoffs) ended too. The new active leader for consecutive starts at quarterback is Russell Wilson.

Wilson has not missed a game in nine NFL seasons. That’s 144 straight regular season starts, and 160 straight starts including the playoffs. Among all active players, only Ndamukong Suh (147) and Cameron Jordan (145) have started more consecutive regular season games than Wilson.

This side of Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, Brett Favre’s consecutive start streak is the most unbreakable record in sports. He got to 297 straight in the regular season, and 321 straight starts including playoffs. So Wilson is not quite halfway there as he heads toward his 10th season, and in 15 seasons as a starter Rivers got more than 3/4 of the way to Favre.

As Pro Football Talk’s Michael David Smith laid out, the NFL’s shift to 17-game seasons will make it easier for someone to catch Favre. Even still though, Wilson would need to start every game for nine more seasons (assuming 17 games for all nine starting next season, which seems likely) to tie Favre’s regular season streak. And that leaves out an extra 24 playoff starts (an average of 2.6 playoff games per year) over that span.