(WEB) The Hell Yes Hierarchy: Week 10 2025.

Week 10.

At this point, every single team has played at least half of their games. That’s quorum, based on the recall of obsolesced Simpsons character Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, for the amount of human remains one must produce at an inquest in order to claim the bounty of a victim wanted dead or alive. Necessarily, unless you’re Darth Maul, someone in possession of only 50% of themselves is either deceased, no longer with us, kaput, gone, etc., or has yet to come into being – an embryo, a nascent entity. Caught in the midsection of the NFL season, our perceptions tugged toward the past by the natural biases we’ve developed for different teams after seeing them play 9 or 10 games, our expectations directed towards a dawning future in which we might hope to see our teams improve, if they are playing poorly, or continue their hot streaks, if they are playing well, we can easily lose sight of what NFL teams are in the here, the now, the present. So let us in that spirit of commemoration and contemplation of the half-season of play we’ve watched unfold so far present some ideas of who we’re dealing with – whether they’re already dead and their destiny already decided or not yet born and still with their season and playoff lives ahead of them.

We’ll begin in the AFC South, one of those divisions whose top and bottom are firm in their fixedness but whose mind-igniting midsection defies any kind of consensus or stratification. There’s the Texans, there’s the Jaguars. Neither have been so incredibly impressive that they ought to be taken seriously yet; neither of them is totally devoid in the season so far of ludicrous wins that transvalue our opinions of them and make us believe they can get further into January than we once thought. For the Jaguars, the most monumental of those wins came at the costly expense of the Kansas City Chiefs, a team themselves dwelling in utter defiance of decisive determination and with much evidence left to be introduced before we can form a full view of their potential in the playoffs. For the Texans, though, their best wins had been against an injury-enervated 49ers team with next to no defense, an injury-enervated Ravens team with absolutely no defense, and a talent-negative Tennessee Titans team with nothing whatsoever to call their own in any segment of the roster or phase of the game. Then the charging Jaguars, fresh off a thrilling win in Las Vegas, came to town – invested, as one often is, with their recent success in the desert and successful escape without incident therefrom. The Texans did what they’ve done to many good teams this year: fall down, big time, with microscopically slim chances of winning as the game entered the fourth quarter. But somehow, lacking their usual field general C.J. Stroud’s passing powers and residing their hopes entirely on the right arm of longtime backup Davis Mills, the Texans piloted their oftentimes flimsy and much-carpentered ship of offense from 29-10, to 29-18, to 29-24, to 29-30, and finally to a thunderously resonant and not a little bit sadistic 36-29 final score. Mills, Nico Collins, Woody Marks and a rabid pass rush were the keys on the circlet that contain the means of opening all the successive doors that lead to a comeback victory. Houston remains in possession of a losing record, a difficult road back into playoff and division consideration, and a roster reeling from the loss of their QB1, but they have a chance that they gave themselves by virtue of this win that few other teams would have been able to provide for their future selves. The Jaguars, meanwhile, only surrendered the largest blown lead in franchise history. You could call it a growing pain with a new head coach and new GM, a result of a culture not fully formed yet, not birthed in totality, but it followed a form similar to several other notable games Trevor Lawrence has played throughout his career – namely, stuffed with déclassé plays best adjectivally described as frustrating, and worst described as bust-like. The Jaguars, too, have much more film to produce for our delectation and digestion before this year is up and we need to make a call on who they are as a team, or who they were. Their fate isn’t sealed, but you can’t blow a 19-point lead to a 3-5 football team with its backup quarterback in the game and call yourselves true Super Bowl contenders. At least not now. Once upon a time, a San Francisco 49ers team found itself up 23-0 on a going-nowhere Phoenix Cardinals team that had just fled St. Louis for the scorch of the desert only to lose 24-23 in the final seconds of the game. It was a calamitous loss that seemed to spell total doom for a Niners team that “only” went 10-6, amidst an NFC that contained six other teams that won at least 10 games. But the Niners, led by golden domer and golden boy Joe Montana, easily slew their way through the Vikings (avenging a stunning playoff loss from the year before) and the Bears (their polar opposites) en route to one of the thrilling Super Bowl wins ever. Little-remembered outside of skilled historians of the Red & Gold after the march to glory was that loss to the Cardinals, but despite its painful pang in the moment and relative insignificance in the grand scheme of things afterwards, it proved to be the final road loss the 49ers would suffer until three years later, in their hiccup 1991 season. From horrible losses, the very best teams draw the very best lessons. Whether Liam Coen, Trevor Lawrence and James Gladstone can use the stunning defeat to didactic benefit instead of corporeally-punishing timbre remains to be seen. And whether Davis Mills can safely guide the Texans, in their time of difficulty, to a passable record from which C.J. Stroud can launch a final assault upon the gates of postseason entry is also a destiny not yet fully woven or certain.

 The Jaguars-Texans game, though it flew significantly lower in the firmament of the national consciousness given its participants, was a production of genuine drama, verve, punch, and climax. Not so for some of the more contender-ish great and good teams in the NFL who played this weekend. The weekend’s NFL action sandwich was bookended by two mold-ridden extremities of a rotten loaf, the sorts of bread slices you wouldn’t feed to a POW and which a POW would throw back in your face if offered: two different 10-7 games that featured nothing approaching excitement, promising play from the underdogs, or stretches of anything in the same neighborhood as full-phase “dominance” from the favored juggernauts. The Broncos and Eagles, it now has to be said, might be paper 8-2 teams; they don’t seem to have the firepower of teams like the Lions or Colts despite possessing notionally comparable or even superior talent, they don’t have the panache or flair for dramatic late-game captures of victory of teams like the Patriots or Bears, and they don’t have the eye-popping payload delivery system of teams like the Chiefs or Ravens. I tried to find a place for the Bills in the foregoing polysyndeton, but after what that team did on Sunday…maybe they fit in better with the jesters in the AFC West and NFC East that authored the 10-point offensive outings we denigrate. Worst of all, they (the Broncos and Ravens) don’t have quarterbacks with the sort of adamantine trustworthiness that some the Chiefs, Ravens, Bills, and Bengals (though who cares at this point about them) do; they’ve both got guys who hold onto the ball too long, drift out of the pocket too often, and scramble too frequently to get the very best out of their skill positions. They also have head coaches who though nominally offensive wizards have yet to prove that, for this season at least, they’ve got an intelligent plan in place to wring the most exceptional dilutions of production out of their offensive casts. But this is 2025 we’re in, and it’s a weird year of football; would it be unthinkable for these two teams to keep plopping their slop on the national screen through November, December, and January, meeting in San Francisco for the slop bowl to end all slop bowls? It’s not unthinkable at all. We the viewing public may demand our money back for services unrendered, the NFL ultimately being an entertainment product, but that’s not an impossible thanatology to envision for this NFL season. But I digress. If you’re only a YouTube TV customer and don’t subscribe to Prime Video or ESPN, you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. So let’s talk about it more, in detail, and with at least some sardonicism. This is Week 10. Two-and-a-half months down, two to go. Time flies when your team is good. Or sucks. Or is sadistically average. Let’s fly.

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“Hell Yes!!!” Taxon

Seattle Seahawks:

The Procession of Pretenders Offered Up To Slaughter By Darnold And Co. Just Goes On And On And On.

Things can change in a goddamn heartbeat in the NFL. Just ask the Washington Commanders, who one year ago with Jayden Daniels, Terry McLaurin, Austin Ekeler and Brian Robinson, Jr. were doing to other teams what the Seattle Seahawks are currently doing to them. Sam Darnold is their Jayden Daniels, JSN their TmC, Kenneth Walker and Zach Charbonnet their twin chariot-pulling horses. And like the charioteer that he so certainly is, Sam Darnold and the Seahawks can little help but ride triumphantly into different colosseums each weekend to flamboyantly dispatch whatever hopeless flotsam is cast before them. This week, it was Jacoby Brissett and the Cardinals; tomorrow, it might be the AFC representative in Super Bowl LX. The Legion Of Boom 2. That’s what it looks and feels like, people. The whole hellish force of the Seahawks’ 46-man roster was brought to bear on the unsuspecting and high-riding Cardinals who’d just come off a defensively-excellent win against Dallas, with an avalanche of rushing and a typhoon of pressure unleashed from the raptorial maw of the Hawks on both Arizonan defense and offense making this game a foregone conclusion by the termination of the first quarter. But like Guy Fawkes on the scaffold, the Cardinals’ devastation did not cease with the Seahawks going up 21-0. Instead, DeMarcus Lawrence, who already had one fumble return touchdown, got home on Jacoby Brissett along with Tyrice Knight and rumbled 22 yards again to paydirt, completing the “drawing” part of the Hanging Drawing & Quartering that was the Cardinals’ lot on Sunday. The “quartering” part, the total dissolution and dismantlement of the Cardinals as a breathing entity, was completed on the next Seahawks drive when a 67-yard Cooper Kupp catch and run (you forgot he was on this team, didn’t you?) led to a short Zach Charbonnet touchdown to make the Seahawks’ latest monument to murder of another NFC team complete, this time a 44-22 don’t-make-me-laugh dismissal of Arizona – the same team who, just a month and change prior, had seriously threatened to steal one against the Seahawks in primetime. Never again, vowed the Hawks, and so proved. This team has no weakness, for now. Could Darnold go from crystal carriage to pimply pumpkin again when the lights are at their brightest and most revealing? Could teams figure out a way to remove JSN more forcibly from endless openness and direct-line connection with Darnold? And could injury, defensive chemistry, or offensive line regression start to hurt this team? Sure, it all could happen. But leave your concerns at the door when you enter the house of horrors that is Lumen Field to view the vivisections that this team specializes in, and do the same when you see them enter the jeopardized abode of another team on the road: this team is weaknessless as we sit here ten weeks in. They’ve no cause to slow down or cease their spree of football bloodshed any time soon. 

Season Score: 3.778

Detroit Lions:

Dan Campbell, Culture Changer, Is Also Dan Campbell, Playcalling Wizard. What A Maestro!

Some would have called the decision by Dan Campbell to take over playcalling duties from OC John Morton after one solitary loss to an inferior Vikings team a rash one. Others might have gone further, calling it an unapologetic and egotistical intrusion of a non-playcalling HC into the flow of the game to try and stifle the smallest indication of adversity at a time when patience was what was needed, not change. But Campbell proves time and time again that he’s a 1-of-1, inimitable polymath when it comes to running a football team, and Sunday against the Washington Commanders was just another example of his Renaissance Man resplendence. Folks feared that John Morton would not be able to replicate Ben Johnson’s success with the Lions. While the early returns have still been pretty damn good, those Naysayers and Nervous Nellys needn’t have worried, because the Lions still have Dan Campbell. And maybe that’s all they need. The fifth-year head coach and star of the Honolulu Blue brigadiers assumed the function of playcaller on Sunday and led Detroit to a prodigious, portentous, and for the Commanders quite ponderous afternoon of offensive symphonic excellence. The Lions piled up plentiful excesses of points and yards while producing a paucity of punts and other statistical pusillanimities – such that, against a team that just beat them in the playoffs the year before (how time flies when your team is falling apart, eh, Washington?), the Lions crafted the only game in NFL history where one team passed for over 300 yards, rushed for over 200 yards, did not take a sack, did not commit a turnover, and did not punt once. 44 points is not a gigantic number in the grand scheme of things, but it does represent the sum total of points you can expect to score by playing perfect balanced offense against a team that we all thought was going to be at least halfway decent. But the Commanders, who might need to change their name to the Cadets after the way this season is going, are looking like a flash in the pan from 2024. The Lions are here to stay. As long as Dan Campbell is pulling levers and calling plays, or entrusting someone worthy with that obligation, they will be – and as long as Jared Goff can do everything they ask of him (which is basically “make every throw we ask of you 30-35 times a game while refraining from using your legs”), too. Jahmyr Gibbs and David Montgomery are generational, toughness-emanating gladiators who can win glory for themselves and their team while, beacon-like, shimmering out the cultural rays that this Lions team uses as a light through the season’s storminess, but it all starts with Dan The Man. It’s hard to conceive of an NFC Championship that doesn’t include this team and its cadre of tough mudders. The leonine fury thought to have departed alongside Ben Johnson is irremovably still very much in Detroit.

Season Score: 3.778

Los Angeles Rams:

The Matthew Stafford MVP Campaign Has Reached Fortissimo Pitch, Each Week A New And Mellifluous Verse.

As the Rams trudged sullenly off the SoFi Stadium turf on October 2, it felt like the San Francisco 49ers had totally stolen one from underneath the unsuspecting, insensate noses of the Los Angeles Rams. L.A. had let two critical short-yardage plays go disastrously wrong as the Mac Jones-led Niners, even at that early juncture reeling from many starters’ loss to injury, won 26-23 in overtime. This go round, the Rams decided not to let such trifles detonate their fortunes of coming away with a win. The chief reason is this: Matthew Stafford has overtaken the run game, the defense, and even Puka Nacua and Davante Adams as THE identity, the architect, and the chief reason for this team’s ongoing prosperity. It’s a strange MVP season he’s having, certainly – but it’s an MVP season in every sense of the word. In a way it mirrors the Rams’ last MVP, Kurt Warner (his second of two MVPs came in 2001 but for ease of comparison let’s focus on his 1999 body of work). That team had two brilliant, uncoverable pass catchers in Isaac Bruce and Torry Holt, a running back in Marshall Faulk who was suited beautifully to the needs of a team that needed to rely on a small handful of star players (in the 2025 Rams’ case Marshall Faulk has been turned into two backs via the process of cell division), and an offensive playcaller who wants to exploit every conceivable weakness the defense on the other side of the ball may have. Another four-touchdown outing ensued from the surging, championship-minded Stafford, all to different receivers: Puka, Davante, Colby Parkinson and someone or something named Davis Allen, which is indeed a person and not a law firm or dentist office. The worry, as with all Rams seasons since Stafford arrived in L.A., is health, and whether Stafford’s diminishing mobility could lead to concerns about health: he doesn’t seem like he’s moving all that well, but the right arm is still sharp and slinging, and that’s all that matters for this team. The Rams are the anti-Bills and anti-Ravens: they’re the perfect evolution of an old-school, balanced offense, that asks nothing of the quarterback on the ground and merely requests he make the throws to the open guys. Bart Starr and Vince Lombardi. Joe Montana, Bill Walsh. Matthew Stafford, Sean McVay; each duo has a certain sameness, a resemblance to each other. And in an NFC crowded with teams that are either unproven, untidy, or still filling gaps left by departed coordinators, the Rams’ steadiness and roster durability may differentiate them from the pack.

Season Score: 3.667

Houston Texans:

Welcome To The HELL YES!!! Winner’s Circle, Houston – I Must Say You’re Here Later Than Expected.

Proclaim it, Will Anderson, through my host: he that have no stomach for this fight, let him depart. So might Davis Mills, The General, have spoken when the chips were down so bad it seemed that the Texans would have been better off, optically and competitively, just taking a knee to kill what time remained in the second half. But down 29-10 the Texans did not say die, did not acknowledge the odds, and did not blink. They forced the Jaguars to do the latter, and in so doing might have turned a runaway Colts/Jags division showdown into a deeply intriguing three-horse race in the South. Bob Lily was known as Mr. Cowboy for his long tenure with the team, which started back in 1960 when he became the Dallas Cowboys’ first-ever draft pick. Davis Mills is not David Carr – he was not the organization’s first-ever selection in the NFL Draft – but he’s been there through good times and through bad, predating the C.J. Stroud “glory” years, if you can call them that, and hanging around as a reliable if mundane backup for the past three seasons. When the Texans have needed him, he has answered the call (aside from that one game against Tennessee, where they asked Case Keenum to play QB instead of him as Stroud nursed an injury), and on Sunday, he might have played himself out of a perennial backup role and gotten on the radar of teams who will be shopping around for a stopgap starter next year. God Almighty, he might have played so well in the fourth quarter that they won’t rush C.J. Stroud back from injury! Sometimes it can help a team to have a very temporary change of QB while the starter rehabs a short-term bump or bruise (or concussion, as the case may be), for lacking any rhythm or groove that comes from starting a lot of games consecutively, they’ll default to targeting the team’s primary weapon as often as humanly possible. And just like that, you end up with Nico Collins, a sometimes frustrated X receiver on an oftentimes frustrated offense, going 7 for 136. It took him 15 targets to get there, granted, but he got there. How this offense, which has done next to nothing all season save for a takedown of the 49ers here and a disembowelment of the Cooper Rush Ravens there, managed to erase a 19-point fourth-quarter deficit against a Jaguars team that was forcing turnover after turnover early in the season is beyond anyone’s imagination, but it’s safe to say that this is a mind-boggling and inspiriting win that a team with a defensive head coach can feed off of for weeks on end, if they use it as proper motivation. There’s no guarantee they will, and coaches are fond of saying that each week is a season unto itself, so maybe the sunlight of this preposterous win will come, warm the skin, and go – but clearly there’s more to this Texans offense than what we’d been seeing so far. How can you doubt this team’s possibilities of a turnaround after a result like this?

Season Score: 2.667

Miami Dolphins:

YES, Dolphins! THIS Is What You Were Always Supposed To Look Like. Now Go Smoke A Cigar At Versailles.

Everyone loves an underdog – except the big bad bullies the underdog is trying to best. Everyone wants to root for the unexpected outcome – except fans of the favorite team. And everyone loves seeing the Dolphins’ quirky brand of quick-twitch football work to perfection. Except, of course, the Buffalo Bills, who have victimized the oft-turbulent Dolphins in many memorable games but who have also fallen prey to those same Dolphins, even if just twice, in two very, very memorable games – two crypt-like reminders that for all their regular-season diadems, they’ve won exactly the same number of Super Bowls since Josh Allen entered the league. So often, a team loses its head coach to a midseason firing at the lowest moment. So often we see the edifice burned down, demolished and razed, when the tide is highest and the ship is at the bottom of the ocean. Too often are our final memories of a good, if not great, head coach and the team he assembled a memory of crushing defeat, total football futility, and pangs of promises and dreams unfulfilled. Thank you, Miami Dolphins, for not letting the Mike McDaniel era end that way. Come what may, this game is the one we’ll remember from Mike McDaniel, Tua Tagovailoa, Jaylen Waddle and Devon Achane when one or all of them are gone – especially if some of them leave after this season. Stephen Ross could have said I’ve Seen Enough after 0-3, or after the 31-6 Browns loss, or after the Chargers heartbreak, or at several other junctures, but instead he chose to go the route of the stoic and see what Mike McDaniel could salvage from a season whose rapture had turned to wreckage in a heartbeat’s worth of Floridian time. And for that, he – and we – were rewarded. This is the game that the Dolphins want to play every Sunday: a speed-hewn downfield attack that asks little of any one player but demands blinding swiftness when an open field presents itself. It helps when your opponent chooses to do everything in their power to self-sabotage, yes, but many football games are decided in such a manner. If 2025 is the end for the Tua-McDaniel partnership, the Dolphins choosing to not go out with a whimper, but with an orange-and-aqua firework-finale bang that made the traditional division tyrants look like unprepared dunces while they themselves looked like estimable professionals, is decidedly a Good Ending. You’re allowed to be emotional, and giddy, about football, even in small moments that don’t ultimately portend all that much; for Miami to not lie down to Buffalo, but instead wrestle down Buffalo and force them to tap out, is a sterling memory that chisels the memory of Mike McDaniel into something with more staying power than most coaches get to enjoy when their time with their team is up. An old poem called “The Soldier” goes like this: If I should die, think only this of me/That there’s some corner of a foreign field/That is forever England. If this is the end, there will be a little corner of Hard Rock Stadium, and a small crevice in the recall of all Dolphins fans, that is in this moment, this beautiful frame of cathartic triumph, for all time.

Season Score: 2.100

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“Hell Yeah.” Taxon

Indianapolis Colts:

True Contenders Don’t Usually Let The Falcons Hang Around. But This Team’s Self-Belief And Identity Saved Them.

It stabbed one in their stomach to see Daniel Jones continue his turnover-worthiness in Germany. And for a moment, it seemed that the Falcons may indeed have zeroed in on the “blueprint,” a hateful and overused term, for turning the Colts’ kingly offense from crystal palace into pillar of salt: get pressure, quick, on Jones, and hit him in the hands. But that’s only one dimension of the multivariate tesseract that is the Colts offense – another, far more mind-bending dimension consists in Jonathan Taylor, who made this game his personal playground. Raheem Morris inaugurated the Falcons’ week of practice by showing them a documentary about Jesse Owens, the hero of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He could not have known – but maybe could have guessed – that a performance of similar superhumanness would be perpetrated against his defense. Jonathan Taylor went off like a bomb against Atlanta’s porous rush defense, ripping through them for 276 total yards and three rushing touchdowns, including the clincher, the dagger, the beheading stroke in OT. They have needed Taylor desperately throughout the season – he far more than anyone else has been the flame of offensive production who just needed decent QB play and a shiny new TE to take some of the focus off of him – but the Colts never needed him more than they did on this day. His 35 total touches were only 5 fewer than the total number of times Daniel Jones, the quarterback, threw the ball, ran with it or was sacked. That is workhorse heroism the like of which one rarely sees in the modern, by-committee NFL. In a vacuum, this was a glory-soaked, beatific, valiant win for the Colts – down by 8, and 3, late in the game, to come back against a team that (in theory, but rarer than you’d think in practice) that has a great running game and win is an immense and ennobling result. But these are now two consecutive games in which Daniel Jones has felt, and gotten burned by, pass rush heat. True, I made little of the turnover apocalypse the team suffered in Pittsburgh – it felt awful flukey, after all – but to see Jones struggle once again, and in the second straight game, with ball security is a reason for mild concern. I still think Steichen’s scheme, Taylor’s grit, Warren’s physicality and Jones’ born-again knack for playing the position more soundly than he ever has before will guide this team to the South title, the playoffs, and likely a win – but fast-strike passing that doesn’t leave time for slavering pass-pocket-plunderers is not a Want, it’s a Need.

Season Score: 4.200

New England Patriots:

The Nine Weeks’ Worth Of Pretending TreVeyon Henderson Does Not Exist Has Finally Come To Its Merciful End.

Everyone knew the joke of Rhamondre Stevenson and Antonio Gibson as nominal RB1 and RB2 could not go on forever, and indeed it did not. With both nursing injuries and out for this game, the Ohio State rookie paragon TreVeyon Henderson stepped in and stepped on the neck of the reeling Bucs defense, who looked like they knew they could not hold back the deluge for much longer by them the time the Buckeye turned the corner to his left and made it 28-16, cementing a Pats win. They might be back. Ugh. Frustrating though it is to see New England Patriots fans, whose five-year vanishing act between the years of 2020-2025 rivals anything that Houdini, David Blaine or Penn & Teller ever attempted, happy and fitfully pugnacious once again, one must admit that they have good reason to come out of their Bostonian hovels once again. This team is very, very good. And nothing will make an opponent question itself quite like a rookie running back hitting the pile-up of bodies in the middle of the field, very nearly succumbing to the vicelike grasp of Vita Vea, then bouncing the run outside and cresting home for a 69-yard touchdown to make it a two-touchdown game with less than two minutes to go. Drake Maye also played in this game – the sports media doyens and doyennes whose job it is to favorably warp the sport so that you the viewer keep your eyes glued to the screen, no matter what, even if it means presenting a less-than-totally-accurate picture of the league will never let you forget his name again – and while he made a couple of bad mistakes, he didn’t sink his team. He engineered numerous long scoring drives and picked up tough completions to Diggs, Henry and Demario Douglas (one of the great complementary pieces in the NFL who gracefully has gone from WR1 to WR2) to build a late lead, and even though he committed what can only be called a vestigial rookie mistake by throwing an interception in the endzone late with a five-point lead, the fact was his team was already up by a touchdown – his defense, which swarmed Mayfield far more discomfitingly than he has been in recent games, closed the Bucs’ offense out, and his running back turned the defense, and the lights, out. A dumbfounding Bills loss in Miami made this day doubly sweet for the Pats, who have the inside track on the AFC East crown for the time being and can eye the one seed with something less unrealistic than mere wistful longing. 

Season Score: 3.700

Los Angeles Chargers:

Pittsburgh Once Made Opponents Play Down To Them. L.A. Gladly Let The Steelers Play Bad All By Themselves.

Against the Kansas City Chiefs, Justin Herbert was the star of the show. Against the Minnesota Vikings and the Miami Dolphins, heroic backup-thrust-into-starting-role back Kimani Vidal was the guy everyone wanted to know. And against Pittsburgh, it was all the above and more – a full-spectrum exiling of the Steelers out of Los Angeles and into territories of deep concern. This one started as slow as any game you’ll see in primetime, and it carried on like that for much of the night. You could ruminate for hours over the film of this one trying to find a true highlight or identify a true in-game MVP without much luck. You could even poke through the box score for someone who stands out as an avatar of performance for long periods of time without as much as a whiff of interesting data. And as such, it better avails the interested consumer to dispense with the atomization of the game and instead take a step back and breathe the painting in, brushstrokes, textures and all, without troubling to delve too far into individual performances. Because in this game, Jim Harbaugh and his Chargers signified that the last rites of the Mike Tomlin Steelers, this era of Pittsburgh football’s extreme unction, its anointing of the sick, is nearby and not far off. This is the kind of game that Pittsburgh used to play against its own foes, not the game that they allowed to be practiced upon them: a balanced, never all-that-impressive, but rarely unsound plunge into the pit of combat that does not provide the eye a feast of visuals but does leave the onlooker with no doubt which team brought greater physicality and heart to the game. That’s what the Chargers did in L.A. on Sunday night: proved that they have heart in spades. That hasn’t always been the case with the Chargers. Nor should it be forgotten that the other bugbear the Chargers have often dealt with in previous seasons, acuity in the special teams phase of the game, still have not been fully modernized: up 15-3 with a chance to put even greater pressure on a flagging Steelers offense, Cameron Dicker missed a 55-yard field goal. But these Chargers can also play complementary football in a way that minimizes the monumentality of their mistakes: on the ensuing Steelers drive, the Chargers held Aaron Rodgers and company scoreless for the ninth straight drive, a categorically superb handling of an offense that looked like it had found its footing against Indianapolis. The Chargers seem to have been forgotten amidst the rise of the Colts, the Patriots and the Seahawks, but they’re still here – and they can still mount quite a challenge for this division.

Season Score: 3.400

Chicago Bears:

A Glorious Moniker Anointing Many A Worthwhile Team Has Made Chi-Town Landfall: The Bears Are Finally FUN.

A common refrain used to mock over-aggressive coaches that pitilessly attempt to pick up a first down on fourth down rather than punt or attempt a field goal is this: “they’re getting too cute.” For a time, it seemed that Chicago was guilty of just that: overreaching themselves and going for it too many times on fourth down when they should have just taken the points available to them, or, barring entry to field goal range, punt the ball away and play the field position game. Despite going only 1-for-4 on fourth down, the Bears still won. That’s what a scholarly understanding of risk and reward can do for you. Bear Down, Chicago Bears. I do not mean to compare the two, and I hope that impression is not given from the following comparison. But, in the vacuum of this game, a Mahomes-Reid-like sense of “knowing” that the Bears under Ben Johnson and with Caleb Williams at the head of the conquering army would come back on a wobbly Giants team pervaded the viewing experience. Fourth down misses early – three of them, all so close to being first downs or touchdowns – felt, simply, like that: misses. Not enormous failures, not blown opportunities, just misses. And the Bears comported themselves accordingly. The Giants are a large, wounded buffalo without their three young superstars in the game, and the Bears are, well, a bear. They just needed to keep the scent of blood in their nose while it was still light out and the hunt still ongoing to be able to give chase, run down, and take the life from their opponent. And as soon as the tripartite transfigurations of Russell Wilson entering the game, Daboll and Kafka modifying the game plan to suit a new and much more limited quarterback, and the defense playing more conservatively all came to pass, the Bears had an opening, and they seized it. It seems to fly under the collective NFL radar just how fast Caleb Williams is when he runs – and that’s a good thing. Caleb doesn’t need to have an offense tailored exquisitely to his athleticism the same way that a Lamar Jackson or Justin Fields does; his damage comes from scrambles, when it comes on the ground, and he does not need to be asked to perform any designed QB runs to wring the very maximal return out of his skillset that the Bears need. Still, his rollout to the left and subsequent run to the endzone to put the Bears up 24-20 (and effectively end the game, since there was no chance a confidence-building Bears defense was going to let Russell Wilson and what remains of the Giants starters go yard on them in the clutch) was a Steve Young-against-Minnesota-like highlight for the young QB, and with what happened elsewhere in the North on Sunday, by no means a tawdry or meaningless one. The Bears have been dangerous for a while now this season – the last two weeks, they’ve become something even better. Fun.

Season Score: 3.333

New York Jets:

Three Or Four Plane Crashes And We’re In The Hunt. Five Or Six Plane Crashes And We’re In The Playoffs.

What a three-week stretch for the New York Jets. They won a game against the Bengals, had a bye, then won a game against the Browns. Sure, it’s not exactly a 2006 Colts postseason romp through the AFC’s very best, but it’s progress. They didn’t lose a game in three weeks during the season! When a team with such unspeakable personnel deficiencies as the 2025 New York Jets comes along, it can be very difficult to assess the performance of their offensive coordinator. That guy, a former Lions coach named Tanner Engstrand, wowed a good many folks with his and Justin Fields’ admirable if not-conducive-to-winning performances in the season’s first few weeks. Then, as reality set in, the offense became so pathetic that Engstrand’s name was forgotten entirely – and then, worse, remembered for bad reasons. The New York Jets have had five different games with less than 100 yards of total offense at halftime this season entering Week 11 – that’s not just bad, that’s horrifically terrible. But this isn’t a Nathaniel Hackett or Matt Canada situation, where the brass and strings are visibly in place and the conductor cannot figure out how to strike a harmonious chord between them; you can sense, with every game, and especially in this most recent one after Garrett Wilson found himself entirely frozen out of the gameplan by a clamping-down pass D from Cleveland, that Engstrand is striving with great exertion to figure out some kind of pathway to success for this offense, and his pieces in place simply won’t allow it to happen. In this game, the 27 points the Jets scored were not even mostly courtesy of the offense: 14 came from two return touchdowns, only 13 from the offensive unit itself. The lone touchdown, a screen pass to Breece Hall, constituted the entirety of New York’s positive passing yards on the day. As such, the offense goes as the runners go, if it goes at all: indeed in this game the run-pass ratio was extraordinarily lopsided, with rushes outnumbering pass attempts 3:1. Justin Fields can throw, a bit, in 2025, but he’s almost entirely a monothreat: not through the air, but on the ground. In a way it’s the perfect setup for a team that’s tanking in everything but name and hoping to position itself as powerfully as possible come the draft: no passes, all scrambles, few wins. It’s atrocious medicine, but the convalescent effects are to be desired. Let’s hope Aaron Glenn and Darren Mougey are the proper surgeons general to administrate the exploratory general surgery that this Jets roster and organization need. What could possibly go wrong?

Season Score: 2.333

✪✪✪

“Hell, Sure.” Taxon

Tampa Bay Buccaneers:

You Can Start To See The Cracks. True, They’re Mostly Injury-Formed, But They’re There All The Same.

On first glance at the box score, Baker Mayfield appears to have had another MVP-caliber day: 273 yards, not too many incompletions, a high passer rating and only two sacks. But this time he came up against a defense for whom the path to victory was not exclusively through suffocating the Bucs; they have a quarterback, too, and while Baker was not outplayed by Drake Maye per se, he was gotten the best of by him in the meaningful phase of the game. The tragedy of Baker Mayfield is that he has all the traits you want in any quarterback – except the ones you have to be born with. Perhaps this isn’t the game to invoke the “size” or “athleticism” clause that all loyal Bakeshow defenders have to invoke every now and again, but it seemed impossible to ignore when you see how effortlessly certain plays seem to Patriots quarterback Drake Maye and how infernally quizzical the same plays, which would be routine for giants like Maye, Allen or Lawrence, are for Baker Mayfield. The Patriots successfully tamped down the Buccaneer defense for just long enough to escape without having to totally and explosively detonate the scoreboard; a late touchdown by TreVeyon Henderson didn’t exactly change the outcome of the game, but it did prove that the Bucs defense cannot bottle up an oozing-with-electricity rookie for four quarters without its offense cracking 20 points and still expect to win. The Buccaneers injuries have to be mentioned alongside the torpid afternoon Baker slogged through until an effectively detrital drive made the score and his stats more appealing: Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, and Bucky Irving – going into this season the three most important skill players on the Bucs – were all out of this game, and Egbuka, though incredible, still cannot be asked to go it alone like this if the Bucs want to stay alive in the race for the NFC one seed and a South championship. Irving and Godwin are practicing again, finally – but Evans won’t be back until the playoffs, if he returns at all. This team needs its crucial identity components back to compete at the level they’re used to – this is turning into a bit of a slog for them, all things considered.

Season Score: 3.778

San Francisco 49ers:

Leave Aside The Defense Cosplaying As Barrett’s Privateers. Is Mac Jones Making Brock Purdy A Has-Been?

There are bad losses that make you question yourself, your corps of players, your whole approach to the game of football. Then there are losses that make you go, “better luck next time, I guess.” The San Francisco 49ers, to their dubious credit, are living in a reality governed by the latter frame of mind. They don’t have their (nominal) QB1. They don’t have their (nominal) WRs 1 and 2. They barely have a pass-catching tight end (did you see the size and the bulk of the Kevlar vest that George Kittle was wearing? He looked like Jordy Nelson in the 2016-17 playoffs). And when you’re playing Matthew Stafford, who is now up to 20 straight passing touchdowns without an interception (!!!), you needn’t hang your head – you had no chance, man. Mac Jones is a solid quarterback – a guy you can count on to execute a well-devised gameplan, a guy with experience receiving tough coaching, a guy who doesn’t do anything perfectly well but who does most traditional quarterback things with decent competence. But Mac Jones is not a Matthew Stafford, and this version of the 49ers are not the current version of the Los Angeles Rams. The 49ers have done an incredible job of holding the line as they lose piece after piece and contributor after contributor, but that can only work for so long before you come up against a monster team whose starters are all essentially healthy and whose scheme and talent are both superior to your own. That’s what happened to the 49ers on Sunday. Stafford and the Rams are hot – and when you’re hot, you’re hot, as they say. The 49ers defense had no answers early, and no answers late, for a Rams team that was at full strength and plumbing the depths of what they could get away with against a staggered defense. The Rams built a 21-0 lead, but credit the 49ers for fighting back with everything they had: they weakened the Rams lead from 21-0 to 21-14 and even came within one score at one point, 28-20. But Los Angeles has Puka, and Davanta, and two great running backs in Kyren Williams and Blake Corum. Mac Jones had at his disposal Christian McCaffrey and George Kittle – and not much else. The running game was finally snuffed out to mere whisps of smoke, with San Fran’s running backs (Brian Robinson Jr. also played with some effectiveness in this game) combining for just 71 yards. But Mac Jones still played with every drop of piss and vinegar he had. He completed 33 of 39 passes for over 300 yards and three touchdowns – his lone interception, a desperation pass to the middle of the field under immense pressure on 4th down with precious little time left in the fourth quarter, bounced off of McCaffrey’s hands into the waiting paws of Emmanuel Forbes. The defense, unable to get a stop to keep it a 35-20 game, gave up a fourth touchdown pass to Matthew Stafford, the last one of the day, who found a totally unguarded Colby Parkinson in the flat for a walk-in touchdown. Mac Jones, with almost no one healthy or at full strength, did drive them to another touchdown to make it 42-26, but the Niners were simply overpowered in this game. Brock Purdy is, supposedly, coming back this week. He has some ‘splaining to do if he can’t match Mac Jones’ level of play by the end of the season. If he can’t, would Shanahan consider making a change without the veneer of injury to cover up Brock’s regression? It’s one of the more titillating storyline as we enter the second half of the season. Mac Jones, after all, is the quarterback that many opined Shanahan initially zeroed in on in the 2021 draft before ultimately deciding to ride with Trey Lance.

Season Score: 3.300

New Orleans Saints:

Well, Now…Tyler Shough, You Say? And Here We Were Thinking They Drafted Him As A Veteran Backup.

Tyler Shough, the man of the hour. What a hilarious world it would be where he, a 26-year-old-rookie, is the Saints’ answer at QB and Kellen Moore, himself an old rookie when he entered the league, is his long-term head coach. I say let us leave aside Testament Of Youth and instead take up the faded pages of Memoirs Of Hadrian. Old age hath yet his honour and his toil! The NFL may be no country for old men, but it does occasionally show you that agéd man are not always paltry things, nor tattered coats upon a stick. And perhaps it’s good for one team in the league to stick with the elder statesmen of a fading epoch when so much of the NFL is geared hyper-aggressively towards youth, athleticism, measurables and analytics, if only so that we can better remember the well-worn names on a roster and so I can drop in some wisdom from the poems “Ulysses” and “Sailing to Byzantium.” Tyler Shough has certainly done enough to warrant starter-status for a considerable while longer, and perhaps the rest of the season, or even beyond – you certainly do not need to worry about how long his “development” is going to take, because the 26-year-old rookie should be fully developed already after a half-decade-plus of college football. Outgunning the Panthers’ sad defense is a low bar to clear, but he cleared it all the same, throwing for 282 yards and a pair of scores to win comfortably, if not overpoweringly, against the inscrutable Panthers. Taysom Hill, incredibly, is still playing meaningful snaps on this team, but the Saints could have gone without if they really needed to; his 7 rushes for 20 yards, one incomplete pass and one drop were not the difference today. But you know who was? Alvin Kamara and Chris Olave, still the two most weight-bearing pillars of this team. Holding onto Kamara, an aging running back, at the trade deadline was an interesting move for a team that needs as much draft capital as it can possibly bring to bear in the coming drafts, but Olave, probably the Saints’ all-around best player, was never going anywhere. If you squint through a James Webb Space Telescope-resolution lens at this roster, you can discern the faintest inklings of connective tissue that may presage a good football team. We’re projecting, of course, but at least this team isn’t tied for dead last in the NFL in terms of total wins anymore. (Sorry, Titans – your stay in the cellar may take up the rest of the season.)

Season Score: 2.600

Baltimore Ravens:

The Business Of Exsanguinating Tumult-Troubled Teams Isn’t Pretty, But It Does Pay The November Bills.

The Ravens used to do something other than merely drip-suck the lifeforce and nourishing blood out of teams that were their inferiors in the hoary days of, say, 2019, 2023 and 2024 – they used to sanguinarily extinguish them. They aren’t doing that quite so majestically these days, but that could be a good thing for them as the season’s second act gets into swing. Remember – the Ravens were up 27-13 with precious little time remaining in this game. Their play selection in defending a 14-point and 8-point lead was as follows: Derrick Henry no-gain run, Lamar Jackson sack, Jackson incompletion, punt, Jackson 6-yard run, Henry 3-yard run, Patrick Ricard 3-yard run (a first down that forced the Vikings to use their last timeout - NORMALIZE PATRICK RICARD!), Henry no-gain run, Zay Flowers no-gain run, Jackson incompletion, punt. That’s not “crush the opponent into utter nothingness” behavior – at least not in the same way that they were going about it last year and before Derrick Henry got there. But as Tony Soprano once told us, “’Remember When’ is the lowest form of conversation.” This team is simply different from the one that took down team after team in 2019 and 2023 and put up statline after prodigious Lamar Jackson statline in 2024, when the wins were just a touch scarcer; this team started 1-5 and has had to flap its wings desperately to get within an ace of even on its record for the year. Thus this team will take a close, time-runs-out victory over a scuttled team whose offense can’t figure out what it does well and what it doesn’t (or for that matter how to start phasing in young players like McCarthy, Jordan Mason and Jordan Addison complementarily and without it coming at the expense of Justin Jefferson, T.J. Hockenson and Aaron Jones). It’s not clear if playing well against the Brian Flores defense in 2025 is still a commendable act of brilliance or more par for the course, but suffice to say, Lamar didn’t “light up” the Vikes’ D – he did just enough. So did Derrick Henry, who has looked a whole lot more like the guy whose last two seasons in Tennessee left lots to be desired and couldn’t turn volume touches into voluminous production. With that in mind it is interesting that the ghostly name of Keaton Mitchell, a thrilling player who authored several very eye-catching highlights in 2023, has begun to appear in something more than wispy numbers in the box score, at this point still as a spell for the bulldozer cadence of Henry, but perhaps as the season goes on as something more. The Ravens did not add much near the trade deadline, with the principal addition coming in the form of Dre’Mont Jones, a DL from Tennessee. Baltimore can never have too many defensive bodies, and, it seems, can never have too few offensive contributors. We’ll see what happens, but letting the same old cast of Mark Andrews, Isaiah Likely, Rashod Bateman and Zay Flowers (with the Great Old One stylings of Deandre Hopkins strewn about here and there) float the boat for another season seems…uninspired. We’ll see how far into the playoffs they go, if they get there, this year.

Season Score: 2.222

✪✪

“Hell’s Bells…” Taxon

Denver Broncos:

This Is About As Bad A Win As You Can Possibly Author. Denver Excels At Consistently Flunking The Eye Test.

The first ominous musings of the phrase “TeBo Nix” bubbled to the surface this week, and they were not unjustly propounded. Bo Nix has played terribly, horribly, not goodly and very badly for long stretches this season, surpassing 300 passing yards once and falling beneath 200 yards on five different occasions, including his previous two games against the struggling but defensively-stout Texans and the flailing, defensively-unsound Raiders. It’s been a hard watch, and confidence in the team amongst fans cannot be all that high with two games against KC and one each against Green Bay and Los Angeles on the horizon. There’s no rule that says you have to play like the Greek God of passing touchdowns each week to be taken seriously. In fact, there’s no law anywhere – not in the NFL rules of play, the league charter, the Personal Conduct Policy or the Constitution – that says any part of your team has to “look” dominant, well-coached, or any similar descriptive property to win a Super Bowl. Now, it certainly helps, and it’s a good bet that if you can only win low-scoring games or blowouts against overmatched fodder that you won’t be long for life when the playoffs come round, and that’s why Denver and their interconference brothers in poorly-played arms Philadelphia find themselves in the 2-star category despite their wins. Because the truth is this: Winning a game 10-7 counts infinitely more in your favor in the league standings, but failing to satisfactorily dispose of a horrible opponent and winning by a mere 3 points while barely exceeding the double-digit scoring threshold is, subjectively speaking, a worse outcome than losing 23-28 or 26-42, as teams ranked above the Broncos and Eagles despite their losses had to endure on the same day. It stands to reason that if the Buccaneers and 49ers played as well as they did against the Broncos and Eagles, who for sake of argument let’s assume also effected a perfect mimicry of their own performances, on a field where Tampa or San Fran were the opponents, the Broncos and Eagles would fall, convincingly, to their hypothetical enemies. This win does nothing to boost the sagging confidence of Broncos Nation, who have been waiting a while for Bo Nix to string a few halfway decent games together. It didn’t happen on Thursday against Las Vegas despite the team wearing the glorious throwback threads that everyone wishes they’d change back to permanently, and it’s a safe bet that being so vexatiously troubled by the likes of the 2-7 Raiders and 3-5 Texans in back-to-back weeks does not bode well for this team as it enters the second half of the race against the Chiefs and Chargers.

Season Score: 3.200

Philadelphia Eagles:

This Is About As Bad A Win As You Can Possibly Author. Philly Excels At Consistently Flunking The Eye Test.

Nick Sirianni is the Vince Lombardi of Nathaniel Hacketts. They cannot keep getting away with this. The Eagles have had two, maybe three “passages of eye test” this season (depending on how you view the ludicrous win over Los Angeles way back in Week 3), and in none of their other 6-7 games have they looked remotely like a team that could or should do damage in January. The quarterback is not the steward of an elite passing game. The defense rarely looks like it is the cause of the opposing offense’s misfortunes, as opposed to the opposing offense being the author of its own tragicomic foibles. The running game hardly exists outside of Jalen Hurts scrambles and the occasional untouched Saquon Barkley run, who most of the time looks more like 2022 Tyler Lockett than he does 2024 Saquon Barkley. The coaching decisions and game management are not simply suspect – they are tone-deaf, wrongheaded, arrogant and at times imbecilic. Just about the only thing on this team that does work is the offensive line, which can still punish and stonewall opposing rushers and run-stuffers like five cloned hybrids of Markus Ruhl and the Berghain club bouncer. And if you had to choose just one aspect of your team to be going strong while the rest slip and fall and fail to find footing even in mid-November, you’d choose the offensive line. Nothing else on this team is playing up to billing or to contract value, and the frustration for the weapon with the most unspent potential energy direly wanting to be turned into kinetic energy, A.J. Brown, gave cutting voice to his angst once more during the week, beseeching his Fantasy Football owners to “trade me.” This can do nothing but sow more discord into an already taut and tense locker room, one of the least cheery ones a defending champion has ever laid claim to, and it only makes the already less-than-ideal job of head coach Nick Sirianni more fraught with opportunities to cavil and disenchant in front of a microphone. The 10-7 final score of the Eagles’ no-show win over an absentee and suddenly offenseless Packers team would have been a loss for almost any other team – but not this one. To Howie Roseman’s, and maybe Nick Sirianni’s, credit, the Eagles have built a team whose floor for performance is stunningly low but whose floor for final result of each game independent of performance is stunningly high. It’s a transfixing oasis of unsightly football, like an NFL version of the Iowa Hawkeyes. Unfortunately for the rest of us, if that analogy proves true in more than one aspect and Nick Sirianni proves to be Philadelphia’s answer to Kirk Ferentz, we may be in for 20+ more years of this administration in the Eagles’ coaching booth. That will not be the case, however, if some team figures out how to punish him and his band of most unimpressive football Hulks for outrageous flights of über-aggressive football thoughtlessness the like of which we saw again very late in this game, twice – first when the Eagles decided to throw the ball on second and third down instead of run out the clock on their second-to-last possession of the game, and again when they, in direct defiance of 150+ years of established football philosophy, decided to throw a deep shot prayer on 4th and 6 instead of pin the Packers deep. As with all poor Eagles decisions, the consequences of these actions failed to materialize in a costly way, and the Eagles escaped – barely – with the slimmest win imaginable. This is not the high-soaring, balanced offense of 2022. It’s not even the grind-it-out, endearingly thuggish brand of cloud-of-dust run-game that they rolled out to convincing if not always engrossing effect in 2024. This is a team that’s simultaneously skating by while resting on its well-earned laurels from last season. We can be chided by the Philadelphia fan community for not seeing the vision, or whatever – just bear in mind that anything short of a repeat Super Bowl championship this season will cast this 2025 team’s issues in finding and fully cultivating any sort of positive identity in a far worse light. As Seth Rogen said in the film Step Brothers, and as will be said of this team when they (probably) get bumped off by Los Angeles, Detroit, Seattle or someone else in the NFC playoffs: “Okay, now the tuxedos [close wins] seem kind of fucked up.” 

Season Score: 3.111

Minnesota Vikings:

J.J. McCarthy, Or “Nine,” Raised Ninety-Nine Red Balloons (Flags) With His Erratic Quarterbacking On Sunday.

No one thought the season would be going quite like this for Minnesota – a disagreeable, if not fully disastrous, stew of quarterback confusion, run game non-profusion, and defensive disillusion. Three plays more or less told the tale of this, the Vikings’ ill-fated sallying-forth against a revved-up Ravens team at season’s midpoint for both teams: the two interceptions thrown by J.J. McCarthy, which quite probably proved the difference in an 8-point loss to the other Purple team, and a third interception by Roquan Smith which after a review was overturned and ruled incomplete. The lesson is this: the Vikings were sloppy enough to beat themselves, but the Ravens let eminently punishable breaches of quarterbacking decorum slide by with tacit absolution. Transparently, J.J. McCarthy, at this stage of his football life, should not be asked to throw the ball so many times and into such perilous windows that the chances of three passes being intercepted ever occurs – the poor guy, basically still a rookie, dropped back 46 times on the afternoon, throwing for 248 yards, a score, those two picks and a sack. Meanwhile, his running backs carried the ball a grand total of 13 times. THIRTEEN TIMES!!! J.J. McCarthy, despite being the recipient of last week’s “LFG Award” from FOX announcer Tom Brady (which is a thing now,  I guess, but holds about as much weight and prestige as that farkakte NFC Offensive Player of the Week award he received all the way back in Week 1), needs to be a game manager in the strictest sense of the term as he learns and grows in the KOC offense right now. Why bother with chucking it 50 times into the teeth of a toughening Ravens defense? He clearly cannot be relied upon to make all the right reads at all the proper times – that ridiculous, not-even-close interception to Marlon Humphrey proves as much. At the same time, isn’t Aaron Jones supposed to be good? Isn’t he a big part of this team’s identity? Can’t we give him a few more touches? He’s nearing the end of his career and could be put to better use than his duties as a bystander and occasionally out-the-backfield pass catcher exude right now. This was a winnable game, Vikings – the unraveling of the quarterback position on this team and within this season gives rise to suspicions that Kevin O’Connell is not quite as masterful a quarterback whisperer as we’d been led to believe. That, or J.J. McCarthy and, Heaven forfend, Carson Wentz are so far beyond redemption that the preeminent Extreme Makeover: QB Edition artist of our generation cannot give them succor. The twain cannot meet in factuality – both cannot be true. Well, they can, but they probably aren’t. This is a Whatever write-up of a Whatever performance. 

Season Score: 2.778

New York Giants:

The Darkness Fell Once Again – This Time, Critically, Climactically, And In Bestowal Of Closure On Brian Daboll.

When the going gets tough, the Giants get blowing. Blowing leads, that is. This is the fourth fourth quarter lead they’ve surrendered this season, and it was also the third strike for Brian Daboll, whose trilogy of 2-8 starts to the season in 2023, 2024 and 2025 have left the Maras and everyone else wondering what the hell the point of it all was. We’ll focus on Brian Daboll and this game for now, though god knows there are other gravediggers of the Giants’ season with cemetery gravel staining their palms, trousers and boots still taking up residence in the offices of the New York Giants football club. For the briefest of moments it appeared that the revelation of Jaxson Dart could save Brian Daboll’s job; after all, if you let a coach and general manager select a first-round rookie quarterback, rarely (though recent years have posed a grievous challenge to this historic pattern) do you also saddle them with a short leash. One could argue the leash was lengthened, shortened, lengthened, and shortened again on Daboll in a counterintuitive and confusing way the last year-plus in more complicated ways than just the onfield product, but what cannot be argued is that his record of 15-39-1 after their Week 9 bye in 2022 constitutes a much longer leash than almost any other coach would have been given in that same period of time. This team often looked like the most forlorn, least talented, and furthest-away team from true Super Bowl contention following their 6-2 start in Daboll’s first year as HC in ’22, which is really saying something in a league and during a time that also included the Brian Callahan Titans, the Matt Eberflus Bears, the Dennis Allen Saints, the Josh McDaniels Raiders, the Antonio Pierce Raiders, the Pete Carroll Raiders, the Panthers in general, and other such pigskin jetsam. That’s all pre-Dart. Once Dart entered the lineup, though, it seemed like the fortunes of this team were changing – they knocked the Chargers, a team that was 3-0 and looked like they might be the best team in the league through the season’s first three weeks, off their undefeated perch. They slipped up badly against the Saints on the road, but then came back and just hammered the Eagles with flair and with ferocity – two traits we used to associate with those same Eagles. But in that game Jaxson Dart took a nasty hit that landed him in concussion protocol (one of several hits and several concussion tests the young passer was to undergo in coming weeks), and Daboll did not seem to think twice about how such an occurrence might need to affect how he called plays for and handled his young QB. Dart continued to take hit after hit, finally being forced to leave this game against Chicago for Russell Wilson. Dart’s health was plainly mismanaged or simply neglected by Daboll, but more than that, the games in which Dart played were mismanaged by the coach too. Daboll just could not figure out when to run, when to pass, and how to feel a game. The tragedy is that, as so many different coaches have undebatably demonstrated, this is almost never a skill you can learn on the job, even as the talent level of your team is cresting and its competitiveness augmenting. Daboll may have been a good guy to have around to help shepherd the development of Dart from raw rookie into polished professional, but the calculations of the Giants told them that he was decidedly not the guy to run the rest of the team or to make sound judgments on how to employ his QB’s athleticism. Denuded from his playcalling prowess when playing with a full deck of cards (and it must be noted that Daboll’s deck was full of 2s and 3s instead of face cards by the time Russ entered this game, having lost Dart, Nabers, Skattebo and others to injury), Daboll is simply a gigantic liability, an at-times too aggressive and at-times too sheepish decision-maker, not least when it comes to close games that need a steady hand to guide the team and find the best way forward, and nothing dramatized these facts more than his infamous decision to kick a field goal on 4th and goal from the 1-yard line. The arguments from analytics, game-flow and common sense are too numerous and condemnatory to get into detail on here, but it was the wrong decision. Two Chicago touchdown drives and a couple effete Russell Wilson attempts at holding onto the lead or retaking it later, and the Giants’, and Daboll’s, fate was sealed. The season’s lost. Daboll will surely land on his feet somewhere (he may even have his pick of OC openings), but he had run out his string on this team. The Giants are really just a vehicle for us to look at their cool throwback threads for the rest of the year. Just don’t get Dart hurt, interim coach Mike Kafka, we implore you. We will have to put you on Trial if you do.

Season Score: 2.600

Cleveland Browns:

You Get A Lot Of Rope If You’re A Browns Rookie QB. But Losing To 2025 Justin Fields Is Beyond The Pale.

YOU. SHALL NOT. PASS! Is what I imagine the Browns defense said, over and over, to Justin Fields on Sunday afternoon. The passing defense of the Cleveland Browns certainly did its job, holding the overland Jets to 42 net passing yards and just 169 total on the afternoon. Still it was not enough to bring Dillon Gabriel and co. the second win of the post-Joe Flacco Browns era.  Outrush the Jets: check. Outpass the Jets: Check. Out-possess the Jets in terms of time of possession: big check (almost 10 minutes’ difference). Win the turnover battle and surrender a single touchdown to the opposing offense: check. All this the Browns did – and lost by 7. It was a ludicrous day for Kevin Stefanski, Tommy Rees, and Dillon Gabriel, none of whom, it should be noted, came out of this game looking like a curséd man smitten by the Football Gods and denied victory after a valorous day but rather appeared to be three people who just could not play a regular game of football and also win. You might think that the 42-yard Breece Hall touchdown pass from Justin Fields, which proved to be the final completed pass by Justin Fields on the day, constituted the final triumph of the Jets’ paltry passing game over the Browns’ insufficiencies on offense for the day, but you’d be wrong – Justin Fields did drop back to pass, one more time, on the day, but was promptly sacked by Denzel Ward – a play which was wiped out by a defensive holding call on Devin Bush, giving a play that could have turned a 3rd and 16 into a 4th and 16 into a first down. That tells you all you need to know about this Browns loss. It was ultimately just one more in a long, long string of them dating back to 1999, but as with many Browns losses it included refreshing inventions that enriches the art form of Losing Football with their novelty and surprise. Perhaps nothing sums up in one crystallized vision the difference in approach to this game between the Jets and Browns and the fruitlessness of the Browns’ offense quite like the final selection of plays the two teams combined for: in the final three drives of the game (two by New York, one by Cleveland), the Jets ran the ball 12 times and dropped back once. The Browns threw the ball or had Dillon Gabriel drop back only to scramble after the play broke down on all 9 of the Browns’ plays. Both teams added one field goal to the tally in so doing. Some say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result. This game, which saw the Browns give up the decisive points of the game on back-to-back return opportunities by Kene Nwangwu and Isaiah Williams (not exactly household Fantasy Football names) en route to losing a game where they themselves and their opponents rolled out radically different and equally futile offensive gameplans, proved that insanity can also be arresting and wild, not merely drudging and monotonous.

Season Score: 2.444

Arizona Cardinals:

So, As It Turns Out, Kyler Murray Isn’t The Only Impediment Holding This Team Back From Winning The West.

The facts are plain: the Seahawks have fully rebuilt themselves from middling conference also-ran to Super Bowl heavy-hitter, and in a season less of time than it’s taken, and continues to take, the Arizona Cardinals to build themselves back into something approaching their 2015 form. It’s not Jacoby Brissett’s fault that this game got so out of hand so fast. Well, not his alone. The Seahawks’ ravenous pass rush has devoured passing pockets like coyotes on housecats and sealed up running lanes like carpenters shutting-up coffins all year long – Brissett was not going to be the exception to that rule. Demarcus Lawrence’s best day ever as a pro (he scored two defensive touchdowns in one game, both off Brissett turnovers) came less at the expense of Brissett himself than at the expense of the Cardinals operation as a whole. Jonathan Gannon is much like Mike McDonald: defensive coordinator from well-run, contending conference giant asked to come in and make do with a team whose glory days were firmly in the 2010s, and had not been sniffed this decade. McDonald has already proven that he and his staff can make it work with both existing players and assortments of new additions; Gannon and company are still struggling to make it happen three drafts in. The fear is that no amount of drafts, or quarterbacks, or offseasons of installing new philosophies or studying wars from history (that was a uniquely intriguing exercise, it must be said) will ever cause the Cardinals under Gannon to come to self-actualization. While that question overhangs, a more pressing one arrests: what will become of Kyler Murray? No quarterback – not Brissett, not Murray, not prime Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes or Aaron Rodgers – could have hoped to pilot the Week 10 2025 Cardinals to victory on the road against this Seattle team playing like it is, true; but one doubts if Kyler could have put up 22 points, and briefly given the Seattle Seahawks pause, as Brissett did even if he was fully healthy. There are swirling questions demanding answers about if this team has the right leaders in the right positions right now endlessly troubling the minds of the Cardinals staff, ownership, fans and players, and in a game like this where everyone you thought would be starting on offense in the summer is either hurt (the entire backfield) or ineffective (MHJ, who went a mere 3 for 33 with a meaningless touchdown), the most salient question comes to the fore: if the anointed leaders of this team aren’t the ones driving the car, do we need a new car (new QB, new HC, maybe even a new GM) altogether?

Season Score: 2.444

Las Vegas Raiders:

But For Denver’s Unwholesome Opera Of Playing Down To The Raiders’ Level, This Loss Would Be One Taxon Lower.

Las Vegas, let’s just be real here: if you can’t win this game, you can’t win any of them. And from here on in, you might not. In the film Hot Fuzz, the protagonist, Police Constable Nicholas Angel, moves to a sleepy country town and one night accompanies his police partner in – well, not crime, given their occupation, so law – to the local pub. He asks the publican what their wine selection is, and is told “We have red – and white.” That’s the same number of options you have when determining which Raiders win from 2025 you find most memorable as we sit here ten weeks in – there’s only two, and neither are that exciting. While their win over New England is, in retrospect, an insane upset given the trajectory the two teams have taken since, in the moment it wasn’t terribly dominant or easy on the eyes. Neither was their win over the hapless Tennessee Titans – in fact the Raiders were already so bad by that point, and their own effort in a win so underwhelming, that it gave leave to the powers that be on the Titans to fire Brian Callahan the next day. Denver is a better team than Tennessee, but you wouldn’t know it from watching this game: instead, if all you had to go off were those two games, you’d probably just assume that Las Vegas has simply gotten a lot worse. Which they have. Geno Smith, at one point a decent-ish quarterback for this team, is almost certainly the worst starting quarterback in the NFL right now. He doesn’t do anything right. His athleticism can no longer make up for his poor field vision or waning arm strength, and the Raiders’ OL cannot pose enough of a threat in the run game to make play action passes and their quarterback-friendly passing windows a viable option in the flow of the game. Ashton Jeanty still has one or two runs per game that remind you he’s akin to the meme of the Bugatti Veyron sitting underneath a trailer park carport, but not more than that; Brock Bowers, the hero of Week 9, was nowhere to be found on this day. It all added up to 7 points that one has to be amazed the Raiders even got around to scoring. Their punter was the man of the match, full stop. Denver’s punter was, by comparison, awful, and he was as complicit in whatever offensive threat the Raiders posed to Denver as was anyone who actually wore silver and black. This team is going nowhere, it needs a new QB badly, it need a new HC nearly as badly, and more importantly, we, the viewing public, need to demand the truth about how involved Tom Brady actually is in this team – we heard it trumpeted nonstop that the genius GOAT was heavily involved in building a winning culture while the bloom was still on the 2025 Raiders’ rose, and now that that soupçon has guttered away like an autumn wind fleeing the oncoming blizzard, we haven’t heard a warble of discourse on how the aging announcer/minority owner/Fanatics spokesman’s application of perspicacity to this sinking vessel is proceeding. A curious coincidence!

Season Score: 2.000

✪

Hell. Taxon

Buffalo Bills:

No Amount Of Podium Coachspeak Or Evasive Declamation Can Dispel The “Super Bowl Hangover” Allegations.

No one should be surprised by this, if you’ve been paying careful attention to the 2020s Bills. Yes, they’ve gotten better at not letting random off-the-wall losses to pathetic opponents totally derail their midseason jaunts in the past three years, and yes, the Bills have built up enough solidity from wins in September and October to be able to treat this blowout loss as a “learning experience,” but all the same – god DAMN was this one humbling, Buffalo. Someone – it might be Nick Wright, or it might be someone else in his orbit or who shares his profession, but someone nonetheless – once identified the annual regular season Bills-Chiefs game, so often bearing a great influence on playoff seeding and occasionally looking as though it will determine who gets the #1 seed and homefield advantage, as the “Bills’ Super Bowl.” The mocking implication being, of course, that the Bills will never play in a real Super Bowl, and must therefore take care to enjoyably best their AFC rivals before the playoffs come. Though deployed derisively and sarcastically, you’d have to be especially out of touch with the state of the modern NFL to see it as just a bit of joking, and not something with at least a smidgen of concrete insight into real-world goings-on, after a game like this happens. The Bills looked eminently and reproachably like a team that had just exerted itself to the utmost and had nothing left to unspool against the Dolphins in Miami, letting an early 7-0 molehill deficit metastasize into a mountain 16-0 one before the end of the first half. Two situational solecisms from Josh Allen turned what could have been a dispiriting if not doom-portending comeback win turn into a cataclysmic loss: first, an interception thrown in the endzone after a 14-play, 9-minute drive, and later, and far worse on the eyes, a Tush Push first down that turned into a fumble after Josh Allen decided to try and wring as many rushing yards as humanly possible out of a laggardly Dolphins tackling attempt. The defense could not get off the field quickly or often enough to give the offense sufficient chances to make up for their laxity, and the Dolphins offense careered through them like it was 2023 all over again. A one-off, negligible loss to a frustrated opponent chomping at the bit to unleash some pent-up energy on an emotionally-drained contender that just came off a massive win? Or a bundle of grave tidings for the coming playoffs and, horror of horrors, a “blueprint” for how to unsettle the Bills offense and impale their unstable defense? We will wait and see.

Season Score: 3.556

Carolina Panthers:

No, No, No, Panthers – This Was More Than Just One Step Backward After A Massive Bound Forward In Green Bay.

Like a ship being tossed from port to starboard and back again on a tempestuous sea, the Panthers seem to be living through one dramatic heave after another. Their madhouse of a season continued on Sunday against New Orleans, who looked to have been firmly relegated to “Worst Team In The NFC South” status through a half-season of play. Paying no mind to the previous two months of blowouts and beatdowns, though, the Saints reminded the Panthers just how close-by the spectral figure of embarrassing loss is to the big cats, who fresh off the biggest upset of the season dropped what has to be in contention for the biggest let-down of the season. Every Panthers game is a referendum on Bryce Young at this point – he’s an unavoidable lightning-rod of “Franchise QB” discourse and drawn-out think pieces on the true nature of quarterback-as-leader. No, he isn’t as obviously a miss as Josh Rosen, and no, he isn’t as polarizingly antisocial as Kyler Murray, but he also isn’t as much of a sure-thing as the gilt pedigree QBs of the NFL, and is decided below other undersized, contemporary QBs in toolsiness, such as Mayfield, Tagovailoa and even Rattler and Ward. He makes up for this with a penchant for pinpoint accuracy when protected, though, and has shown more than enough in this season alone to prove that he can start, and win, his fair share of games. But with negotiations for his second contract looming and no postseason success to show for his first two seasons in Carolina, a decision must be taken at some point on whether Bryce Young is the man for this team. While one should never presume to know the abysses and netherworldly swirls of machination that storm in David Tepper’s mind, the fashionable intelligence suggests that if you had to diagram the gravity of the franchise as it currently exists, Dave Canales would be winning the “tug of war” versus Bryce Young. Depending on how the rest of the season goes, one of them may be gone in 2026, and with Bryce Young the less-recent of the two additions to the franchise, the rational logician would identify Canales as the last man standing if change does come. Bryce Young is not “his” quarterback in the same way that Patrick Mahomes is Andy Reid’s or Josh Allen Sean McDermott’s, and you needn’t puzzle till your puzzler is sore to see the Panthers wanting a toolsier, bigger, faster, stronger, and, frankly, sightlier presence in the backfield if the slumps continue and the team doesn’t reach the postseason. But as noted above, one week brings disaster to Carolina, and the next brings dreaminess – this could all be for naught if they have a winning record down the stretch and shoulder their way into the 6 or 7 seed.

Season Score: 2.900

Green Bay Packers:

Who Are These Impostors, And What Have They Done With The Packers We Knew, Loved And Cherished?

A football season is like a lot of things – endless analogies can be formulated in service of description. One thing that a football team is like is a car, and the season, a long road trip. You need fuel, and in no small amount, to get to your preferable destination – the Super Bowl – without having to stop off in some less well-furnished, poorly-appointed econo-scape. You either need a lot of fuel, a lot of refuelings, or a huge tank of gas to get there. And while it’s difficult to diagnose what the make and model of each of the 32 NFL team cars are in-season, I think it’s safe to say one can be worried that the Packers spent too much fuel gunning down the early straightaways to be totally confident in their reserves for the steep climbs ahead. That was a tortured analogy, but it was a tortured game, and Jordan Love doesn’t keep his hands at 10 and 2 on the steering well quite so well as you’d like. Two high leverage failures basically totaled the Packers’ milk wagon in this race with the Eagles – the Jordan Love strip-sack fumble at the end of the first half, and the hurry-up, uncreative, easily-snuffed-out handoff to Josh Jacobs on 4th down late in the game, which the Packers didn’t convert and which could have been called back anyway on an illegal formation. The Packers actually don’t deserve credit for keeping this one close – if anything, the Eagles’ offense played very much down to the low standards the Packers offense set. You can give the defense kudos for not letting it get out of hand, but then again, just about every defense shuts down the Eagles these days – it’s nothing special to bottle up Saquon Barkley anymore. Tucker Kraft’s absence loomed weightily over the cast of this game, and the lack of Christian Watson’s stepping-up to be a true WR1 coming back from a long injury might have been the biggest difference between these two teams. If anyone deserves a game ball (and maybe no one does) in this game, it was DeVonta Smith, who darkened the physiognomies of Packer fans, coaches and players just enough to account for the game’s sole passing touchdown. Josh Jacobs alone isn’t enough to defeat the best of the best the NFC has to offer – where have you gone, late 2023 Jordan Love? Packers Nation would like to turn its lonely eyes to you, but your current incarnation is pretty bad. Add to this admixture of offensive ice the weird but, tellingly, not-immediately-brushed-off question from a reporter to Matt LaFleur in the postgame presser about the seventh-year head coach potentially “coaching for his job,” and you have a situation in Title Town desperately in need of some dopamine. They’re still 5-3-1 and not yet in danger of falling completely out of the playoffs, but this is a far cry from the season the Pack envisioned unfolding when they traded for Micah Parsons – who, granted, has been a total beast. He needs to be rewarded more for his labors by his underperforming offense in the weeks to come.

Season Score: 2.889

Pittsburgh Steelers:

Make Room, Allegheny Cemetery. Another Promising Tomlin Steelers Season Is Going In The Family Crypt.

Mike Tomlin is the longest-tenured head coach* in the NFL. He’s been around the block enough times to know how to approach adversity as it manifests in football teams. Similarly, we the football public have been around Tomlin long enough to know what sorts of problems he specializes in smoothing over and what problems might be beyond the powers of the quick-with-a-turn-of-phrase coach whose podium delights can go a long way in making up for his team’s boring if victorious brand of football. On Sunday night, there were no answers – and we shouldn’t expect them to arrive. A statistic that never grows weary of its repetition is this: T.J. Watt has never won a playoff game. It’s fascinating to think about, even though it should be obvious to anyone who has studied the Steelers, kept up with their drafts and acquisitions, and watched their fortunes fall since late January of 2017. That’s the last time this team won a postseason game – against Alex Smith and the pre-Patrick Mahomes Chiefs. Patrick Mahomes was not even on the team yet, he had not even been drafted. Nor had Watt. They would both be selected in the first round by the respective teams involved in an eminently forgettable if entertaining 18-16 Steelers win in Arrowhead the following spring, but that game was the beginning of the end of Tomlin Ball. They trudged along for one more season with the “Killer Bs” – Ben Roethlisberger, Le’Veon Bell, and Antonio Brown – before an electroshock stunner loss at home in the Divisional Playoffs to Jacksonville took them firmly out of the “glory days.” The following season, Le’Veon Bell held out, and the Steelers lost out on the last playoff spot when rookie Baker Mayfield lost to the division-winning Ravens. The one seed in that tournament was those same Chiefs from two years previous, now firmly in their blazing heyday and counting among their 2018 plunders a 42-37 win and six-touchdown day from Patrick Mahomes in his first year as starter. It seemed quite true that the Steelers had let the game pass them by – true, their offense was still mostly formidable, and their defense was still largely competent, but the best of the best in the conference, those that the Steelers just could not beat, were no longer only the Patriots. The Chiefs, the Ravens, the Chargers and even the struggling Broncos and Raiders had taken them down (the Steelers went 0-4 against the AFC West that year), and since then, it seems that the Steelers’ store of “bankable wins” – teams that their 2014-17 incarnations would handle with little difficulty – has diminished each year, even if slowly. This latest humiliation, on national TV, brings a new dimension to the disappointment that Steelers fans have come to expect: one of non-competitiveness. At no point did the Steelers offense threaten to take over the game; at very few points after the initial few drives did the Steelers defense do anything more than stand feebly in the path of the rampaging Chargers offense. Indeed, the thing the Steelers are best at right now is kicking long field goals – Chris Boswell might be their most reliable player, anywhere, and he’s in the conversation with Cam Little, Brandon Aubrey and Jake Bates for best of the best. But outside him? Age is gnawing away at this team – Watt is in his ninth season and has never looked as invisible, down-to-down, as he does now; the offense, helmed by 41-year-old Aaron Rodgers and staffed with few difference makers, also feels like it’s seen better days, even if new faces make up most of the key roles. When you watch the Steelers, you see a team that not only struggles to destroy the bad teams in this league, but struggles to keep pace with the good, and finds itself incapable of challenging the great. Do not forget how little the Steelers actually “shut down” the Colts two weekends ago – turnovers, turnovers and more turnovers comprise the only reason that Indianapolis wasn’t able to have a chance at a win late in that one. Jaylen Warren may be a “true” RB1, D.K. Metcalf the equivalent at WR, and Rodgers the equivalent at QB, but none of them have any argument for being the best at their position – in Tennessee, where OC Arthur Smith once thrived, all three principals had at least an argument towards such honors in their prime. Of course this team has a shot to deny a resurgent Baltimore team a division title, and of course they’re still in the playoff hunt. But what makes anyone think this team, the most “all-in” team the Steelers have ever fielded under Tomlin, can actually capture hardware this year?

Season Score: 2.889

Jacksonville Jaguars:

Playing In Their Soulless, History-Denying, Unremarkable All-Whites, The Jags’ Seriousness Evaporated.

We’ve had a few different games like this one this season now, and the point that I’ve raised before bears repeating: If you take a large lead on another team and then surrender it, any chance of one team not scoring a 2 or a 1 on the Hell Yeah Hierarchy star scoring system goes out the window. Naturally, a team that builds the large lead, surrenders it, then gains it back and holds on to win will have a higher score than this (they won, after all), but woe to the team that builds and burns the lead – your lot is doom, despair, and denigration. And thus we come to the Jacksonville Jaguars. Comebacks of any stripe are distasteful to fans of the team that lets a comeback happen to them, but there is something especially displeasurable about a comeback that happens imperfectly – that is to say, when one team erases a large deficit without having to play perfect football. That’s what happened, in puke-inducing contours, to the Jaguars courtesy of a late, unforseeable, and irrepressible Texans surge. The Jaguars were up, 29-10, on Houston (a 19-point deficit that, unlike the next team down on the list, the Texans tried to erase in the most efficient way possible); they wound up losing 36-29. The Jaguars scored the game’s first 17 points, the Texans scored its final 26. Notably the Texans comeback came courtesy of three straight touchdowns that did not feature extra points or 2-point conversions after them; indeed, the final 18 points of that Texans comeback were all from touchdowns with no points-after. An utterly bizarre mathematical day in the National Football League, and fittingly, a scorigami. 36-29 is technically a 7-point win for the Texans, so it’s odd that this exact final score has never occurred before, but I digress. The Jaguars wish it was still an un-accomplished final score, as well they should: their attempt at defending the lead was pathetic. All three touchdowns the Texans scored (before the final meaningless one, a defensive touchdown as time expired by Sheldon Rankins, the perennially underrated) came on 3rd down; two of them came on 3rd and 10+, including the one that gave Houston the lead, which was an inarticulate masterpiece of a scramble by Davis Mills that put the Texans up 30-29. Needing only a field goal – but lacking any timeouts – the Jaguars had a golden opportunity to give all-universe kicker Cam Little a shot at a makeable, or a record-setting, field goal, but Trevor Lawrence took an utterly inexcusable sack on the first play of the next drive. A 21-yard scramble of 2nd and 19 didn’t get them close enough for even Cam Little to attempt a trebuchet, so one more play was called with 13 seconds left. This time Parker Washington collected the ball and put them further up into nigh-field goalable territory, but Chuma Edoga was called for illegal use of hands. Then on the final play, the nightmare terminated, with the duo of Will Anderson and Sheldon Rankings sacking and recovering Trevor Lawrence and the football. But it’s the previous touchdown that will agonize the Jags and their fans for years to come, along with the sack of Lawrence to start the drive. In context, those might be the two worst individual plays of the Trevor Lawrence era (there are many to choose from). This team, which learned during the week that the IR designation of Travis Hunter would be a season-ending one due to reconstructive surgery the WR/CB had opted into, is in something very close to freefall, and excuses can no longer conceal their shortcomings. Their only hope now to challenge Indianapolis for the division would be to sweep their South rivals, but it’s looking more and more like the real drama of the second half of the Jags’ season will not be a duel for divisional dominion, but for simple playoff participation.

Season Score: 2.667

Washington Commanders:

You Can No Longer Deceive Yourself Into Believing Dan Quinn Will Become A Better Version Of His Past Self.

A funereal, exasperated, and wholly predictable din of denunciation descended across the Northwest Stadium bleachers as the full face and full figure of President Donald Trump deluminated the jumbotron. The sitting President had used the occasion of Veteran’s Day, which fell on the Tuesday of the coming week, to make an appearance at the embattled Commanders’ home turf, and it’s an open who is more despised in Washington, D.C. proper right now – he or Dan Quinn, in whose persona the natural focalizations of rage at the government shutdown and the competitive unwinding of the city’s main sports team have made their nest. It’s a small enough thing in an otherwise monumental blowout, but it’s worth mentioning. Daron Payne, a spirited if at times vacuous defensive tackle, delivered a half-hearted punch to the facemask of Amon-Ra St. Brown after the third Lions drive of the day resulted in the third Lions touchdown of the day. This moved the spot from which the Lions would have to launch a 2-point conversion attempt from the Washington 2-yard line to the Washington 1-yard line. Dan Campbell, ever the aggressor, went for 2 up 17 to turn a 17-point game into a 19-point one. Dan Quinn’s Commanders, to their credit, scored a touchdown on the following drive – and did not go for 2. Choosing to turn what was now a 22-9 game into a 22-10 game instead of a 22-11 game meant that the Commanders, if they had any chance at coming back, would now need two touchdowns instead of a touchdown, 2-point conversion, and field goal to erase the deficit, which a touchdown and 2-point conversion on their initial touchdown drive would have enabled them to aim for. None of it mattered, ultimately – the Lions smoked the Washingtonians right out of their home stadium like they were the British army in 1814 – and never let it get close enough that Dan Quinn had to regret his decision. That’s the sadder ending between two sad ending options: the Commanders are so bad that the errant game management decisions of Dan Quinn can go unpunished because the larger level of competitiveness put forth by his team wholly overshadows such peccadillos. Never mind that the Washington defense, which Dan Quinn, nominally and historically a defensive head coach, should be the strength of this team with their QB1 out and investments in veterans on that side of the ball lading the offseason news cycle; this offense, which exploded out of the gates in Jayden Daniels’ rookie year, bears not a molecule of resemblance to the fluid, flexible, dynamic and deep-strike-capable unit that downed defenses throughout the 2024 season, Daniels’ presence or no. It will be very interesting to see what will happen with regard to various things, sportswriter Jon Bois once said. I must echo him on these points. Will Dan Quinn definitely be back in 2026? Will Kliff Kingsbury? Will Deebo Samuel, Von Miller, Laremy Tunsil, Javon Kinlaw and Matt Gay take it up a notch this season and give the team a better ROI than they have been giving so far? Will Jayden Daniels return, eventually? Will the Commanders even be in a position for his return to matter, meaningfully, at any future point? Will Dan Quinn do anything – can he do anything – to ensure the materialization of any of the foregoing? The answer to none of these questions is definitely yes nor definitely no, and patience, as well as vigilance, is warranted in each case. This isn’t how this season was supposed to go, QB1 available or unavailable, and you don’t get paid as an NFL head coach to throw in the towel the minute your roster isn’t 100% healthy. Right now this is the worst team in the NFC East, and by far the most disappointing.

Season Score: 2.600

Atlanta Falcons:

The Lack Of Acumen From Atlanta’s Coaching Staff Ever Astounds. Was This Their Götterdämmerung?

The götterdämmerung, or “Twilight of the Gods,” is the central event in the final act in Richard Wagner’s epic Germanic saga of myth, revenge, and fate, the “Nibelung Ring” cycle. It involves the final destiny and, indeed, apocalypse of an ending age. In the case of that subject matter, that fleeting age was one of gods, demigods, heroes and monsters, and deserved as pomp-ridden and magisterial an operatic climax as the human mind could conceive of. These Falcons need no such eruption, outpouring, or exaltation – in fact those of us who watch this team would be fine leaving the theater, letting Arthur Smith handle the termination business, then returning as though only a short intermission had broken up the long and tragic cycle that is the succession of Falcons seasons, one on top of the other. As Jonathan Taylor and the Colts plodded smoothly forward on the German playing surface, every self-respecting Falcons fan came to grips with the same hard reality – they were not going to stop the Indy offense short of the endzone. The Falcons defense has shown itself to be decent, even superb, at chowing down on less-talented adversaries who can’t mount a suitable defense against their energetic and youthful pass rush, but it hasn’t yet proven it can come alive late in a close game where the opposing offense has been able to find success already. It’s not a trait exclusive to Raheem Morris amidst the Chthonic pantheon of uninspiring Falcons head coaches, but it is a hallmark of his as well as of others: this team doesn’t finish the job. It can’t close ‘em out. Instead of showing the team Jesse Owens highlights in the buildup to this game, sports and American hero though he is, Morris might have instead elected to show them Mariano Rivera or Dennis Eckersley highlights to instill a sense of how to end a game in stoic, manly fashion. The whole team identity would need to change for that contingency to come about, though, because right now this team’s defining characterization is one of pliancy, of dispassion, and of firelessness. You saw it in the “tackling” of Jonathan Taylor on his 83-yard touchdown to take the lead midway through the fourth. You saw it in the Falcons’ inability to keep the Colts out of field goal range when they trailed 25-22 late with almost no time remaining. You saw it in their final drive of regulation, when they went backwards like a vanquished army fleeing the barbarians. And you saw it in their first, and only, drive of overtime, when they went backwards again, after taking the ball first in overtime despite the new rules guaranteeing a possession regardless of touchdown on the first drive, and punted the ball, and the game, away to the Colts. Relying on a young, raw, and talented-but-not-too-talented team to play hardball against the best offense in the NFL is one thing, but asking them to overcome the appallingly brainless timeout usage and associated game management decisions of Raheem Morris is simply impossible. The man did not understand how or when to use any of the six timeouts he had on Sunday, and it is a certainty he will not learn how to do this part of the JD capably if he hasn’t already. And, on that note, once more I must make the threnodial inquiry: if you can’t manage the game well, and if your defense sucks most of the time, what would you say you do here? It is only a matter of time, and a matter of several more losses that resemble this one in shape, closeness and stupidity, before Raheem Morris’s boss, Arthur Smith, starts asking that same question, and with painful pointedness.

Season Score: 2.556