(WEB) The Hell Yes Hierarchy: Week 14 2025.

Week Fourteen.

As you peer into the crystal ball of the future, it’s hard not to see one that includes the red and gold McDonalds-like colors of the Kansas City Chiefs. It’s less difficult but still jarring to think of the playoffs not possessing the deep purple and mustard gold of the Lamar Jackson-led Baltimore Ravens. It is incredibly un-challenging, and in fact taxing to even try to imagine the opposite, to think of the tropically inclined and perceptibly not-winterized Miami Dolphins invading the orderly ranks of the postseason with their newly run-heavy scheme that has scythed fluidly through the dregs of the NFL over the last month. And yet, with a month and change to go in the swift dwindling 2025 NFL regular season, that is the reality we’re faced with.

Let’s break this down counterclockwise. The Dolphins have missed the playoffs a fair deal since 2020, during the Tua Tagovailoa era. In their first year post-tank job, the Brian Flores-Tua partnership bore little fruit. As a result, the former Patriots coach turned often to Ryan Fitzpatrick (who started the season as starter and frequently was called in to play in a relief role for the rookie), wringing several unlikely wins – including a heart-stopper over Las Vegas when all hope seemed irretrievably lost – out of a roster that was clearly playing at a level far higher than the sum of its parts. But then came Week 17 in Buffalo. The Dolphins, despite already having 10 wins, needed one more to assure themselves of a playoff spot, sharing a 10-5 record with Baltimore, Cleveland, Indianapolis and Tennessee – and finding themselves behind the division leaders Kansas City (14-1), Buffalo (12-3) and Pittsburgh (12-3) – in a remarkably competitive year in the AFC. Despite their best efforts, Buffalo proved that they were superior in just about every which way, annihilating the plucky Dolphins 56-26 and denying them, a 10-win team, a chance at the playoffs, a doubly-cruel fate seasoned with additional suffering by the fact that this was the first year that each conference would send 7 instead of 6 delegates to the postseason. Ouch. This year, though, some five years after the events of late December 2020 and with the light of the Tua era seemingly beginning to dim greatly, the Dolphins have a chance to make the playoffs again – once again as a 10-win team, once again with far less surety than they’d have hoped for even if they get to the double-digit win mark by virtue of another excessively competitive AFC playoff hopeful field. They’re 6-7 right now – they almost certainly need to win out to even have a shot at January ball (one thing, among many, that I dislike about the 17-game schedule is that “January football” technically encompasses part of the regular season too, but you understand what I’m driving at here). There’s no reason the Dolphins can’t win their remaining slates, though: they face the Steelers next Monday night, which will be tough because of the elements but not necessarily because of the opponent as Pittsburgh has shown itself to be nothing if not an inconsistent, occasionally feisty but mostly underwhelming team who cannot be relied upon to certainly take care of their business on any given Sunday, regardless of opponent. Then they have two home games against the Bengals and Buccaneers, two teams that faltered gigantically on this most recent Sunday, and who can be run upon and run away from as their defenses have shown. Finally, on January 4, the season finale, the Dolphins will play at Foxborough against the Patriots. But at 11-2 with three eminently beatable teams on the Pats’ schedule between now and their final game against the Fins, the Pats will most likely be in a position whereby they do not need to win against Miami to secure the #1 spot in the AFC playoffs, as they may have already clinched it at 14-2; resting starters seems quite likely. If so, the Dolphins can win that one, too; even if the Patriots don’t rest their starters, it’s not unlike the Pats-Dolphins rivalry to showcase a late-season Patriots loss to the usually inferior Fins that gives Bostonian hopefuls things to neurotically fret about as the playoffs get underway. They’ve done it in seasons past and they could do it in season present. If they get in, the three-headed Cetacean monster of De’Von Achane, Ollie Gordon and Jaylen Wright would not be a pleasant sight in the estimation of any opposing defense seeking to romp untrammeled over a team traditionally treated as one unsuited to the brutalities of midwinter.

For the Dolphins to be in a spot where their Week 18 opponent may feel disinclined to play all-out in their regular season finale, they would need an assist from one Kansas City Chiefs, who are now in as tight a pinch as they’ve ever found themselves during the Reid-Mahomes partnership. Kansas City, you may remember, was last situated in a potentially postseasonless quagmire in 2014, when Alex Smith suffered through a steep regression in his second year in KC and the concluding convulsions of the Romeo Crennel/Todd Haley offensive personnel wriggled, sputtered, and flamed out, this group’s hideous death throes exemplified indelibly in the ludicrous statistician’s factoid that not a single touchdown was caught by a Chiefs wide receiver in 2014. Despite the horrendous passing attack (which incidentally featured the first brushstrokes on the canvas of Travis Kelce’s career, whose NFL story had gotten off to a belated start after he missed his rookie 2013 season with injury), Kansas City meandered its way to 7-3 through 11 weeks, but then suffered a 2-3 penultimate five weeks to the season which dropped them to 8-7 and eleventh in the conference, which meant their final tilt with then-San Diego could only determine if the Chargers, then at 9-6 and one win away from that magical number 10, got in or were kept out. To KC’s credit, they beat the disappointing Chargers, 19-7, and finished with the same record as their powder blue (then mostly navy blue) rivals. Four teams finished 9-7 in the AFC that year, and the AFC North sent three teams, all with 10 or 11 wins, to the playoffs. Like that season, this Chiefs team will almost certainly need to get to 10 wins to even have a chance at the playoffs, and even then, they won’t control their own fate. If they win out, they would give both themselves and Miami a better chance at the playoffs pending the deeper tiebreakers which take into consideration strength of schedule and record, as a potential KC defeat of Denver in those teams’ upcoming Week 17 game (on Christmas Day, because that’s what the jolly Chiefs do every year now, I guess) would solidify New England’s hold on the #1 seed, potentially making their Week 18 game with Miami a moot point. There’s all to play for!

Then we come to that team that stole San Diego’s playoff spot in 2014 – the Baltimore Ravens. They’re in an agonizing fix. After starting 1-5 and turning out a defense that bore less of a resemblance to the great defensive teams that have defined Baltimore’s heritage than Denver Russell Wilson bore to Seattle Russell Wilson, the Ravens seemed to start to find their footing, rattling off a five-win stretch that included victories over such powerhouses as the J.J. McCarthy Vikings, Dillon Gabriel/Shedeur Sanders Browns and the Tyrod Taylor Jets. Dominance, sheer dominance. But then they had to play the Bengals and, importantly, their back-from-IR quarterback Joe Burrow, on Thanksgiving night, and got handled. More accurately, they themselves did the handling, by handing the game on a silver turkey platter to Cincinnati to the tune of five offensive turnovers, including an utterly exasperating fumble-turned-touchback by tight end Isaiah Likely – who was, as it happened, not finished with his authorship of end zone embarrassments, a fact we’ll return to later. Another loss followed, bringing a team that was 1-5, and then 6-5, back to 6-7 and in a state of both desperate, urgent terror as to their 2025 playoff hopes and, more drearily, existential terror regarding the long-term trajectory of this team. No one is necessarily in the crosshairs yet, but when you lose, yet again, to a Steelers team with a worse or more objectionable quarterback, worse or more objectionable skill players, and a defense that might be better but always seems to coax Lamar into his very worst performances, one has to ask, as a neutral observer, just how many losses to one’s biggest rival would constitute sufficient grounds to consider other options – at QB, at HC, at everywhere. But these are three teams – three teams that because of their storied past, and muddled present, are fascinating. There are lots of others just as good, and better. Let’s fly, reader!

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“Hell Yes!!!” Taxon

Los Angeles Rams:

On Days Like This, You Remember: Darnold-JSN Is Merely A Cheap Imitation Of Stafford-Nacua.

It was simply another day at the office – not their own office, an office of a competitor, to be sure, but an office in which it was possible to transact lucrative and prosperous custom nonetheless – for the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday. It wasn’t especially gaudy, by their standards; it wasn’t especially eye-popping, also by those lofty standards they set for themselves; and it wasn’t humiliating to the opponent, as those things go. But whenever you the viewer found yourself needing to step away from screen and couch to get the pizza or pour a glass of something, when you came back and really pondered the score, you thought to yourself: “My God…these Rams are ROLLING.” It’s been difficult to find a truly suitable comp for the probable MVP season that Matthew Stafford is enjoying, but I think I’ve hit upon one: it’s his Aaron Rodgers 2020. A quarterback whose physical skills are waning, and fast, but whose neuromancer nous is at a snowcap peak rarely reached by athletes who don’t play deep into their late 30s. Matthew Stafford has done almost everything right without racking up the kind of “highlight” style plays that have defined recent MVP campaigns like those of Josh Allen, Lamar Jackson, Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers (twice!), but he has another positive trait on his side: he’s old, he’s played well for a looong time, he’s the chieftain of the best team in the NFC and he feels “deserving” – deserving over the course of a career, that is. He still needs to string a couple more statistically pleasing games together to win solely on merit, but frankly, he doesn’t need to do that to win it outright: the voters will take a look at his stats, his team’s record, the gray in his beard and his accumulated career numbers and say “hell, just give it to the old man.” I’m not going to sit here and say he isn’t worthy of the honor – he probably is. As for this game specifically, what can you say? The Rams are in the enviable position that many great teams who’ve enjoyed sustained success found themselves in: blessed with a divisional rival who is essentially a pushover, a doormat, a tune-up game. Not only was the Rams’ 45-17 dismantling of the Cardinals a welcome respite from the hard-fought games they’ve had to play recently against the Panthers, Buccaneers and Seahawks, but it of course gave them yet another divisional win – and yet another leg-up on the still-surging 49ers. With the Lions and Seahawks coming in Weeks 15 and 16, the Rams needed something for the pain after their heartbreaking, and very much Stafford-led, defeat at the hands of the Panthers. If they can just split those games, they get the cremains of the Falcons and Cardinals in Weeks 17 and 18. That Week 17 game in particular, a prime time affair against a Falcons team whose coaches’ offices will probably already be packed, might be the exclamation point at the end of the declarative sentence of the season: “MATTHEW STAFFORD IS MVP!” Then they get the Cardinals again, who might be so downtrodden at that point that they themselves aren’t playing their regular starters. It’s not insane to think that things might be going so well for the Rams by that point that they won’t even need to win that one to retain their #1 seed status in the NFC. Days of wine and roses in L.A., with hope and power animating everything, is what Sean McVay needed. One more Super Bowl win for the Rams, and for McVay and Stafford specifically, would move them into an exceedingly rarefied territory – and if they get there, it’s not impossible that both would come back, for one more, in 2026, to challenge the Chiefs and Eagles as THE team of the 2020s. This could be a special team – if they can keep it rolling. There’s another key piece of the equation, of course – in fact there are 52 others, along with the entire assistant coaching staff – but the main one is Puka Nacua, who has basically had the best 2.75-year start to a career a wide receiver has ever had if you account for his per-game stats. He’s a walking, talking 10-for-175 statline, and on Sunday he proved why. He isn’t quite the same archetype as Cooper Kupp, though there are many similarities, but Puka is actually better at making contested catches, which makes Matthew Stafford, who is already probably the best quarterback in the NFL at reading the entire field, almost impervious to mistake-making. Just take a look at some of the over-the-helmet-of-the-defender catches and runs-through-contact at the end of his YAC yardage he authored yesterday. He doesn’t have the frame and musculature of a D.K. Metcalf or Terrell Owens type, but he has every club you could ask for in the bag. He’s an exterminator whose verminous specialty is man coverage. The Rams haven’t felt this good since late 2021. The word of the week for the Rams, employed numerous times in this write-up so far, is “ROLLING.” They need to keep it that way. If they can, they’re champs.

Season Score: 3.769

Detroit Lions:

On Again, Off Again. On, Off. That’s The Cadence With Dan Campbell Playcalling. This Time, Detroit Was ON.

I urge you, if you haven’t already, to go and watch the stunningly sweeping and touchingly humanist work of sports journalism “The Bob Emergency” by Jon Bois – specifically the segment in Part I discussing 1940’s Major League Baseball pitcher Bob Lemon. Bois notes the inherent absurdity of being a professional athlete who needs to figure out a new skill in the middle of their pro career – in Bob’s case, it’s pitching, and in Dan Campbell’s case, it’s playcalling. There are bad endings to this sort of thing, like when Matt Patricia tried to go from defensive coordinator to offensive coordinator, but there are good endings too, like Bob Lemon getting to the Hall Of Fame. Through a month and change of being a playcaller, Dan Campbell is somewhere in the middle – but he’s getting closer to the Bob Lemon side of things with every game he calls like this. Only one team has authored a game in 2025 where they ran fewer than 60 plays, average 7 or more yards a play, scored at least 44 points and did not turn the ball over. It’s the Lions, and they’ve done it twice – against the Bears and the Cowboys, two teams that could very easily make the playoffs (though the Cowboys, by dint of having to play the juggernaut Lions in their den, just made things harder for themselves). Only one of those games, the most recent one against Dallas, came with Dan Campbell calling the plays – but he also was the maestro writing the sheet music for the Lions’ carnage-wreaking of the Commanders a few weeks ago, too, which because the Lions ran 68 plays doesn’t qualify for the above statistical measure. If you want to remove the number of plays run and simply look at games in ’25 where teams scored 44+, average 7+ yards-per-play, and didn’t give the ball away, you’re left with five games – three are courtesy of these Lions. It might be tempting to view these cats differently because the concentration of offensive perspicacity and precocity isn’t located in a single personage anymore, with Ben Johnson gone, but even if the responsibilities have been divested into play designer (Morton) and play caller (Campbell), you can still recreate Ben Johnson in the aggregate. Johnson, Morton, Campbell – it doesn’t seem to matter against Dallas. The Lions simply have the Cowboys number right now. It’s the second time in as many games they’ve gone over 44 points and simply had their way with the Cowboys defense, which makes sense: the Lions have absolutely perfected a uniquely modern and uniquely suited-to-the-age combination offense that blends smashmouth with precision and makes the Cowboys look not only small but soft. Jahmyr Gibbs’ three rushing touchdowns – on only 12 attempts – attest to such. This is a nasty, nasty team right now if the passing game and fourth-down decisions don’t get too off-base, and even if those are two issues that definitive contenders will have ways of complicating for the Lions, for the next month, the Lions can afford to figure themselves out a bit. A matchup against the Rams in Los Angeles in Week 15 will tax their defense and offense mightily. If they could ever find a way to win that game, perhaps by studying in excruciating detail how the Panthers bedeviled the Stafford-led attack, they could finagle themselves into incredible position before the playoffs – they still have the Vikings and Bears left, and a perfect final month (no sure thing, of course) could bring them as high as the 1 seed if a couple things break their way. The only way that happens is by Jared Goff outgunning his old mentor, though, and if the Lions don’t find a way to win that one, their homefield advantage and their divisional hopes are both probably gone. Much to play for in Motor City.

Season Score: 3.615

Green Bay Packers:

More And More, This Team Looks Like One That Watched Tape Of The Eagles Game And Said, “Never Again.”

Matt LaFleur is BACK. For a few years there, it looked like the game might not be as malleable, as supremely willing to be harnessed to his will, as knowable as it once was for the Green Bay coach who kicked off his career with three straight 13-win seasons. There were murmurs in 2022 of the elegant beauty that had defined the first three years of the LaFleur-Rodgers partnership, and it was only an anguishing collapse in the 2023 Divisional Playoffs against San Francisco that kept the Pack from reaching another conference championship and, who knows, maybe another Super Bowl. But last year the juice was never all the way there. Those days, this team showed in the late first half and throughout the second against Chicago, are over and done with. And Jordan Love is more than suitable as mayoral candidate of Title Town’s chief municipal organ. Jordan Love is BACK, baby. The guy we thought might have been just a flash in the pan during the last weeks of 2023 and first few playoff games of 2024 looks like he has returned with all the familiar, unorthodox, joyful-to-behold quarterback traits: a somewhat gangly lightness on his feet, a throwing motion that often involves something approaching a fluttering jump-pass, and a kind of anti-Peyton Manning-ish long-striding pocket presence that, while susceptible to pressure when it gets to him, allows him to glide gracefully back and forth in the pocket while his receivers get open. This style of play hasn’t always worked, but it is inextinguishably his, and with toolsy WR1 Christian Watson returning to full strength and carving out a clear X role in this offense, it’s working now. The offense is gearing up for the playoff push, which is good, because in the past two games, the defense has allowed the other team to keep it very, very close. Too close for a Super Bowl hopeful, frankly. But they’ve still won, and in addition to the passing game, the generous inclusion of Josh Jacobs, who is a December Flower to write rhapsodically home about, has allowed the defense to not have to make more than one or two key stops in the second half. The defense can still do that, by the way; the defense was the unit that finished this game out, with Keisean Nixon giving Cheesehead Nation the dual delicacy of intercepting the final fourth down pass from Caleb Williams – which even though a batted pass would have won the game as well just makes this rivalry game feel more gleefully destructive in its ending – and then propounding a profane and self-aggrandizing statement in his postgame remarks that seemed both purely stream-of-consciousness and utterly captive (in a good way) to the moment of victory. This is why Packers-Bears is awesome when both teams are good. For the Packers, they really needed this one; they are on a ROLL now, like the Rams, and have a difficult two-game road stand coming up in Denver and Chicago. Here’s the thing: Green Bay is colder than both of those places, and the Packers play a kind of football that works everywhere. This can finally be Matt LaFleur’s Super Bowl team, and he can beat the pre-2024 Ryan Day allegations if that comes to pass. It can.

Season Score: 3.308

Jacksonville Jaguars:

Is It Jags-Colts? Is It In Jacksonville? Does The Universe Still Exist? Yes, Yes, Yes? Then It’s A 5-Star Win For JAX.

“Your victory was so complete,” Leonard Cohen muses in his brooding, groovy strain “Nevermind.” No better words could be employed to define how this contest went for the humming, talented, well-coached Jacksonville Jaguars, who in a single afternoon moved themselves decisively ahead of the Indianapolis Colts with a win and saw the Colts’ man of the hour, Daniel Jones, crumple on the EverBank Stadium with a ruptured Achilles, probably finishing the Colts season. They could have used some help from Kansas City later on in the evening to really cement their stranglehold, but who cares? Trevor Lawrence, Devin Lloyd, Jakobi Meyers, Trevor Etienne and the ringleader Liam Coen have a division championship in view and have taken care of all the important games so far – nothing says they cannot go onward in this way to the playoffs.  The kings of the AFC South reside not in Indianapolis. The kings of Jacksonville reside, unquestionably, in Jacksonville. Obviously. But if you’re a betting man or woman who wants to find a road team to wager your money on, you simply could not do worse than betting on the Colts to win in Jacksonville. The last time that happened, Blake Bortles was a rookie, Marcus Mariota was playing his way to a Heisman Trophy with the Oregon Ducks, and the wanton deflation of NFL footballs was proceeding untrammeled in Foxborough, MA. The Jaguars have a weird, metaphysical way of always becoming the very best versions of themselves whenever they host the Colts, and the case was the same this time round: Trevor Lawrence, who profiles as an interesting comparison point with Colts Daniel Jones, looked every bit the prototypical big-arm mobile QB, the Jags’ receivers looked like a chemistry-brimming, complementary, dangerous lot, Travis Etienne looked like he’d recaptured his 2022 straight-line speed, and the defense, led by the inimitable and underrated Devin Lloyd, made the going unbearably tough for the Colts, even before Jones was replaced by rookie Riley Leonard. It has been an almost unthinkable two weeks in the AFC South: the Colts have tumbled, probably irreversibly, from their perch, Houston has risen up to crush five straight offenses (beginning with these Jaguars, who were reeling at the time), and the Jaguars have shaken off shaky games from October and early November to morph into a well-coached, hard-to-handle operation that could easily continue siphoning the divisional lead from their enemies in Houston and Indy. At some point this team will face true adversity, but for now, the high of first-year head coach Liam Coen looks awfully similar to the emboldening mojo that Doug Pederson brought with him in his first year in Duval, and as we all know, that was enough for the 2022 Jaguars to win a division and a playoff game. These Jags have that same young, bright air about them – and while you’d prefer T Law to be on pace to throw for 5,000 yards and a hundred touchdowns, isn’t it heartening to know that this team can just as surely win by three-plus scores when he throws for under 250 yards and just two touchdowns? Imagine what can happen when he really steeps himself in the Air Coen scheme. I know – we’ve said the same thing about Trevor before after brief, inspiriting flashes, but maybe this is the coach that does, at last, unlock him.

Season Score: 3.077 

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“Hell Yeah.” Taxon

Seattle Seahawks:

This Team Endured The Final, Dying Spasms Of Raheem Morris’s Falcons In 1H. Then, They Set Fire To The ATL.

The Seahawks haven’t been a good team this year – they have been a great one. And the proper way to gauge the greatness or ungreatness of teams when they might be living on the edge between goodness and greatness is by how they comport themselves in games where they possess clear superiorities to their opponents. Teams like the Broncos, the Eagles, and the Buccaneers are always at risk of playing down to their opponent, not reaching the natural apogee realizable through their teams’ component parts, and winning way too close for comfort or (looking at you, Tampa) blowing one in grotesque fashion. But not these Seahawks. This is a full-spectrum, three-phase, four-quarter demolition crew with murderous and exhilarating energy, who absolutely can win it all. The Mike McDonald Seahawks can simply do no wrong once they’ve drawn blood from their opponent and their defense can pin its ears back. This game, which was somehow tied 6-6 at halftime, did not stay tied for long: Rashid Shaheed, who is looking like he might be the single best trade-deadline pickup a team made this year, bludgeoned the horrific Falcons kick coverage for a 100-yard return touchdown as the second half kicked off, and from there the Hawks played free and easy. The Seahawks, who racked up only 114 yards in the first half, exploded in the second, gouging Atlanta for 259 yards of offense and 24 points plus the 100 kick return yards and kickoff return touchdown – a 31-point volcano of destruction that no team, much less the Falcons of Raheem Morris and Jeff Ulbrich, could have possibly had an answer for. The indefatigable reception machine Jaxon Smith-Njigba made fools of the Falcons secondary, scoring twice in the second half and burning theoretical CB1 A.J. Terrell over and over to eventually end up with a 7-catch, 92-yard day – which if you want to be charitable about could actually be seen as a win for the Atlanta coverage unit given some of the eye-popping statlines the former Buckeye has put up this year which far exceed that figure. There’s nothing new to say about the Hawks defense, either; they are far too sound, far too athletic, and far too exotic in the presentations of coverage that they convey to enemy quarterbacks to be anything less than an impervious fortress wall to someone like Kirk Cousins, who completed only half of his passes and threw the ravening Seahawks defense two interceptions on the day. If there’s an issue with this team, it’s undoubtedly the inconsistent run game that they don’t always try to really get going – the Seattle backs combined for only 21 carries and 107 yards on the ground against the 24th-ranked Falcons rush defense. Curiously, the Falcons are also exactly 24th against the pass, but only 19th in total defense – but we’re not talking about the ridiculous Falcons right now, we’re talking about the Seahawks, the one relevant team that played in Mercedes-Benz Stadium this afternoon. Sam Darnold hasn’t really been the focus of national conversation this season – at least not anywhere near the same degree as last season, when his resurrection from the NFL’s career cemetery was the story for much of the season – and that’s fine for the Seahawks, who are a wide-receiver-and-defense-led team right now. In that way, they’re quite similar to the 2017-19 New Orleans Saints, a team that used Drew Brees less like a vanguard artillery commander and more like a backlines airstrike organizer whose chief responsibility was finding Michael Thomas, or, if he was double-covered, Alvin Kamara. This team doesn’t have an Alvin Kamara, but JSN is a worthy substitute for Michael Thomas. They went to the same school, after all. One other point of objection to this team would be, if we’re picking nits, Darnold’s penchant for interceptions and fumbles – he has 18 of those combined – but it hasn’t hurt the Hawks outside of one cataclysmic afternoon in Los Angeles. Not yet, anyway.

Season Score: 3.615

Buffalo Bills:

Josh Allen Is Irrepressibly Himself. It Doesn’t Always Work. But You’d Have To Be A Fool To Tinker With The Vision.

Colin Cowherd once said, speaking of Patrick Mahomes, that “when he trails late, it’s a challenge.” Left unsaid was an implied first stanza to that statement, which goes along the lines of “it’s not a burden.” And nothing is a burden to Josh Allen these days – his shoulders and shoulderpads are those of Atlas, and his labors those of Hercules. The Bengals, the Chiefs, whatever helpless victims remain on the schedule, whomever they face in the playoffs…all these trials are simply Herculean labors in the offing for the demigod who wears #17. And with the Chiefs circling the drain of a season that looks ever-increasingly like it will terminate in early January, this might just be the year… I said, waaayyy back in August, that the Bills had one route they could take if they wanted 2025 to be their Super Bowl year, at last: get the #1 seed, and avoid the Chiefs in the playoffs. Half of that statement remains correct – if this team faces the Chiefs in the playoffs, I still like the team with arrows on its helmet. But with the likelihood of that nightmare coming to be shrinking weekly and shrinking dramatically, they probably won’t have to. Unfortunately, another team in their own division is probably – probably – going to win both the AFC East and net the #1 seed. It’s a familiar foe – the New England Patriots. But I’m prepared to amend my statement from August: I do not think this Bills team needs anything more than the Chiefs to go away to have as good a shot as they’ve ever had and better to win a Lombardi Trophy. They have proved enough this season already. In this game, a rematch of the snowy deathtrap the Bills played against these same Bengals in January 2023 which ended what was then the Bills’ best shot yet at a Super Bowl, the game started much the same as that Divisional Playoff game did – with the Bills trailing by 10, early. What didn’t happen this time around was the Bills staying stuck in a dismaying neutral gear for the entire game. Instead, Josh Allen stayed true to himself, firing off missile after accurate missile and, importantly, not forcing any throws into tight windows but instead relying on his effervescent mobility to win against a depleted and dysfunctional Bengals defense when no easy completions presented themselves. That’s what this team needs to keep doing: trusting Josh Allen. Sure, they can mess around with the James Cook and Ray Davis-led running game late in the regular season, if it works. But it won’t work all the time, and it certainly won’t be as easy as turning around and putting the rock in the stomach of a running back come January. When the opposing defense clamps down on the patented Joe Brady rushing attack, Josh Allen needs to become Josh Allen. I think he can. That hasn’t always worked in the past, it is crucial to note; but look at the landscape of the AFC right now. It is entirely possible that the entire three-headed dragon of Josh Allen and Buffalo’s traditional postseason enemies (Kansas City, Cincinnati, and Baltimore) all miss the playoffs. If that is the case, I trust damn-the-torpedoes Josh Allen, who has come up short against quarterbacks of equal or superior talent, to get the better of clearly inferior ones like Bo Nix, Trevor Lawrence and 2025 Aaron Rodgers; I have almost as great an amount of faith in him besting a rising young star who is closing in on top-shelf status in Drake Maye. Bills fans: you should be as excited as you’ve been since late 2020 right about now, because, to borrow a phrase from Kurt Russell by way of Jeff Saturday, “This is your time.” 

Season Score: 3.538

Los Angeles Chargers:

For So Long, The Chargers Have Been That Team Without Luck Or Grit. This Team Could Not Be More The Opposite.

Justin Herbert, The Hero. Not “If Man,” the spurious slur foisted on the poor quarterback by negativity-gluttonous urchins searching hungrily for targets to shoot poison arrows at on social media, but Yes Man, the guy who affirmatively did what many have wanted him to for so long. Outside of a few nice totes of the rock from sidekicks Kimani Vidal and the finally-returned rookie Omarion Hampton, it was all in the battered and bruised and bloatedly swollen hands of Justin Herbert, who didn’t do a ton – but did do enough. No stat paddings, just successes in the win-loss column. No gaudy numbers, just grudging perseverance. And when the defense of the Chargers ensures that an Elizabethan drama of devilish evil is enacted on the opposing quarterback, that’s all that’s needed to escape a Philly fan-infested SoFi stadium with a ninth win. You can’t expect the Chargers to ever be the beneficiaries of good luck when it comes to truly intangible things like injuries or help from outside their own division, but with the occasionally comedic willpower of Jim Harbaugh and the utterly enamoring toughness of Justin Herbert, you can exorcise enough of the troublesome familiars that have spiritually pestered the Chargers franchise for as long, at least, as I’ve been alive. These are two Football Guys of the highest order, and when you have rock-solid, sometimes ludicrously self-confident leadership emanating like crackles of lightning from your head coach and quiet intrepidity wafting off the person of your starting quarterback, who simply refuses to miss a game if the injury he’s nursing hasn’t paralyzed him, you will defeat anyone in your path. That’s what the Eagles learned, in the hardest of ways, on Monday night. The Chargers showed up with animal intensity, self-assuredness that conjured thoughts far darker in hue than their all-powder blue getups, and luck – not always something you can generate for yourself, of course, but something that you can certainly be deserving of because of how you comport yourself. And there is no team to whom the spirits of the universe that govern, determine and dispense luck are more in arrears than the Chargers. It might seem like a diminution of the beautifully brutal defensive masterpiece that the Chargers worked on Monday night to mention “luck” as a significant factor in their win, but (and this is surely not always the case in the NFL – there’s tons of “dumb luck” too), in this specific instance, luck was without doubt the residue of design. The game turned on two factors: Justin Herbert’s legs, and the DBs’ ability to bat down balls – or bat them up. Forcing Jalen Hurts into three turnovers, if the takeaway torrent had stopped there, could be dismissed as purely luck. But they forced five. That’s style. That is intentionality. And when you play with a combination of panache and intention like that, luck will turn your way, eventually. It did on the final play of the game, in overtime, as the Eagles were driving for a game-winning touchdown. Just plays before, Jalen Hurts had fired off a near perfect pass into the deep left corner of the endzone for his behemoth wideout A.J. Brown. Brown’s fingertips grazed the leather of the ball – but defensive back Donte Jackson, dwarfed by the giant Gundam-like bulk of Brown, interfered with the spin of the ball just enough to force a drop. A terrible penalty on the next pre-snap period, on 4th and 4, gave the Eagles a first down and a new lease on life for the evening (it didn’t look like the defender who was whistled for encroachment actually transgressed into the neutral zone, but alas – that’s bad luck right there). Two passes to Dallas Goedert. First and 10 from the Chargers’ 17. And then, with the game on life support, it happened. Hurts, emboldened by an earlier pass between coverage windows to DeVonta Smith on 3rd and 16, decided to try his luck again. This time, fortune was against him. Jahan Dotson, who has carved out a deeply intermittent WR3 role on this team, traveled upfield toward the endzone for a game-winning score. Hurts tried to fire it in to him, but Cam Hart, a fifth-round sophomore season player who brought up the back end of Harbaugh’s first draft class, tipped the pass – and someone on the other end of the career span spectrum, Tony Jefferson, picked it off, tapping his toes near the sideline for Hurts’ fourth interception and fifth turnover, to give the Chargers a win from the heavens, 22-19. Tony Jefferson was a rookie the first year I ever bought a Madden video game, if you care to know. This is the sort of win the Chargers almost never effectuate or see through to the end; this is the sort of seemingly-inevitable, plodding game-winning drive that the Eagles, boring and disjointed though they often are, almost always sew up successfully. If there was ever a sign that it's a new season for new men, where the old tyrants of both AFC and NFC are fallen on the hardest of hard times, this game showed it. It’s the wrong city and the lyrics are obsolete, but queue it up anyway: SAN DIEGO SUPER CHARGERS!

Season Score: 3.308

Houston Texans:

Despite Protracted Stretches Of Moronic Torpor From Its Offense, This Team Is Too Tough To Not Be Scary.

Stubbornness, patience, and just a dash of playmaking from C.J. Stroud is enough to beat the 2025 Chiefs, who found themselves for the first time in a while on the receiving end of a truly brutal defense that conceded nothing and challenged absolutely everything attempted by the wounded Chiefs. The Texans’ maniacal defensive front didn’t get home on Patrick Mahomes as often as would have been expected against a makeshift, nearly strawman OL, but they pressured the QB enough to bat down passes, force tight window throws, and laugh off any attempts at establishing the run long enough to waltz archly out of Arrowhead with a 20-10 win. The events of Sunday shook up the AFC South with dramatic upheaval, making the next iteration of Jags-Texans appointment television. You mess with the bull, you get the horns. I’m the first person to ever make this joke in relation to the Texans. The Houston Texans did it – they fatally wounded the Chiefs. They did not deliver the final, killing blow, but they stuck them in the side with a gory horn and let the ichor of this age’s football gods begin to flow weakeningly out. What’s most surprising about this game – though at this point, perhaps it shouldn’t be – is how this offense did the bare minimum and still won. A cursory look at the rushing stats of Woody Marks can communicate the particulars: 26 carries for 68 yards. Every other running back on their roster, plus rookie Jaylin Noel, had one carry, none for more than 5 yards. C.J. Stroud only threw for 203 yards and a solitary touchdown. He was sacked three times by a vicious and visibly pissed-off Chiefs defense, which refused to let their season begin its death spiral without one hell of a fight being put up by the Texans. But in two or three critical high-leverage third downs, Stroud did what you need your franchise quarterback to do: buy time, find an open man, and move the chains. In the grimmest of winter temperatures in the swirling coliseum of Arrowhead Stadium, those were the plays that won the game, not deep passes to Nico Collins or breakaway runs by Nick Chubb. That’s what the offense did to win the game – but what the defense did, the revelry of pressure, cramped passing lanes and nonexistent rushing yards it wrought on the Chiefs, constitutes as effective and magnificent a defensive assault on the Reid-Mahomes partnership as any we’ve ever seen. No other team has ever coaxed Mahomes into three interceptions without a touchdown; no other defense had ever held his passer rating down so abysmally low (his 19.8 passer rating was significantly worse than Jalen Hurts’ 31.2, which factored in four interceptions). What wasn’t unique to the Texans’ effort was how it managed to easily neutralize any semblance of a running game for the Chiefs; for the eleventh time in thirteen games the Chiefs failed to rush for more than 150 yards, and even though they outrushed the Texans, who put up a staggeringly supine 82 yards on 31 carries (their languid all-around offensive output is the chief reason they only scored a four-star win here and not a five-star one), the Texans’ rushing on the important downs was what separated them from the Chiefs. The Chiefs faced three different huge, high-leverage downs at the end of the game; two fourth downs and the final meaningful play of the game to Travis Kelce. All three were failures – either turnovers on downs or a tipped pass that turned into an interception. It was just a tamping-down in every which way, the kind of exacting prohibition on positive yards and chain-moving successes that you almost never see a team undergo at home. If the Texans can do this in the shrapnel winds of Arrowhead Stadium, imagine what their defense can do with a full-throated Houstonian crowd, well-fortified in the heated confines of NRG Stadium, can do in the playoffs.

Season Score: 3.077

Pittsburgh Steelers:

You Can’t Go Home Again, And You Can’t Be Young Again. But You Can Make Your Foes Look Older Than You.

Michael Pettaway Tomlin, First Baron Baltimore. That’s what his 9-9 record in enemy territory has allowed him to be bestowed with. Having a terrible, deplorably underwhelming, boring and future-dimming season in Pittsburgh? Just play Lamar Jackson, John Harbaugh and whatever clutch of B- skill players they’re keeping around at the time to reignite excitement around Primanti Bros, Giant Eagle and the Iron City Light brewery vats. If you want a great stat that will never recur, try this one on: Aaron Rodgers and Lamar Jackson rushed for the same amount of touchdowns in this game, and that equal figure was not a zero. Wild silliness in the AFC North is ever appreciated – especially when it makes for even more dramatic football later in the year. For the first time in a long, long time, you saw something of the Aaron Rodgers that won innumerable games, tons of division titles and a Super Bowl in Green Bay while he wore the black and gold. Maybe he just needed to play against this era’s preeminent dual-threat quarterback to be reminded that he too still has wheels, still has a knack for evading pressure if it isn’t bearing down full bore on him, and still plays for a team that, while saddled with several glaring limitations, has DNA that includes knowledge of how to win close games. Let’s conduct the following thought experiment: if you knew you couldn’t blow the other team out, and needed to pick a coach to win a game that would end in a one-score difference between winner and loser, is there anyone you can think of who you’d rather have than Mike Tomlin? His Steelers haven’t notched a win decided by more than one possession against a team with a winning record since way back in Week 3 of 2024, but their 9-6 record in one-score games since then is about what you’d expect from a team with a sagging, aging roster, questionable assistant coaches and equally dubious schemes, and one rock-solid, mystically stoic and steady head coach. It’s always been just about good enough to get to the playoffs and, inevitably, lose – at least since 2017. But the AFC is a wide-open Wild Wild West of a shooting gallery this year, and Pittsburgh can do the equivalent of winning a playoff game by going 2-0 against their hated Raven rivals in the regular season. They’re halfway there right now. You saw things beyond just Aaron Rodgers’ dormant if swiftly-waning rushing abilities on this day: he can still throw an immensely fetching deep ball down either sideline, evidenced by a perfectly-placed pass to D.K. Metcalf that helped them build an early lead; he can still find open receivers who break out of the play’s structure, as evidenced by a long-developing pocket-presence-teach-tape-esque play where he evaded many Baltimore linemen, drifted to his left, and found Calvin Austin open in the middle of the field; and he can still play the foundational game of football, evidenced by the Steelers sticking with the run to ice it late. Sure, you may say, this game means nothing for the Steelers if the Ravens aren’t royally screwed by a ridiculous Isaiah Likely touchdown-overturn. To that I would say, go back to that aforementioned year, 2017, and see if you can’t locate a play of similarly stultifying import involving the Steelers, a tight end, a touchdown overturned, and a season derailed thereby. No tears will be shed in the city of Three Rivers for the silliness accompanying Likely’s stolen score. The Steelers are only 7-6, but with Cincy, Kansas City, and most importantly for the Steelers, Baltimore all entering hospice care for their playoff hopes, this might be Tomlin’s last and best chance to go on one final playoff run.

Season Score: 2.846

New Orleans Saints:

The NFC South Will Always Dissolve Into A Vast Crabs-In-A-Bucket Game. NOLA Is This Year’s Grasping Lurker.

Hey, Baker Mayfield: Go Shough Yourself! You can imagine the aggrieved parties of the 2025 New Orleans Saints, who had to grudgingly bear the ambush mudslinging of the Buccaneers quarterback after these teams’ Week 8 tilt where the then-Spencer Rattler-led Saints dropped a bad one 23-3 to their pewter and creamsicle-wearing foes, thinking just such. This team had something that the late October Saints didn’t – a mobile quarterback who can run for touchdowns. That that windfall should come from Tyler Shough, a 26-year-old college journeyman who was a teammate of Justin Herbert’s at Oregon and is somehow a rookie this year, is as unexpected as it is welcome for a Saints team who above all needs clarity and focus as they begin the arduous rebuild from the last vestiges of the Drew Brees era to what the future holds. Who can object to a totally random berserker from the Big Easy as the season winds down? The Saints are a strange team, with a strange roster, and a strange way of playing football. They’re not exactly “fun,” like so many other bad teams who ramble around their conferences playing close games and losing most of them only to win against a division bully in stunning fashion late in the year. But they aren’t terribly uninteresting from week to week like the Titans or Raiders. They’re just kind of, “there,” y’know? This is the seasonal misfortune that tends to descend on the entire NFC South until one team locks up the division and has to play (usually only one game) in the playoffs, and the Saints are keeping the storied tradition of NFC South irrelevance alive with their begrudging, contract-chicanery-laden rebuilding year that has already seen Brandin Cooks and Taysom Hill subjected to the hallmark Mickey Loomis contract alchemy involving moving future money and void years around, or just cutting them outright, to skirt salary cap restrictions. No one securitizes, underwrites, divests and defrays with quite as much creativity and stratagem as the New Orleans Saints, but one contract that is not in jeopardy of fanciful language meant to introduce complexity and disavowal into the terms (just yet) is Tyler Shough, an already-old rookie who is looking pretty decent despite the lowliness of his team and the humility of his draft pedigree. Against a Buccaneers team that has, let’s face it, totally bungled their offensive identity since Mike Evans went down, Tyler Shough outdueled Baker Mayfield in a dramatic if low-stakes affair pitting two quarterbacks with significant physical limitations (in the case of Shough, his ancientness) against one another. Someone out there made themselves into America’s next oligarch by putting down a few dollars on a Tyler Shough 2+ Total Touchdowns prop, I’m sure, and even if his finding the endzone twice with his legs was extraordinarily unlikely, the Saints giving the malfunctioning Bucs a rough go of it and winning a game where both team scored in the low-20s isn’t all that jaw-dropping a result. This team was awful early but has been competitive with Kellen Moore calling plays for the rookie Shough. The issue, which isn’t truly an issue just yet, is whether Shough is going to be good enough to make the Saints make a hard decision on the draft next year; for the time being, few would argue that Shough has been quite good enough to forestall New Orleans from taking a good, hard look at the quarterbacks that will be within their draft day grasp next season, but if he keeps this sort of play up, he may just. The Saints, like a lot of bad-but-not-laughable teams in 2025 and other recent seasons, haven’t gone full tank mode. That may be good in the short term, but New Orleans is still pushing back the eventual rebuild with hair-of-the-dog seasons that don’t get them the first overall pick but still fall under the “nothing ventured, nothing gained” umbrella. Worse still is their remaining schedule: a cakewalk joke of a final month that sees them squaring off with the Panthers, Jets, Titans and Falcons. They could go 0-4 or 4-0. If it’s the latter, that probably means Shough played well enough to warrant an entire 2026 to himself as starter. If they go 0-4, the reverse is true. But say they go an even 2-2. What then?

Season Score: 2.769

Miami Dolphins:

The Dolphins Have Shown Resilience In Reaching 6-7. They’d Be 13-0 If They Could Play The Jets Every Week.

When a team rediscovers a running game late in the season, even if it’s the team that plays in the most Tropical of all País Tropical-s of the NFL, it’s beautiful to watch. It’s even more beautiful when that team forges the iron of the run game in close-fought contests for a few weeks and then gets to swing the complete broadsword lethally through the undefended trunk of an uncontesting run defense on a terrible team to the tune of 200+ yards. The Dolphins are that broadsword – the Jets were that helpless Medieval foot soldier. The Fins, in total defiance of the cosmos and the sweltering pessimism that inhumed them in September and October, have a sliver of a chance at making the playoffs. Don’t say die in South Beach – the sun never sets and the party never ends in that town! There are lots of self-kicking fits going on in Miami right now. The team and coach are kicking themselves for not hitting upon this run-heavy formula, which is very clearly a winning one, earlier in the season, when they could have racked up a couple more wins and all but guaranteed them a spot in the playoffs. The ousted general manager, Chris Grier, is kicking himself because of how good this team appears to be doing in his not unwelcome absence, and wondering simultaneously why it is that Mike McDaniel saved all the good gameplans for after his firing. And the owner is probably kicking himself for choosing the worst of three options that presented themselves before and during this season: i) empowering Mike McDaniel more and allowing him to feel out non-Tua-centric offensive options more early, ii) firing Mike McDaniel at the same time he fired Chris Grier to get a jump on the next head coaching search, and iii) taking a half-measure by sweeping out only Grier and not McDaniel with him (Stephen Ross went with option iii). You’re left with an issue now. Do you allow Mike McDaniel, if he continues his unlikely rise from ashes, to pick a new GM? Do you simply elevate Champ Kelly to full-time GM? Or do you hire a GM of your own choosing, knowing full well this will confer lame duck status on Mike McDaniel if you do decide to keep him around? The possibilities are dizzying in Miam; no team has quite as many contingencies and plausibilities swirling around to sow insomnia in the bleary eyes of their decision makers as the Dolphins do. These are big issues they face, but on a weekend like this, let Stephen Ross, Champ Kelly and above all Mike McDaniel revel in the little things that always end up being more the stuff of happiness than the big things, anyway: stuff like beating the living piss out of the New York Jets, who have about as firm an immovable lid on their competitiveness level as any team who hasn’t fired a head coach or coordinator yet. The Dolphins may have had withering tribulations in keeping pace with the big dogs of their own division in New England and Buffalo, but their most milquetoast offensive gameplan is more than enough to down the sputtering Jets. The Dolphins followed the form that’s been paying dividends for them during this win streak yet again against New York, running the ball 41 times for 239 yards. De’Von Achane had to leave the game early with a hamstring injury, which could have foredoomed any hopes the Dolphins had beyond the rigid confines of their sixty-minutes game on Sunday if it was serious, but McDaniel confirmed that the young back could have reentered the game if it was a do-or-die scenario and if the game wasn’t already well in hand. If he had stayed in, he may have broken the rushing record: his 7 carries for 92 yards and a 13.1 average per rush, extrapolated to include both his and Jaylen Wright’s total attempts, would have netted the former Aggie 407 yards on the day. The Jets should feel lucky they had the good sense to wound the lethal jackknife before that reality could manifest. Tua continues to be a bit-part player in this offense, which, truth be told, he’s always been; this time it’s simply blindingly obvious how unimportant he is to the broader offensive vision. Even without a good quarterback who can throw the ball more than 30 times a game and even without Jaelan Phillips, their best defender before they shipped him north to the chill of Philadelphia, the Dolphins are finding ways to win. That is the essence of coaching: adapting your style to suit your resources in service of securing victory. If we go off that definition, Mike McDaniel is doing himself immense favors; even if Ross decides upon a parting of the ways with the quirky coach, it’s almost certain he will have his pick of offensive coordinator openings, or even head coaching vacancies. He’s commodifying himself more and more richly with every win. Shades, capris, hoodies with rolled-up sleeves, and late-season wins led by a dominant rushing attack: The Mike McDaniel Winter Collection.

Season Score: 2.385

Tennessee Titans:

A Duel Of Two Future Stars, Or A Calculated Maneuver Between Two Tanking Teams? Does It Really Matter?

No teams remain with one win – meaning, for the statistically and trivially inclined of us, that the dream of the first-ever 1-16 team gracing the history books is dead and buried. We might need to wait for the 2026 Falcons for that doozy of a milestone, but until then, hope can spring eternal, because the Titans just showed us that even a twitching husk of a team and roster that simply has to be looking forward to next season can still go into a hostile town and win close if things break their way. They have the foundations of a professional football team, in other words. And that is not a given. Though this win had unpleasant larger implications for Tennessee, be real – you don’t want to be the first team to lose 16 of 17. You know something? This was a fun game. The Titans don’t play a whole lot of those – this is special! The Titans haven’t done a lot in recent years that recalls their franchise’s Steve McNair, Jeff Fisher and Eddie George glory days, but a snowy showdown with an angry Browns team, led by running backs, tight ends, defenses and special teams with two athletic but deeply hampered quarterbacks goes a long way to resurrecting those cherished, old school memories. And make no mistake: for Cam Ward and co., this was a day for running backs, not helpless former first-overall picks without a friend in the world in the form of pass catchers. Tony Pollard, a guy who has barely made so much as a psychic blip on the mental radars of Fantasy Football players or national audiences since his departure from the Cowboys, had The Tony Pollard Game, carrying the ball 25 times for 161 yards and two touchdowns. He was THE Titans offense in this game with Cam Ward stalked ceaselessly by a Browns defense who showed up only in one sense – to defend the pass. All in all, Ward was fine, throwing for 117 yards and two touchdowns with an interception, performing admirably against a defense that has made better passers look far worse. The Titans’ receivers are really, truly wanting, though: no one on this team went over 30 yards, and the Browns defense held Ward to only 14 completions on 29 dropbacks. This was an Escape Room of a game, though, and not an afternoon where anyone had stats on their mind: you could almost see Ward and interim head coach Mike McCoy thinking to themselves, “Let’s find one aspect of our offense that works, spam it, and get out of here.” In that wise, they succeeded, and proved that they are tough enough to win in a snowstorm in an enemy stadium. Not a small thing! The bigger issue may well be that this game, this win, caused them to relinquish control of the #1 overall pick to the Giants; by virtue of a loss later in the day, the Raiders also pulled ahead of the Titans, leaving Tennessee picking third in next year’s draft if it all ended today. It doesn’t, but…the Titans have been a better team than the Raiders over the previous month, and even though the Giants have flashed incredible spiciness at times this year, no one is better at losing games than them, so it’s probable that Tennessee, despite starting 1-11, might not be in position to ransom their invaluable draft rights to someone in need of the draft’s best quarterback. It’s not the end of the world, since Cam Ward is their quarterback and they’re still the team in the best position to draft the “Best Player Available” who isn’t a quarterback (assuming the Giants will trade their pick and the Raiders need to draft someone), but the future, paradoxically, is not as rosy after this win with the Titans at 1-11 as it was before this win, with them in position to be 1-12. Weird season, Tennessee. 

Season Score: 2.231

✪✪✪

“Hell, Sure.” Taxon

Chicago Bears:

The Win Streak Couldn’t Last Forever. But Bears Fans Would Give Anything For It To Have Lasted One Win More.

Inches from a first down, and feet from a touchdown, the Bears might have committed that dreaded sin, the bane of tough-guy coaches everywhere: they Got Too Cute. No, it wasn’t a trick play, and no, it wasn’t even that bad of a play call to run a play action pass on fourth and one with just seconds on the clock, but if you want to be the bullies, if you want to be the division dictators instead of the division delegates, if you want to be the Ben Johnson who enamored and enthralled the football world from 2022 to 2024 and not the one who is awesome but not quite godlike, then there’s only one option there: RUN THE DAMN BALL. Regardless, the Bears gave noble account of themselves in what has been a house of hellish horrors for them over the past 33 years, and will doubtless be circling the Sunday two weeks from now, when these two teams meet again, with enough blood-red ink to bleed all the way through the calendar, the cardboard jacket, and probably the door on which the calendar is mounted. It’s just a joy when the Bears and Packers both matter in December. When is a loss less of a loss and more of a “dang…well, we’ll get ‘em next time, boys?” The answer is, when you take your most despised rival, your blood enemy, your deeply and historically-entrenched Big Brother to the very limit and can rest assured that even though you lost, you had them breathing heavy and sweating bullets in the second half right to the bitter end. The Bears could easily have persisted in their awful offensive ways that saw them head to halftime with 76 total yards, three points and an eleven-point deficit. But unlike the other games in which the Bears have struggled mightily – namely their first two games of the season, both losses, in which few adjustments appeared to have been made after the first 15 or 20 scripted plays had run their course – the Bears came out of the locker room with a new-look offense, doing an evolved version of what had worked for them in their 7-1 stretch post-bye, throwing a multitude of short passes and pursuing that tired but effective adage of “aggressively taking what the defense gave them.” With Rome Odunze out with an injury and D.J. Moore ruthlessly stymied by the Packers defense, it fell to the Bears’ two brilliant tight ends, Cole Kmet and rookie Colston Loveland, their rookie receiver Luther Burden, their rookie running back Kyle Monangai and their luminous, highlight-desirous second-year field general Caleb Williams to catch and throw them back into the game. Even though the defense simply could not cover Christian Watson, the offense responded every time it absolutely needed to in the second half with long scoring drives that forced the Packers to play near-perfectly. The only issue is, the Packers kinda did play near-perfectly. This is a stinging loss for the Bears, but not a crippling one – if anything, it is useful fuel, nourishing impetus, and a source of grim tinder and kindling for the simmering enmities that will only make them play as hard and harder in their next meeting two weeks from now. The future, both near and long term, are still bright in Bears land. This is a reminder and a wake-up call that their best is good enough for just about anyone – they just need to get in gear earlier.

Season Score: 3.615

Denver Broncos:

Every Team Enjoying A Special Surge Is Entitled To One Bizarro Stumbling Block. The Raiders Are These Broncos’s.

You get to conduct your dirty work with a twang of levity and leisure when you’re 10-2 and have bested nine straight opponents, many of whom are better than mere punching bags, to seize the top seed in the AFC. You might not score top marks on the Hell Yes Hierarchy, of course, but since the Broncos aren’t thinking about that type of thing and have never heard of HYH, Personal Vowels, or me, they’ll take a 7-point win over a trampled Las Vegas team in which neither team showed itself to be so wholly resolute as to capture the imagination. You only ever need to be better than the guys on the other side of the ball – and it was never in question who would come out on top in this one, a mundane dismissal of the Raiders from our screens. The Raiders have been a weird, non-fatal, pesky orb of Bronco kryptonite this year. But any radioactive rays of contagion they radiate out to their Mile High enemies in both of their losses to the Broncos, while concerning for Sean Payton and Bo Nix and their band of merry, divisional championship-eyeing men have been well below the LD-50 for a soundly-coached team led mostly by its defense with a dash and dollop of offensive competence here and there. That was the story in these teams’ first meeting and it was the story here. The Broncos offense is a lot less inspiring than their 11-2 record would have you believe if you really peer closely at their down-to-down operation; Bo Nix seems to take as many checkdowns and scrambling opportunities combined, a stat that Personal Vowels is going to call the “Escape Pod Rate,” as any good quarterback in the NFL, but it rarely hurts the team. That’s because the Broncos’ defense and special teams are, well, special. They were on Sunday in Vegas, with the defensive front of Nik Bonitto and Zach Allen playing havoc on the banged-up Raiders offensive line and the kick and punt return units immiserating their peers on the silver and black side of the ball, crystallized in a far-too-easy Marvin Mims punt return touchdown midway through the second quarter that helped end the burgeoning drama of a game stuck at 7-7 for longer than the Broncos could have been comfortable with. There are still a lot of less-than-stellar aspects to this offense that conjure up unflattering reminders of the late-stage Drew Brees Saints – almost every Bo Nix pass was short of the sticks, and a ton of them were behind the line of scrimmage, in this game – as well as procedural deficiencies that lead to unfavorable down and distances, including an early delay of game on third and goal that Bo Nix was only able to overcome with a scramble up the middle assisted by an uncalled hold which gave the Broncos an early 7-0 lead which the Raiders never really challenged. This team still has a month to figure out how to up-level their offense, but it’s doubtful whether they’ll ever be much more than what we’ve seen so far this season: a difficult-to-score-upon defense with an offense that piddles around for three quarters before getting its act together late. Hey, teams have won Super Bowls that way. Could this be a 2017 Eagles type of year for Broncos Country? The fundamental necessities are there! They just need to hope they don’t draw the Bills in January. If they do, this thing is probably going pear shaped. If they don’t, this could easily be the AFC representative in Santa Clara.

Season Score: 3.385

Cleveland Browns:

S-H-E-D-E-U-R. Those Letters Don’t Spell OROY, But They Belong To A Rook Who Can At Least Make Some Plays.

Flash that watch and primp that jewelry, #12 – this was a certified Fresh moment for the glitzy passer that must have felt like it took eons and eons to manifest. Now, temperance must be observed, of course: like his first-ever NFL action in the preseason against the Carolina Panthers, it has to be noted that, “Yeah, but…it was the Titans,” and it also has to be noted that, y’know, they lost the game, but those facts are as unflattering as they are irrelevant to the legions of supporters Shedeur has gathered to himself as they are miniscule and footnote-worthy in the larger scheme of the 2025 season. Let the Browns have their ballyhoos and let the hype train hurtle down and, eventually, off the rails – Browns fans don’t’ get excitement nearly enough, and I’d sooner destroy a stained glass window than an artist such as Perfect Timing Shedeur Sanders. Nourish yourselves on hype and highlights, Dawg Pound – you don’t know where your next meal is coming from. Shedeur Sanders is a polarizing figure. He rubs many people the wrong way with his luxury-brand image and both onfield and off-field behavior, including locker-room antics, speeding tickets, draft day shenanigans and the looming specter of his über-famous and vocal father. None of that really factors in his play, though, which is all that matters, and on Sunday against the Titans he flashed the kind of tightrope playmaking ability and sage passing-window decision-making that made him a figure of interest at Colorado. He did all that and much more – he is only the 15th rookie since 2000 (and 16th since 1999, the year the Browns re-entered the NFL) to throw for over 360 yards and at least three touchdowns, and only the second Browns rookie to do so after Baker Mayfield did the same – in, it should be noted, the season finale against Baltimore, after an entire season as a starter and after being the first overall pick. Shedeur Sanders’ “practice reps” storyline might be ludicrous, a waste of one’s time and pitilessly overblown, but it’s not nothing, and it’s a damn good outing by anyone, even if we’re talking prime Tom Brady versus an expansion team, to go over 300 yards and three passing scores. No, the Titans aren’t the 2000 Ravens, and no, Shedeur’s 42 attempts for 364 yards, three touchdowns and one interception – bolstered by two 60-yard catch-and-runs from Quinshon Judkins and Jerry Jeudy – wasn’t as impressive in reflection as the number indicate, but you can’t get to those totals without playing pretty well all the same. The game of Shedeur Sanders – the way he bobbles around in the pocket and holds onto the ball, oftentimes for longer than he needs to, often inviting pressure and sacks – reminds one of a younger, smaller Ben Roethlisberger, or Byron Leftwich, who were decently mobile but not rushing threats. They could run around as much as they wanted behind the line of scrimmage, in other words, but still needed to chuck the damn thing eventually. Shedeur might be in that vein. There’s worse company to be in! Meanwhile, the Myles Garrett Sack Tracker has had a quiet few weeks since his 7-sack fortnight against the Ravens and Raiders, “only” registering a sack apiece in the last two games. In his stead, fresh-faced Browns like Harold Fannin and Quinshon Judkins have shined with their new quarterback. Many disingenuous tears were shed, most of them in jest, for the sorry sight of Myles Garrett’s greatness being wasted on a now 3-10 team. With a little luck – which this current starting quarterback might help to spark – he might not regret his decision to stay in Cleveland quite so much come this time next year. If he does, he can always imitate the Woody Harrelson gif and wipe his tears with dollar bills.

Season Score: 2.615

Minnesota Vikings:

Maybe We’ll Never Know How Good Or Bad “9” Really Is. We Know He Isn’t So Bad He Can’t Crush A Dead Team.

The Vikings’ season was, at one point, a rollicking, hilly drive through pastures of greenery that offered up promises of the future. It quickly descended into uncertainty, shuttled along by J.J. McCarthy’s “soft benching” and Carson Wentz’s early conquests. Then it became scary, with Wentz losing whatever magic he had left in his right arm and weighing down the roster with his own oldness and badness. And then it went full nightmare, with J.J. McCarthy looking like the worst quarterback in the NFL and a strident liability that needed to be excised from the Vikings as soon as possible. Well, now, in December, the season having gone through many hues and shades, the final autopsy report may show that the 2025 Minnesota Vikings were more of a fever dream: not a nightmare, not a glorious illusion, but a surreal, unsettling, confounding chaos of some ups and a lot of downs that portends next to nothing. That’s still bad – but, could be worse? The Vikings and Panthers’ respective seasons are a lot more similar to one another than any of their fans would care to admit. The Vikings’ only wins this season are that wacky Week 1 comeback against a still-jelling Chicago team, an unholy blowout of the pre-Flacco post-Burrow Bengals, a London game escape versus the Browns, a gritty 27-24 win against the Lions in McCarthy’s return, and this game – another unholy blowout against a floundering, uncompetitive team dealing with the worst kind of QB vicissitude. The Vikings have at last found a way to make the current edition of “9” playable – it isn’t necessarily pretty, and it involves boxing in the passing game to such a degree that Justin Jefferson essentially becomes an afterthought, but it works against bad teams, which the Commanders are. Whether that’s good enough to guarantee that J.J. McCarthy will be the starter next year (a fate which very few would be willing to bet on sight unseen) isn’t certain. It wouldn’t be for a non-first round pick quarterback in whom the Vikings sank a 2024 top-ten pick, but that’s what they did for J.J. McCarthy, and it would be rash to give up on him after fewer than 17 starts – at least I think so. The Vikings’ remaining games are against the Cowboys, Giants, Lions and Packers. If you want a bet to place, the Vikes going 1-3 with the lone win coming against the Mike Kafka-led Giants seems like a pretty decent way to spend and probably recoup some money. For the love of Jettas, let’s figure out this quarterback situation and this offense in general this offseason, Vikes.

Season Score: 2.538

✪✪

“Hell’s Bells…” Taxon

Tampa Bay Buccaneers:

You Can’t Be Serious, Bucs. The Saints? In December? At HOME??? If You Want To Be Contenders, This Must Cease.

The powers of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers appear to be shrinking, weekly, before the eyes of the nation. Seemingly gone is the ragtag, rough-and-tumble, dashing cannoneers who blew fatal holes open in talented defenses with combined rushing and passing broadsides; replacing those swashbucklers is a dysfunctional, station-to-station, easily-disrupted passing attack that seems at times like they need 2025 Baker Mayfield to be 2018 Josh Allen. That’s not a recipe for tasty grog – that’s unappetizing, indigestible hard tack. Everyone knew Mike Evans going down in Detroit would fundamentally mix up the well-brewed chemistry this team had, but it’s shown to be a far worse development than it seemed even at the time: without his vertical field-stretch superpowers, Emeka Egbuka and Chris Godwin, not to mention auxiliaries Tez Johnson and Sterling Shepard, have quieted to a low, open ocean softness. Losing to the Saints? It’s the latest tempest the Bucs have failed to weather well. And what looked like calmer seas – in the form of the Falcons, Dolphins, and Panthers twice – may turn out to be a month of stormy squalls themselves as the regular season draws near to close. The Yuck-aneers laid an egg. They’ve been doing that somewhat quietly, without the same sort of heat or criticism or disdain from media sorts reserved for true dumpster fires like the Falcons, Cardinals and Raiders, since at least their ill-fated contest against the Lions in the Monday Night Football double-header some two months ago, but they’ve been doing it all the same. These Buccaneers are a shell of the team we saw take down the 49ers and Seahawks in consecutive weeks back in early October. Gone is the confident, anticipatory firing sense from Baker Mayfield. Gone is his chemistry with Emeka Egbuka. Gone is the defense that held so many high-scoring offenses in check just long enough for Bake Show and his sous chefs to confect a game-winning drive or coup de grâce score that puts it out of reach. In those things’ stead is an undersized, gun-shy quarterback who is looking to scramble far more often than his size or speed would reasonably suggest he should, a collection of wide receivers that, minus Mike Evans, bear a resemblance in all the wrong ways to the jumbled mix that Kansas City is working with, and a defense that is just bad, full stop. Not just bad, but old and bad. It’s tempting to still think of this defense as largely the same one from 2020 and 2021 that led the Buccaneers to a Super Bowl and a 13-4 record, but it’s just not, even if the ageless Lavonte David is still hanging around. Mike Evans’ practice window has been opened and he is officially questionable to play on Thursday Night Football versus the Falcons (an upgrade from his IR/Out designation of recent weeks and months) but it’s a long shot whether or not he’ll play or, if he does, if he can be anything more than a recuperating decoy. This team positively needs forward momentum going into late December, and it is looking increasingly like the only way they’ll win this division and have any shot at winning a playoff game is by sweeping – not splitting the series with, but sweeping – the Panthers, their only true rival right now in the South. Where have you gone, Fun Buccaneers?

Season Score: 3.308

Dallas Cowboys:

This Defense Was Always Going To Wind Up Ruining The Offense’s Season. And Yet, The East Can Still Be Won.

There were fifteen different scoring plays in this game. Eight of those were Lions scores. Only two of them were Cowboys touchdowns. That this team even got to 30 points is kind of incredible, when you look at it that way. What is unquestionably not incredible, or credible, I guess, is the play of the Cowboys defense in this game. They didn’t simply not show up – they didn’t even try to show up. And against the Lions, that means cessation of motor functions and bodily expiry. The Lions laughed as their skill position players, banged up and beleaguered in a year when they haven’t fully met expectations, took their simmering frustrations out on a soft, underachieving, and potentially spent Cowboys defense whose trade deadline purchases might have been even shorter term stopgaps than Jerry, Will McClay and Brian Schottenheimer expected – the rest of America outside the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex joined in on the guffaws happily, too. Dak Prescott found himself in a familiar position last Thursday Night, wondering, as he stood on the sideline down 27-30 and later down 30-37, if his defense could manage to get a single, lone, solitary, isolated, meaningful stop on the evening. He needn’t have wondered, because the answer was obvious: NO. Prescott’s season in 2025 is eerily reminiscent of the one he soldiered through way back in 2019, when Jason Garrett was skidding towards dismissal, the Cowboys were barely clinging to life late in the season after a bona fide MVP start from their quarterback, and the rest of the NFC seemed to be passing the talented but formless Cowboys by. He finished that year with almost 5,000 passing yards – second in the league to Jameis Winston, who painted his masterpiece 30 touchdown-30 pick season that year – but only 30 touchdown passes. For context, only five players have ever thrown for over 4,900 yards and 30 or fewer touchdown passes; all of them occurred in the 2010s, and four of the five happened in the NFC East. Weird! He’s on a very similar trajectory this season, on pace for 4,756 yards, 34 touchdowns and 13 interceptions; and, crucially, an 8-8-1 record, the closest thing to a perfectly 0.500 record you can have in a 17-game schedule. For most, throwing for 4,700 yards and 2 touchdowns a game would be enough to win MVP and put you in #1 seed potential, but not with this defense. The Cowboys, as they are wont to do, have overspent irresponsibly on offense without stocking the cupboard of their defense sufficiently, and are, just like in 2019 (and 2020 before Dak was injured) wasting a year of a potential Hall Of Fame quarterback’s prime. If this team somehow manages to get to the playoffs it has to hope that for the first time since the Bill Parcells era its defense actually gets better in the playoffs. If Philadelphia continues its all-too-familiar collapse and the Dallas Cowboys, extraordinarily, become NFC East champions, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that they feel so buoyed by their good fortune that they show up with their hair on fire to the postseason and finally live up to their musty America’s Team heritage. But I doubt it will happen. They’d have to play all the teams that have already run roughshod over their defense again, most likely, and this incarnation of the ‘Boys doesn’t seem like one that’s well-positioned to learn quickly from their mistakes. 

Season Score: 3.231

Philadelphia Eagles:

There’s Not Even An Argument Anymore: This Offense Is Broken, And Needs Revolutionary Change To Fix.

It was a 28-hour, well-provisioned, fattening feast of mean-spirited laughter if you were a Certified Hater last weekend. Between the kickoff of Chiefs-Texans and the final gun in Chargers-Eagles, the follies, foibles, faux pas and unfixable failures of the two reigning conference champions proved both manifold and paralyzing, and it was the quarterbacks who played the parts of chief protagonists amid the many dramatis personae in the tragic drama. Patrick Mahomes and Jalen Hurts can each be said to have had the worst games of their entire careers, and while for Patrick it was mostly due to ineffectiveness interspliced with horribly-timed bobbled passes, the creepshow staged by Jalen Hurts was unlike anything we’ve seen from someone not named Jameis Winston in a long, long, long, long time. But Hurts is merely the instrument through which the Football Gods communicated their wrathful displeasure: Nick Sirianni, Eagles head coach, and Kevin Patullo, Eagles offensive coordinator, have bloody red hands in this doleful tumbling, too, and without one or more of the three dramatically improving their presence, play and performance, one or more of the three will be gone come 2026. Jalen Hurts has had 5 different offensive coordinators in his 6 years as an NFL quarterback. As we sit here right now, it’s looking like he’ll almost certainly be saddled with 6 in 7 years once next season begins. That’s because something has to give in Philadelphia. This team is pathetic on offense. It's incapable of doing anything well or consistently, it can’t rely on its passing game to pick up the slack when its run game isn’t working, it can’t rely on its run game ever, and the stars that this team thought it had at wide receiver, running back and quarterback have turned out not to be anywhere near as starry or superhuman as the money that Howie Roseman has sunk into them. Face the facts, Philly: you’re 24th in total offense, 19th in scoring offense, 26th in total first downs gained, 28th in average number of plays per drive (behind the Titans at 27th), and 28th in 3rd down conversion rate – the last of which isn’t even properly offset by their 4th down conversion rate, in which they’re only 9th in the NFL. The one thing they are leading the league in is Red Zone touchdown percentage, with 71% efficiency; the only issue is that they’re tied for 31st in total number of red zone trips, with a mere 31 on the season. From a defending champion, this is 2022 Rams levels of suck. Jalen Hurts’ one claim to being a decent quarterback this season before his Tartarus of an evening in Los Angeles was this: he didn’t turn the ball over. That argument goes out the window when you give the ball away five times in one game – and twice on a single play – as Jalen did on Monday night. He’s by no means the only issue here: A.J. Brown dropped a surefire game-winning touchdown in overtime just moments before Jalen’s final interception sealed it for Philly, and Saquon Barkley, despite a few explosive early runs and a breakaway fake-Tush Push toss where he rumbled untouched to the endzone (aided by the worst uncalled hold of the season by Jordan Mailata), continues to be eminently unreliable down-to-down. He crumples at first contact, which often comes behind the line of scrimmage before he can even select a gap to run through. This doesn’t fall on a single principal of the Eagles so much as it falls on all of them: no one has lived up to their billing this year, and if you want to argue that Kevin Patullo, the un-magical OC, has been the worst, I don’t think that’s outrageously objectionable. Jalen and Sirianni, who have been at their posts far longer than Patullo, have to share in this blame, too, though – especially the head coach, who made this hire, and who is finally and ultimately responsible for the fortunes of this team even more so than the starting quarterback. This team’s upcoming schedule is a rosy-colored jaunt through two of the worst teams in football – the Raiders this weekend and the Commanders twice in the final three – spiked through with a daunting challenge against Buffalo. If the Bills embarrass this team and the offense fails to find fourth gear against the dreadful defenses in Washington and Las Vegas, there can be no doubt: Patullo is definitely on the outs, and Sirianni is in danger too.

Season Score: 2.692

New York Jets:

These Jets Are Out Of Fuel - Everywhere. And The Pilots In The Cockpit Leave A Lot To Be Desired.

In a hard-to-look-at, wan-and-sable array of blouses and pantaloons overlaid with gothic blackletter numerals and anachronistic nameplates that just looked like regular-font surnames, the “Gotham City Football”-uniformed jets put out a reel of game tape that will make Woody Johnson think twice about reprising the strange, harlequin look next year. This Jets team hasn’t been as changelessly and unwatchably bad since their shootout win over Cincinnati as they were for the first 7 winless weeks of the season, but today they came pretty close. The Dolphins, when they have won games this year, have mostly had to play nail-biting, grinding affairs that see them win by a touchdown or less. Well, with the notable exception of the Jets, against whom the Fins’ brand of speed-and-smashmouth combined arms football has worked like a dream. Aaron Glenn and Co. should be very thankful for the three wins they’ve somehow managed to cobble together this year, because it could easily be a winless, and drear, December and early January with the Jags, Tyler Shough Saints, Pats and Bills all forthcoming. Good may yet come of the Aaron Glenn hiring, but so far, none has. His team, and especially his defense which has lost the short-lived spark it randomly found post-Sauce Gardner and Quinnen Williams trades, has laid down to the Dolphins’ otherwise uninspiring offense twice in as many games against them this season, giving up 658 total yards, 362 rushing yards, and an average of 30 PPG in both of those games to a team that is otherwise averaging 20 points per game in all other contests. The Jets are like a Super Mario Mega Mushroom power-up for opposing offenses, and there isn’t all that much else to say about them at this stage of the season other than that they’ve been dealt a difficult hand – but not one that they themselves didn’t have a major part in bringing about – at quarterback. Justin Fields’ health, and quality of play, have been dubious and shaky throughout the season, and Tyrod Taylor has, too. With T-Mobile out in this game, it fell to Brady Cook, an undrafted rookie from Missouri, to finish out the final three-and-a-half quarters of play in the Meadowlands. No team seems to reach the bottom of their quarterback depth chart faster than the Jets in any given season. Cook most likely is not the savior-hero at QB that the Jets have been looking for all these years, if Sunday is any indication; he completed 14 passes for 163 yards but was sacked six times and threw two interceptions. That isn’t a great “good thing” to “bad thing” ratio, and the only touchdown the Jets scored on the day came from Isaiah Williams, who really should be First Team All-Pro return specialist, on a 78-yard punt return touchdown. He’s been the lone true bright spot of this season for the Jets. Aaron Glenn has won enough games this year to avoid being one and done, but few Jets fans can honestly say they feel supremely confident in this team reaching a level of near-0.500 competitiveness as early as next year with the current brain trust in place. They need a ton of help, and it’s less likely that they’ll wind up finding aforementioned but unnamed savior-hero quarterback in the draft than that they’ll draft the third or fourth best quarterback prospect from their draft slot, ruin his development, and be right back in this same position come 2029 or 2030.

Season Score: 2.385

Baltimore Ravens:

This Will Be The Eighth Year This QB-HC Pair Hasn’t Gotten It Done. It Has To Be The Last. Change Is Needed Now.

It doesn’t matter how good this team looks against the likes of the Dolphins, or Browns, or Jets, or Vikings – this team needs, as it has since at least 2019, to show it can win close, and hard-fought, against the good ones, the ones that are professionally-run and won’t roll over for exotic Lamar designed runs or Derrick Henry sweeps or deep shots to Zay Flowers and Rashod Bateman. More to the point, this team needs to show that it can overcome outrageous intrusions of officialdom and referee farragoes and still pull out a win at home. This isn’t to say that the Isaiah Likely touchdown overturn was not putrid and totally counterintuitive; rather, this is a needed acknowledgement that that really should have been a furious footnote in a Ravens win. You will wind up driving yourself crazy if you watch this team expecting it to learn and grow from its mistakes. When this team plays the Steelers and the Steelers have a functional quarterback with whom they can run something approaching a normal offense (an important caveat), the result is always the same: Lamar discards his fundamentals, fails to see the field, fails to throw or run decisively, and winds up being outscored by a Pittsburgh offense that on paper is eternally inferior. It never fails, and it didn’t used to be this way when Ray Lewis, Terrell Suggs and Joe Flacco were on this team. That’s what has been so disheartening about these Ravens years, in spite of all the awesome victories and highlights: it has never seemed that the legendary personalities that defined the first act of John Harbaugh’s stewardship have ever rearisen in the new age. The Ravens’ embrace of analytics, an offense-first mindset, and a maximization-of-our-QB’s-skillset approach since drafting Jackson in 2018 has, it has to be said, not borne the fruit that they would have expected it to – and not only because Lamar Jackson exists in the same age as Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen. The Ravens offense has gone through several different iterations since 2018, but when it starts to fall apart and cease functioning, it always seems to have the same problems. This time around, though, against the team that never fails to expose this concealed issues, they had new ones, like Lamar Jackson’s horrible interception that he tried to muscle over James Pierre who snagged it from the sky and, of course, the mind-numbing drop in the endzone from Isaiah Likely that…well…sure looked like a touchdown in real time. I don’t have an earth-shattering, enormously profound opinion on this, but I will simply say the following. The whole point of catching a ball is to hold onto it, and I don’t think Likely did that. Precedent isn’t on my side, though; the closest approximation of this catch that I can call to mind is a 2015 endzone catch made by Odell Beckham, Jr. against the Patriots, who had the ball knocked out of his hands milliseconds after grabbing it out of the air, causing him to evince a look and a gesture of displeasure, which certainly seemed to indicate to the viewer that he didn’t think it was a touchdown. However, it was ruled a touchdown by the refs all the same. If that play was a touchdown, then this one has to be, too. Confusion and inconsistency are the only real hallmarks of the NFL’s catch rule, however, and the guys in striped shirts were true to their traditions in Baltimore when they ruled that Likely’s two steps with the ball were not in themselves enough to constitute a catch. This season has looked, felt and smelled like it could well be the very last straw before a dramatic overhaul of officiation and review; nonsense like this overturn will help grease the skids of reform. The Ravens still had a chance to win this game on the last drive, but it was conducted without urgency or sagacity by Harbaugh, Jackson, or playcaller Todd Monken, and the game ending with a sack of Lamar as the seconds ticked painfully away was fitting. This team has had massive issues all season – this month, they are located on the offensive side of the ball. Baltimore desperately needs to go on a winning streak, like, now, to have a shot at this division, but anyone with eyes on more than a couple of their games this year will tell you they probably just don’t have it in them this year. Another L to Tomlin and company at the confluence of the Three Rivers and this year is officially in the circular file. 

Season Score: 2.385

✪

Hell. Taxon

Indianapolis Colts:

It’s More Than A Bad Loss And It’s More Than An Embarrassing Streak Continued. It’s A Death Knell For 2025.

Several teams have come close to equaling the feat, so far accomplished solely by the ignominious Cardinals in their Week 5 loss at home to Tennessee, of etching a 0-star entry into the HYH. Because this game was a disaster that saw a rookie QB entering in injury relief getting his very first NFL reps, this Colts loss cannot logically be on the same plane of damnation as the Cardinals’ 22-21 loss which featured a full deck of cards in Arizona’s hands and the worst possible opponent in the NFL. But when you take the strength of the team and of the team’s opponent out of the equation, this loss is as staggering, jawbreaking, and lifeforce-sapping of any we’ve seen this season. The Colts lost Daniel Jones for the rest of this year (at least!) to a ruptured Achilles, the Jags stole ahead firmly in the AFC South race, the Colts extended their winless streak in Jacksonville to eleven straight years and eleven straight losses, and the dismal knowledge that the farcical Chris Ballard frittered away the team’s next two first round picks for a player that did not make an appearance in the biggest game of the year so far splotched streaky black blobs on the already-anguished canvas, to wit. Oh, and then Chris Ballard turned around and set the entire art studio on fire. I’ll explain. Where can you even start with this one for Indianapolis? This was a refutation of everything the Colts have tried to build for the last three years with Steichen and Ballard and a hasty atomization of the Daniel Jones experiment. The effort to make it work with the former Giant was already on its last legs – no sick pun intended – well before Jones’ injury caused him to hobble through a 20-16 loss to Houston and, by extension, before this game too, where he lasted only a drive and a half before he collapsed, his Achilles ruptured. Jones took a sack before the play that ended his season on this same drive, which certainly cannot have helped, but it was the pointless pass to Pierce – which was called back, perversity of perversities, because of a dangerous chop block called on Jonathan Taylor – which will make this December 7th live in Colts infamy. It is hurtful to look at, whether you’re a Colts fan or not. If you watch it again and again, which you shouldn’t, but which you have the option of doing, you can see the panic starting to detonate throughout Jones’s body as he flings his final pass to Alec Pierce in the flat before crumpling to the rainy turf. It’s as horrible a sight to see as was Tyrese Haliburton’s Achilles tear back in Game 7 of the 2025 NBA Finals, though thankfully one without the super-slow-mo, ultra-high-definition close-up that allows you to see in unspeakable and grisly detail the actual striation of muscle as it separates and whips up the leg. When Riley Leonard entered the game, the Colts’ gameplan changed dramatically – at first, that is. The Jaguars correctly guessed that Jonathan Taylor would feature even more heavily with the rookie run-first QB from Notre Dame in, and they hit him hard and often when he got the ball. The forced fumble by Taylor while the game was still 14-7 essentially ended the game; it certainly knocked what wind remained in the chests of the Colts thoroughly out of their bodies, and from there the rout was on. Leonard was allowed to throw the ball more later in the game, but this did not avail the Colts, and the sickening afternoon was given a glum exclamation point when Riley Leonard was almost sacked for a safety on one play…and then was sacked for a safety after replay determined his knee was down in the endzone before getting rid of the ball. Mind you, this play started with the line of scrimmage at Indy’s own 9-yard line, meaning there was really no reason for Leonard to be in the end zone, but whatever. This is the sort of thing that flummoxed quarterbacks from Notre Dame, thrown into their first NFL action ever, tend to do – if you don’t believe me you can take a look at how Ian Book’s first start for the Saints back in 2021 went. Riley Leonard wasn’t good, but he’s a rookie, that the Colts drafted, ostensibly to eventually play football. That’s why you draft people out of college, is it not? And yet based on the actions of the Indianapolis football team over the ensuing 96 hours, you would think that Riley Leonard had gone 0/41 with 10 interceptions. That’s because the following day, Monday, December 8, it was reported that Philip Rivers, a 44-year old former Colts quarterback, had been reached out to and would be working out for the Colts. We’re threatening to go beyond the remit of this game’s writeup here, so this will stay brief, but one has to work it out that either Riley Leonard, a quarterback that Colts general manager Chris Ballard picked himself, is so bad that a 44-year-old quarterback on no practice reps is better than him, or that Ballard is trying a stupid publicity stunt to cover up the fact that Ballard’s entire team-building strategy was predicated on the health of Daniel Jones, whose Achilles injury and long recovery period make Ballard’s trade of two first-round picks for a now-injured cornerback who has been less than lockdown in limited play for the Colts so far might a massive and disastrous misallocation of resources for a team that once again is in need of a long-term quarterback. The season has gone completely off the deep end for Indianapolis, and there is very little that Colts fans can do to palliate their sense of utter despair save pivot entirely to the Indiana Hoosiers’ college football playoff hopes. This might be the single worst Sunday any team has had so far this season. It’s up there with the Jets’ first game of 2023 when Rodgers’ Achilles snapped. The darkness is crushing and black right now in Naptown.

Season Score: 3.692

Kansas City Chiefs:

At Personal Vowels, We Call It Like We See It. And What We See Is This: Total Freefall From A Team Without Magic.

From grace, fallen. From the throne, deposed. From the firmament, removed. And from the cynosure of the NFL’s starlight and publicity-fueled universe, expelled. These are statements you’d have never expected to be written about the three-time defending AFC Champions, whose refulgence with starry personas and repleteness with gridiron power have never had cause to be questioned until now. But fourteen weeks in and sporting a sub-0.500 record, there’s no doubt: the Chiefs’ dynasty is on life support. A season without a playoff berth, right on the heels of a Super Bowl LX extermination to an Eagles team that themselves have proven no great shakes in recent weeks, has stirred a bitter flavoring into the dynastic sauce that till now has seasoned the gourmet tables of Chiefs Kingdom. With four weeks to go and their playoff destinies summarily out of their hands, the Chiefs need to do a few hard things to salvage the rest of this year: prove to themselves they can still win tough, and identify those contributors on this team that should definitely be here next year after another round of evaluations, decisions, and departures come and go. The Chiefs are a bad offensive football team. They’re also a very, very hurt offensive football team. Those two things are enough to ruin an NFL season, even if you are three-time defending AFC champions with the genetic memory of being an almost unstoppable offensive machine. The running game isn’t there. The timing on passing routes isn’t there. The willingness to grip it and rip it to the first open man, even if he has only an inch of separation on his defender, isn’t there. And all of this combines for a team that not only can’t win one-score games anymore, but can’t even be relied upon to keep it close against good opposing defenses. That’s how you end up with a 20-10 home loss to a Texans outfit that barely rushed for 80 yards and barely threw for 200. Even those numbers dwarf what the Chiefs were able to accomplish through the air: Mahomes was held to 160 yards, no touchdowns, and three interceptions. He got no help from Kareem Hunt, Marquise Brown, Rashee Rice and above all Travis Kelce, who all dropped key passes – the last three on either fourth down or on a tip on the final meaningful offensive play of the game. Two names who have largely escaped criticism due to the higher-profile nature of the offensive stars’s foibles are these: Harrison Butker and Matt Nagy. The first is their kicker, whose missed kicks this season have in many cases been the difference between a perfect 12-0 record in one-score games in last season’s 17-3 season total and this season’s 6-7 slog. This game is just the latest instance of a missed field goal or extra point being both backbreaking and unforgivable from Butker, on the one hand, and the offense being far too reliant on highly volatile probabilities going their way, like kicks from a kicker undergoing serious regression. Matt Nagy is the second name on my list of under-the-radar culprits for the sag, and without going too into schematic details, I’ll say this: the moment the Chiefs elevated Matt Nagy and said farewell to Eric Bienemy prior to the 2023 season is where their prolonged offensive struggles truly began. These two plus a down year from Mahomes and a far more aggressive approach from Andy Reid have all caused the mediocrities we’ve seen this year from a team whose past decade has been anything but. This Chiefs team is a glaring reversal of all the great Chiefs teams of recent years: a team whose offense can be good, and whose defense can shut opponents down, but whose two most key units can never do their best work at the same time. This isn’t a Super Bowl team. It’s barely a playoff team. It’s probably neither. Good riddance.

Season Score: 3.154

Washington Commanders:

Less Than Two Years In – Less Than A Year From The NFC Championship – D.Q. Might Have Lost It All Already.

Something profound and awful happened to the fun Washington Commanders some time between their NFC Championship loss and now. It happened closer to the start of this season that this loss, a 31-0 coffin-fashioning that barely registered on the national consciousness, but what happened in this game is emblematic of the larger structural issues that has killed the Commanders team this year. Draining down and distances given rise to by wasted plays, injuries stopping play and removing key contributors, and defensive football that looks small, poorly coached, out of position and more than anything else OLD all combined to create the worst loss so far of the Dan Quinn era: a 31-0 shellacking against a team that itself just lost 26-0. It's pure disgrace, and while it’s probably too early to suppose that the front office and owner would truly consider moving on from Dan Quinn, there’s no doubt he has used up a ton of the rope he won for himself with his early successes last year. Few teams who have their franchise quarterback have a more uncertain future than these Commanders. You can’t do worse than 0 points, but if you’d told us that the Commanders somehow found a way to be the first team in NFL history to score negative points in their 31-nothing blanking at the hands of the suddenly dangerous Vikings on Sunday, we’d have believed you. Jayden Daniels’ return was even more short-lived and more ineffective the second time around this season, netting only 78 passing yards on 20 passes, an incredible 3.9 yards per attempt that came on nine completions. It looked as dreadful as the numbers would suggest. Marcus Mariota entered the game after Daniels was hurt on a desperation fourth-down attempt that resulted in both an interception and an injured elbow for Daniels. That wasn’t even the worst injury for the Commanders, however, as Marcus Mariota threw a pass to Zach Ertz between two defenders that led to a monstrous low blow that crushed the tight end’s knee. It was 24-0 at that point and if the parties involved could have convened at midfield and just ended the game at that point to save all players further injury, they probably would have. The season has reached a funereal depth of meaninglessness for the Commanders, who are having as hope-annihilating a follow-up to an NFC Finalist season as just about any team in the last twenty years. In total, the Commanders haven’t been all that bad on offense (outside of this day, of course), and are fourth in the NFL in rushing. But they’ve had the impenetrability of a thin, cold gruel on defense, giving up 6.2 yards per play and grabbing only six interceptions all year. They aren’t much better at the front of their defense, only hurrying quarterbacks on 5.2% of their dropbacks, the lowest rate in the league. And when it comes to the middle of their defense, they’re bad there too, allowing the third-most yards after the catch to enemy receivers. This is a dark year for Dan Quinn, who looks like a wizard who has lost his magic wand along with all his hair and doesn’t have any answers forthcoming. This team has nothing more to offer this season and needs to just hope they don’t get any more of their players saddled with debilitating injuries as the year comes to a welcome close.

Season Score: 2.385

Arizona Cardinals:

Jonathan Gannon Has Had Time And Resources To Build This Defense. Near Full Strength, They Cannot Compete.

Since their Week 8 bye, the Cardinals have been the worst team in the NFL in the department of convincingly masquerading as a potential challenge to their opponents. In the past six games alone they’ve given up 41 or more points three times. Since that Week 8 bye, their average margin of defeat in games they have lost (and they’ve lost 10 of 13) has moved from 3 to…15. And that figure, which is already in excess of two touchdowns, is only saved from being far more cavernous because of the serial playing-around that the Bucs and Jags tend to do with their food. It is dark in the desert, and like that old short story, the canteen in the sweltering sandy waste is only filled with wine – no succor there. The Cardinals just need to get to January 5 – the first Monday after the regular season – and then they need to dynamite this whole thing, because the Ossenfort-Gannon-Kyler/Brissett triumvirate is not working, not at all. The Arizona Cardinals and their fans had to have gone into this game with one hand over their eyes. This was always going to be a rough one. It didn’t need to be this rough, though. The Cardinals are inhabiting a spot that I can recall the Eagles, with then-first-year quarterback Jalen Hurts at the helm, inhabiting in 2021, which is to say that spot in the NFL where the only notable thing they do from week to week is rack up empty stats in blowouts. If you have Michael Wilson or Trey McBride in your fantasy lineup, you’re coming away with at least a soft smile on your lips; if you’re anyone else who had to watch this game who wasn’t a Rams fan, you’re walking away with a woeful wince. It’s possible that the Cardinals finish the season with one of the worst point differentials in the NFL despite dropping their first five losses by a combined 13 points. No one’s a better bet to lose since November began than the Cardinals, who are in a race to the bottom of the conference with Washington and New Orleans with Atlanta close behind. It’s anyone’s guess how many of those teams will be in need of new quarterbacks…or coaches. Arizona certainly looks like it will be in need of the latter, because this Gannon defense doesn’t bear a shred of similarity to the high-energy, suffocating unit that mauled opponents in Philadelphia when he was coordinating defense for Nick Sirianni. Instead, this is a blasé, pass-rush needy, un-stingy group of eleven that can’t come up with creative coverages nor figure out how to defend contested catches with any sort of regularity. Their tackling stinks, too. Jacoby Brissett is certainly an admirable stand in for a true franchise quarterback, as far as those things go, but he’s not a long-term starter, no matter how many teams with iffy QB situations he chooses to go to. This team needs radical, transformative change across the board, and not just in defensive personnel.

Season Score: 2.308

Atlanta Falcons:

In The Second Half, At Home, Atlanta Witnessed Their Team Quit, Die, And Take Their Leave. Darkness Has Fallen.

Polishing off the final wisps of potential hope for an enemy team is a special and sadistic but not immoral pleasure afforded to good teas at this time of year – a privileged delicacy made the more enjoyable when a game starts close and ends anything but. That’s how the Seahawks took care of business in Atlanta, smashing to smithereens the tottering, predictable machine built shoddily by the Falcons brain trust in a manner that Falcon historians could not help but note looked and felt immensely similar to the first horripilating knells of doom on the Dan Quinn era that rang out in Week 1 of 2020, when these same Seahawks, wearing these same atypical all-white uniforms, came to Mercedes-Benz Stadium and announced to DQ, Matt Ryan and company that they were too old, too disjointed and too bogged down in their own blundering inadequacies to be a real threat to a confident team like Seattle. That game ended 38-25, this one was even less competitive at 37-9. The Falcons of Raheem Morris, Zac Robinson and indeed Terry Fontenot must surely go the way of the Dodo, the dire wolf, and the Dan Quinn – that is to say, to a “Good Riddance!”-accompanied exit from public life. During a week when Quentin Jammer confessed that during the 2011 season he played at least 8 games while intoxicated with alcohol, it’s far too easy to avail oneself of booze-related analogy in recapping these games, so I will. At halftime, with the score tied 6-6, it felt like Atlanta had won essentially a mini-victory. They weren’t getting blown out! They were actually tamping down the Seahawks offense! They were tied, for Heaven’s sake! If they were thinking this way going into the locker room, they may have started the celebration early. It certainly looked that way, because the Falcons came out of the locker room staggering, and Seattle took full advantage. The Falcons got their clocks cleaned in the second half, giving up scores on every one of the Seahawks’ drive except the very last one. Kirk Cousins simply could not compete with his erstwhile Minnesota replacement, Sam Darnold, who granted was throwing to a receiver self-actualizing in real time in a way not seen in Atlanta since at least 2015 Julio Jones. When you get past the stomach-churning optics of losing by 28 points at home to a team that was rebuilding as recently as last year, this game essentially went as you’d expect if you were Atlanta: your defense couldn’t stop Sam Darnold, your offense couldn’t disentangle the head-spinning complications of the Mike McDonald scheme, and your special teams plopped out another mephitic horror of a day in the third phase of the game. Atlanta is finished – they’ve been eliminated from playoff contention. It’s not clear what Raheem Morris would have to do over the final four games to save his job, or if he even can, but it would have to involve winning and looking like a professional football team – no easy feat for a team addicted to embarrassing itself.

Season Score: 2.231

Cincinnati Bengals:

The Dead Cat Bounce, Usually The Domain Of Interim Coaches, Has Come To An End. There’s Always Next Year.

It’s sad to see a great beast like a Bengal tiger roaming around the forest, shot by a hunter’s bullet, who seems on the verge of escaping to live and prowl another day, only for the hunter to find his quarry dead to rights in a clearing with the chance to put a second killing shot between his eyes. That hunter rarely misses, and the prey never survives. The Bengals were within a 3rd and 15 of getting the ball back and salvaging a chance of saving their season – they’re still many degrees of separation removed from truly saving it, to be entirely dispassionate about it – and, as has been the story of their wretched defense all year, they somehow let that chance slip thoughtlessly away in the snowy Buffalo winds, letting the giant strides of Josh Allen thunder past them and toward another Buffalo victory and another Bengals loss, one among countless such that their offense tried to decide but couldn’t because of their dead-weight D. Joe Burrow, The Hero, didn’t last very long. Instead the Bills defense did what they’ve been largely unable to do against their tormentors in the form of Joe Burrow and Patrick Mahomes – take the ball away in the biggest moments. This was even bigger an accomplishment for the Bills defense than taking the ball away: it won the game against the Bengals offense when Joe Burrow faltered, even if just an inch. Christian Benford made the sort of heady, unlikely, ballsy defensive play that we associate with Harbugh’s Ravens, Tomlin’s Steelers or Belichick’s Patriots, disrupting an ill-advised and weakly-thrown Burrow pass and snatching it out of the air to score without the offense needing to take the field. Then they did it again on the very next series. They gleamed in the glorious Buffalo snow, victors of the day – and stood in stark contrast to the simply hideous Bengals defense which can’t stop anyone, much less the reigning NFL MVP. Joe Burrow and Tee Higgins were white hot in the falling snow by the end of the fourth quarter, as anyone could see after the pair hooked up for a final touchdown to make it 34-39 with a bit more than two minutes left in the game. The Bengals defense on the following series appeared to be in capital position to send the ball back to their rampaging offense, getting the Bills into a 3rd and 17 with time for one more stop. But Josh Allen is STIIILLL Josh Allen (Bruce Buffer voice), and he is almost impossible to stop on a scramble if you are just one defender trying to solo tackle him. Of course the Bengals conceded the first down to Allen, and of course this was the end of the game, and probably the season, for the Bengals. They aren’t mathematically eliminated, but they may as well be. They’re done. Cooked. Finito. This defense couldn’t stop a screen door from closing if it had a doorstop made of solid Tungsten, and it couldn’t propel this team to a playoff win even if it had Joe Burrow throwing passes – which it does. Zac Taylor, DO SOMETHING TO FIX THIS.

Season Score: 1.923

Las Vegas Raiders:

There Is Exactly One Notable Moment From This Raiders Loss. That Bad Beat Aside, This Team Is Gridiron Nihilism.

This team isn’t quite as bad as the Titans. They don’t have quite as much ridiculous drama constantly unspooling around them as the Browns. They haven’t fallen short of expectations as badly as the Bengals. But if you need to find a team that is about 31st-best at everything of meaning in this crazy season, you can’t do better than the Raiders. Even if you can name at least one team that does a specific something worse than them, you’d be hard-pressed to find any team that does quite as many different things awfully. Like Arizona, Atlanta, and Tennessee, this is a team that needs the peace, calm and quiet of a long and playoff-less offseason to evaluate positively everything. Just one more month, Raiders fans. Just. One. More. Month. This team is just impossible to evaluate on its own merits right now – they’ve completely neglected all the truly crucial elements of roster building in John Spytek’s first year as GM, including both lines but most egregiously the OL, which cannot do anything to make Ashton Jeanty a good draft pick in Year 1 of his career. His odds for OROY were probably at minus money on some books at the start of this season – he is beyond the reaches of that award’s solar system now, at +15000 on some sites. Omarion Hampton, who was on IR for two months, is ahead of him. Pete Carroll seems perennially clueless on the sideline, the new OC Greg Olson and lifetime Raiders DC Patrick Graham both look befuddled and answerless every time they cut to this team, and Geno Smith might be the lowest-ceiling veteran quarterback in the NFL. He might be the worst quarterback in the NFL, period, but we’d need to spend more time evaluating his, Max Brosmer’s, and Riley Leonard’s film, which we aren’t going to do. The only interesting thing the Raiders did in this game was kick a field goal down 10 as time expired to lose by 7. Of course, this curious move led several blackhearted and wrongheaded doyens in the sports media world to cry foul and accuse the Raiders of intentionally manipulating the game’s final score for gambling purposes, which is harebrained, but it’s the world we live in. If you’re down 10 with time for one play and can’t win, it should not matter if you kick a field goal or try to throw for a touchdown – the game’s not in question, just the final deficit, and you’re crying over spilt milk if you’re shedding tears over a game’s “spread.” Play stupid games and all that. The Raiders are the stupidest game out there right now – and you’re a blithering idiot if you’re counting on them doing something right or orthodox to win money.

Season Score: 1.769