Acme Packing Company
Throughout the 2025 NFL season, SB Nation’s Doug Farrar writes about the game’s Secret Superstars — those players whose performances might slip under the radar for whatever reasons. In this installment, we focus on Green Bay Packers running back Emanuel Wilson, who showed up like never before in Green Bay’s crucial win over the Minnesota Vikings last Sunday.
There is no doubt that Josh Jacobs is the Green Bay Packers’ premier running back. This season when healthy, Jacobs has run the ball 169 times for 648 yards, 11 touchdowns, 32 forced missed tackles, and seven runs of 15 or more yards. Jacobs has also caught 28 passes on 34 targets for 237 yards. It’s why the Packers’ offensive EPA per play drops from +0.217 when Jacobs is on the field, as opposed to -0.012 when he is not. Green Bay’s Success Rate goes from 51.2% to 41.8% when Jacobs isn’t there, the yards per play drop from 5.89 to 5.09, and the first down rate drops from 33.2% to 29.1%.
Here’s the problem — due to ankle, calf, and knee injuries, Jacobs has been off the field on 282 of the Packers’ 671 plays this season. Jacobs has run the ball more than 20 times in just three games in 2025, and this means that the Packers need other options in the backfield.
On Sunday, in Green Bay’s 23-6 win over the Minnesota Vikings that took the team’s record to 7-3-1 on the season, the alternate back announced his presence with extreme authority. Emanuel Wilson, the 2023 undrafted free agent out of Fort Valley State who was originally signed by the Denver Broncos on May 12, 2023, waived three days later, and signed by the Packers a week later, made the final 53 and never looked back.
Wilson did the most with his limited opportunities when he got them, rushing 26 times for 161 yards in 2023, 106 times for 508 yards in 2024, and 53 times for 206 yards in the first 11 weeks of the 2025 season.
Then, Jacobs was felled by a knee injury against the New York Giants in Week 11, and it was Wilson’s star turn. He ran the ball 11 times for 40 yards and a touchdown against Big Blue, and got his first NFL start against the Vikings. All Wilson did with that was to run the ball 28 times for 107 yards, two touchdowns, six forced missed tackles, and four runs of 10 or more yards. Wilson isn’t a breakaway home-run hitter, but when he needs to bust heads between the tackles… well, that’s kind of his game.
In the week leading up to his first NFL start, when he wasn’t quite sure whether that would be the case, Wilson talked about the process of going from the Southern Intercollegiate Athletic Conference to the NFL — a forbidding step, and head coach Matt LaFleur was not shy about the things Wilson needed to add to his arsenal of attributes.
“I mean, Coach...
