(WEB) The Hell Yes Hierarchy: Week 6 2025.

Week 6.

When it comes to the NFL, there are a few notions that are important to remember as the weeks progress and the familiarity we have with teams is both strengthened by expected results and challenged by those unexpected. In the first place, it is key to bear in mind that the distance between the thirty-second-best team in the NFL and the very greatest one is orders of magnitude smaller than can be comprehended if you allow your imagination to run wild and be swayed by oversized scoring differentials put up each week by the league’s best or suffered by the league’s worst; the most talented teams in the SEC and B1G are - or at least were before the age of NIL, transfer portal preeminence, and pay-for-play broke all the rules – possessors of a terrifying superiority in talent, coaching, and general resource allotment than their cellar-dwelling intraconference rivals, something that is not seen in the NFL barring extraordinary circumstances (think first-year expansion teams in Tampa Bay 1976 or Cleveland 1999). That means that the immortal words of Bert Bell, later quoted as the title of a memoir by defensive end Pat Toomay who actually played on that ’76 Bucs squad, on any given Sunday, any one NFL team can beat any other NFL team. And on Sunday, October 12 – as well as on Thursday, October 9, and Monday, October 13 – that adage’s truthfulness was proved once more.

Such proofs are always welcome, and should be met with glad tidings, when they appear; even if you’re a fan of one of the teams who provided the loserly explicandum for the winner’s explicans, you are not prohibited from taking heart in feeling the interwovenness of the league and the inescapable camaraderie and pin-length proximity that barely divide one team from another. It’s good to be in close company with the thirty-one other outfits that compose the whole of the football league you compete in; without the knowledge that you aren’t that much better than any other one team, no victory would be sweet, and no defeat would be able to be processed without undue suffering. And it’s in that vein of contemplation that we come to our theme of the week for Week 6 of the NFL season: Week 6 was the Week Of The Triple Slammer. At least four different teams compelled me to put exclamations in triplicate in their write-ups. In editorial argot, “slammer” refers to this guy: !. The humble exclamation point. Some developments this week were so striking that “!!!” felt a compulsory flourish to add to my interpretation of the events that unfolded. Even with the knowledge of “Well, Any Given Sunday…” frontmost in one’s mind it can be difficult to truly grasp the insanity of weekends like the one Week 6 treated us to. All told, there were upsets by teams expected to lose by 2.5, 4.5, 4.5, and 8 points all in a single Thursday-through-Monday of NFL games. The star of the upset show by sheer point spread was the New York Giants, whose ambush beatdown of the Philadelphia Eagles and their not-all-the-way-there offense felt like more than a stochastic blip on Philly’s radar but still not quite a “changing of the guard” (god, no – there’s champion slip ups, like what the Eagles suffered, and then there are true moments of irrevocable and disempowering dethronement; think Buffalo’s last Super Bowl loss, or the Titans’ takedown of the final gemological inlay in the Patriots’ dynastic diadem in the 2019 Wild Card playoffs for the latter, and remember we’re not there yet with this Eagles team). The giddiness of the Jaxson Dart-Cam Skattebo-Wan’Dale Robinson Giants, the unmistakably unheralded and obscure composition of the roster, combined with the urgent exigency of the Brian Daboll-Joe Schoen partnership bearing fruit in the form of victories, made it a special win – if only one that moves the Giants to 2-4. It takes Herculean efforts to retrieve the Golden Apples of the Hesperides, but that’s one of the few advantages that can come with being a team who has lost as frequently and with as much abjection as these Giants have: when a game begins to unfold that feels different than all the losing, the whole team knows that they’ve got a shot, no matter who is on the other side of the LOS. And this game felt different, looked different, played out different and most importantly ended different than any other recent Giants-Eagles game. It was the Giants who made the big plays, the Giants who made Philadelphia tacklers look laggardly and lackadaisical, and the Giants who jumped on top early and never relinquished the lead despite sparks of competence from the opposition. I’ll raise my hand and say I thought giving Daboll and Schoen yet another chance at constructing a competitive offense – forget “dominant” or “league-leading” offense akin to what Daboll got going in Buffalo in 2020 and 2021, simply a competitive one that looked like it equaled the value of the individual component assets that staffed the unit – was a bad idea and would almost certainly lead to greater dissipation within the team instead of a dramatic turnaround. Well, even though the former could still happen, I’m not so proud to say that I don’t welcome the latter, even if it means I’m wrong. There are precious few teams in the NFL that authentically and spiritually feel, if you’re being objective about these things, like the “fabric” of the league; the Giants are one. They, along with the other acknowledged and/or historic powers in Pittsburgh, Green Bay, Chicago, San Francisco and Dallas (sorry if I left your team out, but these are the big ones), engender a sense of history and heritage when they’re playing well that ushers one back to a time when it seems like the team, the NFL, and perhaps the world were all in a more heroic, less corrupted, and better state. The metaphysics of this phenomenon are impalpable, but nevertheless, it’s there. And to be resistant to the warming glow of historicity when one of the pillar franchises of the NFL begins to turn a page from years that act as a chapter of dereliction towards a dawn of new conquests is not to be imperious or superhuman, nor righteously “above” all of the lowly fanfaronade that accompany these teams ceaselessly; it’s simply to be a curmudgeon, obstinate in unwillingness to avail yourself of the cherishings that make watching football, and living life, a thoroughly profitable enterprise.

Another of those historic, fabric-of-the-NFL-constituent teams found itself entangled in a labyrinth of unexpected stress this weekend – the Dallas Cowboys. Dealing with a defense as bad as any in the NFL and an offense as good as any in the NFL, they came up against a team as desperate as any in the NFL for a good old fashioned feel-good win – the Carolina Panthers. Though the Panthers could boast a record of 2-3 going into this game – merely a half-game back, mathematically speaking, of the Cowboys’ 2-2-1 record – their losses had been pustular, eye-sore-inducing, mephitic shitfires, with final scores like 26-10, 27-22 and 42-13 that had all looked a lot worse before garbage time gave Dave Canales and his band of afloat big cats a chance to modestly tidy up an otherwise gaping wound in the score sheet. The Cowboys, on the other hand, had been competitive-enough on offense to keep all but one of their games close despite a feeble defense that seemed both soft and cretinous at once, to say nothing of starpower-less (they being the team that shipped off the best pass rusher in existence to the team up north, the Cheeseheads, back before Week 1). This one, on paper, looked and felt like a Cowboys blowout that would bolster Dak Prescott’s unlikely but still chuffing MVP case with banner-day efficiency numbers and yardage totals. For a while, a version of that potential reality looked to be in the offing. But then Bryce Young, an embattled, undersized, doubted, dismissed and even disdained former first overall pick took control of the game, coming to glorious life as the Dallas Cowboys defense remained cold and dead on the slab. The Carolina Reaper was 10-of-10 for 125 yards, three touchdowns and a perfect passer rating while trailing against the Cowboys, and unlike other prevent-defense-loving stat merchants, he actually had the honor of winning the game alongside the piling-up of productivity through the mid-autumn Charlotte air. Even though the Cowboys aren’t good right now, they aren’t irrelevant; they’re bad in a fun way. And in its own funny way, that fate is one that helps the league out, too. It’s great when the Cowboys are good. It’s awesome when the Cowboys are fun but bad. And then there are the Chicago Bears, fresh off a 25-24 last-minute thriller win against the uninspiring Raiders, who were up against a surging Washington team waiting to see their second-year quarterback get back to his stratospheric haunts off a minor but still alarming knee injury. The Bears had other plans. They’re still waiting for their first-ever 4,000 yard quarterback. After Monday Night, it looks like, finally, they may have one. The league is in a good spot right now, top – and it is in that good spot because no one is safe. None can be held blameless. “For they can conquer who believe they can,” the poet Virgil once wrote. Let’s see who conquered Week 6.

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“Hell Yes!!!” Taxon

Tampa Bay Buccaneers:

Baker Mayfield, The Hero. For Now, That’s All That Needs To Be Said.

Baker Mayfield is the Sun King of Tampa Bay. He is the solar deity about which all the other celestial bodies orbit. He is, very simply, the Main Character of the 2025 NFL Season. And that’s exactly what Tampa Bay, the NFC, and the NFL needs in a season staffed so far with only minor heroes – a masterpiece comeback story with immortality on the line. We’ve seen early-season mythologies smashed by the hard facts of bully teams tones of times before. We’ve seen beloved, easy-to-root-for human-interest stories torn to shreds by overpowering opposition many a time. And it’s rare, especially in the NFL, that we get to see true redemption stories. But that’s what Baker Mayfield is. He’s the prodigal son who has returned from an overlong stint in the wilderness to raise the Tampa Bay Buccaneers from Tom Brady-led temporary sparkplug to perennial NFC South potentate status. And he is the prime mover, the demiurge, of the post-Bruce Arians/Tom Brady Bucs. Just take a look at the cast of pass-catchers he was slinging the Duke to on Sunday. The OPOY frontrunner Emeka Egbuka caught two passes for 24 yards before exiting with a hamstring wound; other than him, the recipients of receptions from B. Mayfield were named Rachaad White, Kameron Johnson, Cade Otton, Sterling Shepard, and Tez Johnson. You probably knew Rachaad White was the backup running back, and you likely were familiar with the work of Cade Otton; but Kameron Johnson? What about mistaken-identity MVP candidate Tez Johnson? Did you have any idea that Sterling Shepard was even on this team now? Baker completed 15 of 19 non-Egbuka-targeting passes to that cast of scallywags, including a Heisman Moment-esque deep shot to Tez Johnson that iced the game and sent Baker’s MVP candidacy shooting into the stratosphere (it helped Tez Johnson’s case, long shot though he is, too). With a quarterback who is oozing fearlessness, esprit, and sprezzatura like an evolutionary Sammy Baugh, a ferocious and veteran-led defense with monster DLs and brainy LBs, and a cast around the quarterback that can be all things it needs to when circumstances arise, there are clear parallels to this Bucs team and another NFC South juggernaut from days gone by – the 15-1 2015 Carolina Panthers. I think this team has a shot at the one seed in the NFC and much more in January and February to wit. The main character of this NFL season lives in Tampa Bay, and is penning a hell of a story for everyone to follow.

Season Score: 4.333

Atlanta Falcons:

The Falcons Will Be The First To Tell You: That’s Not How That Game Was Supposed To Go. But They’ll Take It!!!

The second half played out the way you thought it would for Atlanta – but that’s the only part of this game that made a lick of sense. Yes, the Bills are beat up. And yes, Bijan Robinson is having a season for the very ages through the early stretch that is putting him on Marshall Faulk/Chris Johnson/Chirstian McCaffrey/Roger Craig trajectories. But this showed that if the Falcons can play *their* game – a big if – they can beat damn near anyone. It’s rare that a first half is so good and so one-sided that it entirely absolves the second half of its blown opportunities, turnovers, and miscues – but that’s more or less what the Falcons’ first half did for the Falcons’ second half on Monday Night. The Falcons stormed out of the gates against a flabbergasted and woefully undermanned Bills defense that looked like Ed Oliver and a bunch of nameless guys chasing Bijan Robinson and Drake London all over the place. Bijan Robinson finally paired a guns-blazing rushing day with a trip to the endzone on the ground, with an 81-yard rushing score putting the Falcons in an early catbird-seat posture that they tried – but thankfully failed – to relinquish in subsequent offensive opportunities. A Drake London catch-and-run as time expired came up several agonizing inches short of a touchdown due to the wideout’s toes touching down outside the boundary as he extended the ball across the plane, a duo of second-half drives that combined to consist of 8 plays and 16 yards both ended ignominiously in punts, and a late Parker Romo field goal was blocked while the game was still only 21-14, leading to the inevitable questions of whether the Falcons were Falcon-ing this game up. But their defense came to play in a way that it simply had not in recent weeks, and after mutilating the next two Bills drives from promising game-tying opportunities into three-and-outs they kicked another field goal – this time a good one – to go up 10 with less than two minutes left. A Josh Allen interception – his second of the evening – ended the game. It’s simply bizarre that a team could in a span of a month lose 30-0 to the Panthers and defeat the Bills 24-14, but that’s the world we live in. Atlanta is a tough out if they can fully utilize their starpower on offense – and with a mostly-intact roster that just last year swept the regnal Bucs, can challenge for the division crown if their defense continues to play like the talented, young, energetic unit that it surely is. 

Season Score: 3.400

Kansas City Chiefs:

Welcome Back To Fun Status, Kansas City; Your Brief Absence Was Not Without Its Revelers.

0-2 is what it says it is. So is 3-3. Neither of those indicate a team with a winning record. But it sure feels like getting through a stretch of games against a brutal succession of opponents with injuries to your WR2 and a suspension being served by your WR1 feels less like a tumble from which the Chiefs need to climb back up from, and a whole lot more like a protracted bounce on a trampoline that once jumped from will vault the Chiefs into a long winning streak. It isn’t 400+ yards and 6 touchdowns, like his third-ever start against the Pittsburgh Steelers. And it’s not 200+ yards and multiple touchdowns to Tyreek Hill in the first quarter alone against the Buccaneers, as in 2020. But dammit, this version of Patrick Mahomes, Rashee Rice or no Rashee Rice, looks like the best version of Patrick Mahomes that we got in 2022 – the first year after Hill’s departure when the QB captured his second MVP and second Super Bowl in a single stroke of 20-game sustained brilliance that had not been seen since Kurt Warner’s first year as a starter. Mahomes didn’t always look infallible in this game, but he almost always looked in control of himself and his team and cognizant of what the Lions defense was doing. The one time he didn’t appear to be coolly collected, when Noah Gray, inexplicably singled-up against Aidan Hutchinson, allowed the star pass rusher to reach his quarterback and force a fumble, Mahomes quickly corrected the mistake, which belongs to him on the stat sheet but should be noted as a slip-up of coaching to allow the best defensive player on the Lions to rush against a non-offensive lineman without any help. Mahomes chucked three more touchdowns and ran for another in what seems like the sixth-straight “I’ll do it myself”-coded performance of the season. While at this point his receiver room is fairly well staffed with talented, if mostly WR2-level, contributors, his running backs are providing almost nothing beyond a couple decent first-and-ten runs that very, very seldom beget another first down, and as such Mahomes is the chief rushing power on this team in addition to being its only passer. While that’s not great long-term, it is a simple and effective recipe for putting oneself in great position for MVP consideration down the line. If the Chiefs can continue to surge while their so-called AFC counterparts in Los Angeles, Buffalo, and Baltimore either slowly or swiftly succumb to their own imperfections and injuries, there’s little reason to think they can’t repeat 2022: League MVP, Super Bowl Champions. The rest is still unwritten with the Chiefs – and you should have known better, doubters, than to question them at 0-2.

Season Score: 3.333

New York Giants:

Welcome Back To Fun Status, NYG; Your Overlong Absence Had Us Thinking You Might Never Return.

This, this right here, is that special moment that David Glen Eisley’s 1997 arena rock anthem “Sweet Victory” – the song from the 2001 SpongeBob SquarePants episode “Band Geeks” – was written for. No, it’s not a Super Bowl win. No, it’s not a game that clinches a division. Frankly, it’s one that we might eventually forget; there weren’t too many true highlights, no one put up a truly gigantic statline and all things considered nothing all that crazy happened. But maybe that’s a reason that we all should remember this one: because a team of total Davids, one whose principal playmakers on the night were rookie QB Jaxson Dart, rookie RB Cam Skattebo, role-player pass catchers Theo Johnson, Wan’Dale Robinson and Lil’Jordan Humphrey, and cornerback Cordale Flott, soundly and one-sidedly defeated a team of Goliaths, a group consisting of reigning Super Bowl MVP Jalen Hurts, freshly-minted 2,000-yard rusher and revenge-minded former Giant Saquon Barkley, the peerless A.J. Brown/DeVonta Smith wide receiver duo and a defense that has crushed rookie quarterbacks for a decade. The slingshot’s aim was true – and the underdog gave America a two-for-one Eagles meltdown and hate-watch that it had been waiting a long time for. You couldn’t come away from this game without noticing, if you’d been watching the full unvarnished feed of Thursday Night Football, a scarcely-contained grin from Brian Daboll every time a positive Giants gain caused the broadcast cameras to cut to him. He beamed with knowing glee late in the game as the Giants, with possession of the ball and in pristine position to salt the game away, lined up yet again at the LOS for either a Cam Skattebo run, a Jaxson Dart pass to a poorly-covered pass-catcher, or a read-option that would send Dart off-tackle for a medium- to large gain. The Giants looked like they were the world champions and the Eagles were the rebuilding team struggling to find harmonious chemistry amongst all their playmakers. But while they looked world-class, these Giants didn’t look like last year’s Philadelphia Eagles, who while dominant and championship-caliver weren’t exciting; rather the Jaxson Dart Giants looked like the 2022 Chiefs, a team that though it had lost its superstar receiver (in the Chiefs case, to trade, and in the Giants case to injury via a Malik Nabers ACL tear) still had more than enough dynamic derring-do in its QB’s holster to gun down stiff competition all while playing a thrilling brand of football. But those Chiefs never had someone like Cam Skattebo, someone who can be a true tone-setter and demoralizing presence for a defense, who provides a contrapuntal dimension of doggedness that enhances the effectiveness of the passing game’s aerial precision – sure, Isiah Pacheco showed flashes in that year and in 2023, and has done so if less frequently the last two years as well, but he never scored three rushing touchdowns in a game against the defending Super Bowl champions. And while Pacheco provided a welcome, straight-ahead, nastiness-pulsating alternative to the smoothness of Patrick Mahomes’ jetstream firings to Travis Kelce, Juju Smith-Schuster and Marquez Valdes-Scantling, he could never be “the guy” – he was in a pass-first, Mahomes-led, Andy Reid-orchestrated offense after all. Skattebo, at least for his rookie season, looks like he can be that guy. At least with Jaxson Dart and his legs acting in tandem. The Giants only dropped back to pass 27 times on Thursday – they ran it 39 times. And two of those 27 dropbacks turned into short-loss or no-gain “sacks” – effectively unsuccessful running plays by Dart. That the Giants could do this against an Eagles defensive line that has absolutely owned the Daboll Giants over the past 3 seasons should sow discord of dizzying magnitude into the minds of Nick Sirianni and his defensive staff – especially considering the bafflingly low pressure percentage that the Eagles have managed to generate through 6 games in 2025 (16.7% - just 27th-best in the league). Even when the Eagles did get to Dart, he deftly wove through would-be sackers in apparent imitation of former Giant Fran Tarkenton, eluding sluggish pass rushers with a seeming sixth sense for staying out of harm’s way when defensive ends and tackles beat their blocks and almost always gaining positive yards. And on the rare occasions that the Philadelphia front seven had Dart near to in-their-grasp, he still delivered strikes, including on two veteran-level throws to tight end Theo Johnson, who dropped one but caught the other (both were beyond first down yardage). The way the Giants simply “showed up” in this game contrasted starkly with the Eagles: from their first offensive series it was clear the Giants were brimming with a “We know we can win this game”-emblematic thrum, an indelible sense of self that was best demonstrated when Jaxson Dart careered easily and uncontestedly into the endzone to make the score 13-3 early (a missed extra point, which the Eagles would have caused to haunt other teams in the past, kept it from being 14-3). After halftime, with the Giants leading 20-17, Dart continued to puncture the Eagles in multidimensional ways, hitting his depleted receiving corps of Wan’Dale Robinson, Lil’Jordan Humphrey and Jalin Hyatt with ease and familiarity as if they’d been the starters since camp. This team even showed a genius for finding the most ideal matchup to take advantage of, targeting a deeply overmatched Kelee Ringo on several key downs resulting in pass interference or illegal contact. So often, this team has seemed like a talent-poor operation that couldn’t even play up to the sum of its parts (never good when you’re already talent deficient); in this game, Big Blue was the team that played to the level, and above, that their talent allowed for, and made the Eagles look like the team that was playing down to a level beneath their standard. And if any play acted as an epitome of that phenomenon, it was without doubt Cam Skattebo’s truck-stick throwing-off of free agent godsend Zack Baun, who seemed to bounce off the rookie’s shoulderpads as the running back picked up crucial yards near the goalline before taking an even larger lead than before on the Eagles. The only scary moment for the Giants came when it appeared Jaxson Dart may have been concussed on a late-ish hit during a scramble up the middle; it didn’t feel like that should be the end of his evening, and both Brian Daboll and Cam Skattebo reflected as much, improperly (but understandably) entering the blue medical tent as the QB’s neurological assessment was ongoing. Thankfully for us as fans, and for Brian Daboll and Cam Skattebo’s blood pressure, he was just fine. This team was fun on Thursday night. It’s been far too long since a Giants team could be described by that adjective.

Season Score: 3.000

Carolina Panthers:

This Is The Game You Needed To See From Bryce Young. Till Now It’s Been Flukey; On Sunday, It Was Formidable.

When David Tepper instructed Frank Reich and Dan Morgan that they would be drafting Bryce Young, this is the quarterback he thought he would be getting. Gigantic and statuesque in the pocket? No. Able to deliver a precision missile 75 yards downfield? Probably not. Capable when the pocket collapses of dashing down the sideline or up the middle of the field himself for a huge gain? Don’t make me laugh. But nigh-omniscient in scanning the field with a selection of pitches that can reach any of his five eligibles if they’re somewhat separated from their coverage? You betcha. There is something being built here – and for the first time in the Bryce Young era, it’s not a foregone conclusion that the Panthers are the less-talented team every time they take the field. The quarterbacks that get to play the Cowboys each week are beginning to do something similar to what the QBs who had the luxury of lining up opposite from the 2015 New Orleans Saints did: put together a season-long glut of aerial plundering that, all tallied, would probably constitute an MVP season if all the performances exhibited against them belonged to a single player. Thankfully that player is only hypothetical, but Bryce Young’s ascent to competent, second-contract-consideration-worthy passer is very real indeed. The guy only went 10-for-10 for a buck 25 and three tugs in every pass he attempted against the Cowboys while trailing, including the first touchdown in Tetairoa McMillan’s career and an ice-cold, savvy-vet-like two-minute drill to drain what remained of the game clock before having Ryan Fitzgerald bury a short field goal for the win. This is what progress looks like in Carolina. The Canales-Young pairing is starting to look like what Tepper signed up for. Can Panthers Nation cancel a fan-operated podcast every week? That strategy seems to be working. Of course, no young quarterback accomplishes everything solely by themselves, and it helps to have a vengeful Rico Dowdle popping off for 473 total yards in just two games to net wins against the Dolphins and Cowboys. No, those defenses are not the best the NFL has to offer – but it’s progress we’re looking for, and it’s progress we’ve found.

Season Score: 3.000 

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“Hell Yeah.” Taxon

Indianapolis Colts:

This Is The Privilege Of Out-Of-Nowhere Teams: Comeback Wins Against Middling Squads Feel GREAT!!!

Do not fool yourself: the only reason Jacoby Brissett is earning wage as a backup and not a starter is because of perceptions of age and lack of athleticism. But he checks every “must-have” box for QBs. And defeating a talented offense with he at the helm is no cold comfort for a Colts team that still has the embryonic glee around it belonging to a team who still doesn’t know just how good it can be. It doesn’t hurt to defeat an old friend who saw them through the troubled waters of the post-Andrew Luck era. Exuberant, joyous, beatific life is flowing through the Indianapolis Colts right now, who sit at 5-1 and with their offense possess alongside the Jacksonville defense the best single unit in the division. Imagine saying that to someone back in August, when it looked like the combined powers of all three rostered Colts QBs could not equate to a replacement-level NFL passer. Danny Dimes has revitalized this offense in a way not seen since Andrew Luck’s return to the team in 2018, and has most likely saved the jobs of both Chris Ballard and Shane Steichen. Whether the Colts GM really deserved this many different chances at finding a quarterback after the retirement of Andrew Luck is up to you to decide, but my goodness is this a diamond-in-the-rough of a find that few could have possibly foreseen paying off as profitably as it has. Alec Pierce, Josh Downs, and Michael Pittman Jr. are all experiencing a much-needed rebirth – or in the case of Pierce and downs, a first birth – with Daniel Jones throwing them the rock, and the main attractions on offense in Tyler Warren and Jonathan Taylor look like the best skill position players in the division, bar none. The balanced approach this offense brings to the table each week has been too much for anyone to deal with so far – the only game they’ve lost was one where the offense catastrophized into irredeemable self-sabotage and took two touchdowns off the board through their own unforced errors. There are concerns on the defensive side of the ball when it comes to boxing in veteran quarterbacks who can deploy a modicum of mobility and find open third- and fourth-reads, as Jacoby Brissett and Matthew Stafford have shown, but otherwise this team has a schematic and, to the surprise of basically everyone, talent advantage most Sundays it takes the field. The AFC South runs through Indianapolis.

Season Score: 4.167

New England Patriots:

Saints-Patriots In NOLA Breeds Quarterback Greatness Like No Other Pairing Of Teams And Location.

In 2009, Drew Brees dissected a forgettably pedestrian Patriots team to the tune of 371 yards, five touchdowns, an equal number of incompletions, and a perfect passer rating. In 2017, Tom Brady began his third and final MVP campaign in earnest with a brutalizing 447-yard, three-touchdown day against a helpless Saints defense that wound up being the single best game according to DVOA of his long career. And on Sunday last, Drake Maye put together a first half that was every bit the equal of the two other QB apotheosis games this series has begotten. The Drake Maye breakout season is in full swing, and man, if you’re Josh McDaniels, you really need to realize it’s never gonna get better than this. Developing one hall of fame quarterback – the greatest of all time – is a solid-size notch in your cutlass, but doing that once is happenstance, as James Bond would say; doing so twice is called coincidence in this analogy, but for our purposes we’ll call it a pattern. Drake Maye had a massive first half, putting up 184 yards and a trio of smooth touchdown passes to wide-open receivers for a, you guessed it, perfect passer rating. All the meaningful scoring in this one had been accomplished by halftime – the Pats and Saints each added a field goal in the second half – and Drake Maye didn’t need to do much in 2H to secure a fairly decisive win against Spencer Rattler and the Saints. Don’t get it twisted, Spencer dueled capably with Maye throughout a lot of this one, but no one would be confused as to whom was taken early in the first round of 2024 and who was a mid-round pick. The Patriots undoubtedly have found their guy – Maye passes both the box score test and the eye test in a way Mac Jones never did, and through a spell of rather unforeseen good fortune are now locked in a deathmatch for the AFC East title with Buffalo. No one thought these Pats would rebuild this quickly, but they’re proving doubters wrong and playing fun, scrappy, underdoglike football for the first time since…2001?

Season Score: 3.667

Seattle Seahawks:

You Don’t Need To Pass The Eye Test Every Week. You Just Need To Pass It A Few Times And Win When You Don’t.

Sam Darnold is not a man for all seasons – but he’s a man for autumn. And he is without doubt the man that can take you where you want to go – the win column – at 1 p.m. against a suspect team coming off close, turnover-rich wins who has been living on the razor’s edge and not closing out their opponents like dominant teams should. Sam Darnold is going to have a befuddling career when it’s all said and done. The guy was awful in New York, awful in Carolina, nondescript in spot-action in San Francisco, awesome for 16 games in Minnesota, awful for the final 2, and has been lights out through six games in Seattle. It helps that in his last two stops he’s had two of the best in the biz on the perimeter catching everything thrown their way from him – but with Justin Jefferson, we knew his greatness from its past manifestations and did not need Sam Darnold to draw it out of him, thus we treated Mr. Darnold’s expressions of statistical productivity which found voice in the routes and roamings of Justin Jefferson as simply a continuation of what we already knew was possible. But Jaxon Smith-Njigba had only been Good before Sam Darnold got to the Emerald City; now he’s on track to dust the existing receiving yards record with The Darnold lofting balls to him, including one that caught the Jags’ secondary flat-footed and wound up being the win-producing touchdown. There haven’t really been a lot of teams like these Seahawks in recent memory; they’re a very good team, with a balanced but not necessarily overwhelming offense that seems capable of outdueling just about any other squadron provided the run and pass are both workable and a defense that while not star-studded can repose in knowing that their lethal intelligence allows them to act as an offense-snuffing gestalt organism with scant vulnerabilities. Holding down an offense that had just thrown 31 points on top of a great Chiefs team (almost 38 barring cataclysm at the plane of the endzone) to 12 points is one of the great defensive accomplishments of the season so far; that this team has two losses is testament to the power and resolve of the San Francisco 49ers and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and tells us little about the limitations of the Seahawks save for the fact that, like all mortals, unpredictable errata can do them in when suffered at precisely the most critical periods. In a three-person race for the AFC West that may have just seen those Niners undergo an unsurvivable blow in the form of the Fred Warner season-ending injury which now piles atop the pitiless litany of absences that team is already dealing with, there is far green country for these Seahawks to conquer yet. Their Angelino nemeses, fresh off injuries of their own suffered in an underwhelming and workmanlike win in Baltimore, should be gulping watching film from this game.

Season Score: 3.500

Los Angeles Chargers:

Justin Herbert Versus Tua Tagovailoa IV Proves Again That Miami Got It Wrong At 1.5 In 2020.

If Man to the rescue! The superhuman highlight play of Justin Herbert on the game’s biggest third down, along with an assist from suddenly much-needed point man Ladd McConkey and, let’s face it, an insultingly obvious missed call on the Los Angeles offensive line, helped unlock the cemetery gates through which the undertaker Chargers had to pass; the field goal with five seconds left to lift the bolts to a 29-27 lead let the pallbearers lower their shouldered load; Tua’s interception thrown to Derwin James as time expired let the vessel of the dead be finally, mortuarily lowered into the ground. This was a thrilling game, in toto, though certainly not on the same level as the “Epic In Miami,” the game that no one should have lost, as Sports Illustrated once termed it; the victors were deserving of their due, and the vanquished very much belonged in their mausoleum vault. The Dolphins almost, almost, stole one here – but it would have been grave robbery. This win was the Chargers’ through and through. Sometimes the box score can tell you all the important numerical details about a game, and while nothing beats watching the tape, this one’s box score does justice to the result. The Chargers, simply put, do everything better than the Dolphins. They throw for more yards (264 to 213). They throw fewer interceptions (0 to 3). They throw more touchdowns (2 to 1). And they rush for more yards (140 to 137). None of those – save for the horrendous differential in interceptions thrown by the two former first round QBs – show a disparity of overmuch size, but that’s how you lose a game by two points: by being ever so slightly worse. And on balance since they entered the league, that’s what Tua’s been in comparison to Justin Herbert – and that’s on his best days. Neither passer was playing with a dead man’s hand in terms of pass-catchers, but Herbert’s was in-sync with him in a way that Tua’s was not; to be sure, Tua’s passes were not arriving with alacrity into the arms of these receivers anyway, as the interception total shows, and he could have thrown two or three more than what he wound up with, but it hardly matters when one team has Ladd McConkey and Keenan Allen, and the other team has…well, Jaylen Waddle, and not much else. The feeble threesome of new faces on the Dolphins that Tua was making do with this day was made up of former Raider Darren Waller, former Seahawk D’Wayne Eskridge, and former Titan Nick Westbrook-Ikhine. Of those three, only one actually caught a target thrown his way. The day, ultimately, was about how Justin Herbert, the constant in a shape-shifting and injury-ravaged offense, made full use of his complement of weaponry: even super-backup-RB Kimani Vidal caught three passes. As long as Jim Harbaugh has Justin Herbert, and this team has a wide receiver and running back room not composed solely of corpses, they are in every single game. Still up one on the Chiefs, they’ll need to sweep their arrowheaded archenemies to get where they want to. But we’ve already seen that they can. As Junior Seau once said, “Do you think we have a chance? I do.”

Season Score: 3.333 

✪✪✪

“Hell, Sure.” Taxon

Detroit Lions:

It’s A Tough Loss In A Difficult Venue. But Dropping A Five-Star Win Does Not Automatically Equal A One-Star Loss.

Well, at least the scripted plays looked nice. Detroit seemed to have landed on a punishing, difficult-to-defend, bells-and-whistles mixed with ground-and-pound formulary for finding success against defenses that no one since the Week 1 Packers had been able to slow down. That changed on Sunday Night against the Chiefs, who showed that if you can win on fourth down, you can turn the Lions into caged-in beasts of burden. As Jared Goff scampered off to his left, away from the center and next to his wide receiver, it was evident to all that some tomfoolery was about to take place. With all novel trick plays, the mind of the initiated wanders first to the obvious questions: can they DO that? The answer for Detroit was, no; recalling the aftermath of the Philly Special that the Eagles once used to beat the Patriots, the specific illegality of this play involved the quarterback lining up under center and then failing to stay still for a second after going in-motion; it’s a small enough thing that made the Lions fans, Chiefs haters, and sickos of the world groan, but it was the right call. But the larger import of that call, and its failure, was made manifest in the moments immediately after the referee discussion that led to the flag; the Lions, seemingly so self-assured that that play would work and result in a touchdown, were too flabbergasted to get the next play, a field goal, off in time, resulting in a delay of game that forced the Lions to call a timeout. The Lions’ next drive started furiously and ended furiously, with a lightning Jameson Williams touchdown to make it 10-3. After an exchange of punts, though, the Chiefs jumped back on top, with two touchdown drives to end the second quarter and start the third quarter – the most classic, if clichéd, hallmark of “smart football teams.” This seemed to throw a ten-ton industrial wrench in the gameplan of John Morton, who only handed the ball off four times to Jahmyr Gibbs thereafter, relying almost entirely on the arm of Jared Goff. Goff didn’t play poorly in this game – 203 yards and two touchdowns with only one sack taken – but he can’t be expected to out-gun Patrick Mahomes in a mono e mono throw-fest. The Lions for the first time all year let their identity slip away in pursuit of point-chasing glory – that’s not the way this team can win it all. They’ll have a trial by fire for the next month, playing the Buccaneers, Vikings, Commanders and Eagles in succession. 2-2 over that stretch would be acceptable; 3-1 would be a godsend; 4-0 seems impossible. But Honolulu Blue has rattled off long winning streaks before.

Season Score: 3.833

Pittsburgh Steelers:

Despite Few “Feats Of Daring” From Rodgers & Co., This Offensive Formula Can Work – And Not Just In Autumn.

The balanced attack rolled out by Pittsburgh’s offense isn’t reminding anyone of the Arthur Smith glory days in late 2019 and 2020, where Derrick Henry and A.J. Brown provided supercharged, inferno-inciting statistical ignitions to help an aging but accurate Ryan Tannehill lead a near-unbeatably efficient offense to victory most weeks. Without the super-soldier-level star power of guys like that – i.e., cusp of Canton-level legends – the offense needs to be more station to station as a general rule. In this watered-down, power-sapped version of the AFC North, though, that will work to be champions. The Browns defense, as it has most weeks this year, will be able to hold its head high after this one. The Steelers didn’t gash them on the ground or through the air; they simply played controlled football that made sparing but effective use of the many chances the Cleveland offense gave them. The 23-9 final score was misleading in a few ways: one, those nine points could have and should have included a garbage-time touchdown to make it 23-16 and distort the final score into a figure even more deceptive than it already was, and two, those 23 points from Pittsburgh were themselves tenuous, coming courtesy of three early Boswell field goals on a surface-of-Venus-quality playing field, a vintage Rodgers scramble and pass to Connor Heyward, and a deep coverage-beating over-the-shoulder pass to D.K. Metcalf. Those are five scoring drives, all told, but the Steelers ultimately ran 58 plays for 335 yards and incurred 10 penalties for 59 yards. That’s not the most pristine day on offense. It’s still a home win over a hated rival to keep them miles apart of the piddling pack in the AFC North, which is all that matters. No Steelers fan should feel too confident yet that this team has the mettle to up-end a Buffalo or Kansas City in the AFC playoffs – but maybe Rodgers will continue to rediscover his old self in the new, chilly confines of Acrisure Stadium (as long as his Achilles doesn’t succumb to another of the NFL’s worst playing surfaces, which to hear Browns and Steelers tell it, Acrisure Stadium surely is).

Season Score: 3.400

Washington Commanders:

This Team Did Not Play Poorly. But They Did Not Play Dominant Enough To Say They Got Screwed.

Think about where this offense, and the offense that sat across from them on the Bermuda Grass of Northwest Stadium, were just two short years ago. Neither had their franchise quarterback, neither had their head coach of the future, and both had ownership situations mightily different than what they’re working with now. Now, both quarterbacks are, without doubt THE guy, both had efficient evenings consisting of over 200 yards passing and three touchdowns through the air, and let’s face it – Jayden Daniels and Caleb Williams is officially a rivalry. That Jayden was not the beneficiary of a late stroke of divine intervention this go round shouldn’t phase them overmuch. Much like Lamar Jackson, Jayden Daniels seems to have achieved the equipollence of passing accuracy that accompanies the understanding that he is so athletic, he almost never needs to force a ball into a tight window – he can elude pressure to find an open man or allow receivers to uncover, he can take off on a scramble himself, or he can simply throw the ball away. That’s how you go 19-of-26 for 211 yards and 3 touchdowns. His lone interception on the day was simply a great play by Bears safety Jaquan Brisker, who read the QB’s eyes and jumped an otherwise certain touchdown to steal a possession (it looked a lot like a “see it throw it” type route for the Commanders offense, anyway, and it doesn’t look like an awful read by Daniels on replay). But it’s the second Daniels turnover – the third for the Commanders on the evening – that will haunt this team. Leading 24-22 late in the fourth quarter with rain pouring down on Northwest Stadium, Daniels and the running back Bill Croskey-Merritt simultaneously mishandled a snap from the pistol formation, leading to a Chicago recovery at midfield. The Bears mounted an uninspiring and ponderous drive that wound up being the game-winning drive thereafter. This team is still highly dangerous and difficult to deal with for opposing defenses – but they’re not incendiary enough to survive a 3-0 turnover battle loss against an average opposing offense. The late-season and playoff dominance of last year’s Commanders has not fully been recaptured by this squadron yet, and it will need to seize that magic back if they want to steal a very much up-for-grabs NFC East.

Season Score: 3.333

San Francisco 49ers:

At This Point, We May Learn How Many Injuries An NFL Team Can Suffer Before They Can’t Take The Field.

Who is this team I see, losing players that they need? When will this gameday roster show who they are for real? It won’t be this season, as the worst loss to strike the snowed-in 49ers occurred against the Buccaneers on Sunday afternoon, losing All-Pro and, I guess we can call it now, future HOFer Fred Warner to an ankle fracture. What’s worse than “brutal” when it comes to bad injury luck? Apocalyptic? Eschatological? Heat Death Of The Universe-reminiscent? There is nothing worse than seeing injuries derail your team’s hopes and dreams. Well, actually, there is – being subjected to that fate three of the last four years, and roughly six of the last nine, is worse by volume. That’s what being a Kyle Shanahan-era 49ers fan is, though: a seemingly endless sequence of doom-portending injuries to star players that ruin otherwise infinitely promising seasons. Sure, this season could be salvaged if they get the guys back that they need to get back, but how long until they get injured again coming off a hasty convalescence? How many games until a new, formerly-indestructible star gets a freak injury that sidelines him for a calendar year? This time it was Fred Warner, who is the 2020’s answer to Luke Keuchly and by many experts’ opinion the best off-ball linebacker in the NFL. Ricky Pearsall remains out, Jauan Jennings essentially claimed to be more machine than man at this point with how many injuries he’s dealing with, no one really knows what the hell is going on with Brock Purdy and Mac Jones’s game of here today/gone tomorrow at QB1, and Brandon Aiyuk is somewhere out in the asteroid belt of long-term injuries. Christian McCaffrey, against all odds, is the one healthy constant on this team (no jinx intended). No one would fault the Niners for throwing their hands up and saying, yet again, “it’s just not our year, boys.” One must ponder if that year is on the horizon, or if, in the words of a decent-not-great Metallica ballad, that season is The Day That Never Comes. 

Season Score: 3.333

Los Angeles Rams:

Cosmetically, This Win Was Not An LA 6 (Nor a NY 9). But You Needn’t Be Helen Of Troy To Show Up Baltimore.

I’m not breaking any news here: with Puka out, this offense’s multidimensionality is reduced strikingly. The loss of the target-devouring wide receiver in the first half did not lead to his being ruled out, but it did effectively end his afternoon from a stat-producing perspective. For a team looking to make a deep January playoff run and eyeing the month that follows it on the calendar, only defeating the worst defense in the NFL 17-3 isn’t a great look. But they all count the same, and sometimes these interconference games don’t go the way you think they will. I’m cross-pollinating with two different, technically unrelated NFC East teams here, but it’s worth pointing out: just how much better is Matthew Stafford than Jacoby Brissett at this point in their careers? In both figures I saw a competent, strike-zone-throwing, ably-equipped pilot of an offense who can take off and land the plane but shouldn’t be counted on to pull any Denzel Washington in Flight-style heroics. There’s positively nothing wrong with that state of being whatsoever – and many coaches would trade their current starters for someone who can be relied upon to embody that stature of aptitude each week. But if that means that the Rams offense under Stafford becomes little more than a pro-style, un-star-studded ball-control operation that needs to huff and puff to get to 17 points against a bad defense when Elvis (Puka) leaves the building, that bodes unwell for this team’s 2025 (and beyond) future. One plus for the Rams is that over the past ~3 seasons, even though they’ve rarely lit up opponent defenses for 35+ points, they’ve been able to play the same type of game almost every week, holding down opponent offenses and out-good-ing (is that a thing?) them with the McVay-Stafford-Nacua trio, along with a healthy serving of Kyren Williams. That’s all well and good – Kirk Ferentz has made a career out of doing much the same thing with a defensive focus at Iowa for the past thirty years – but it won’t help them beat the true conference heavies in January. Tampa Bay, Detroit, and Philadelphia have all shown that they can fry enough circuits in this offense, even when it’s at full strength, to beat the Rams soundly; do they need someone on the other side of the ball from Puka, Davante Adams notwithstanding, to truly take it to the limit?

Season Score: 3.333

Green Bay Packers:

This Is The True Midpoint Of Game Results. It’s a “Sure, Whatever” Win For The Textbooks. 3 Stars Embodied.

Like the Rams, “only” winning 27-18 against a reeling Bengals team that was so desperate it traded for an in-division benched quarterback doesn’t feel like the way a prospective Super Bowl team should comport itself, but at the end of the day a win’s a win. The dynasty Patriots had loads of games like this: close game against an inferior opponent that a late score puts away for good. It needs to get better for the Packers on offense if the defense isn’t going to totally extinguish struggling offenses, but there’s time for that to happen yet. As we mentioned with Seattle: you don’t need to pass the eye test every week. You need to cross-off a criterion here and there every week to stave off Early 2025 Eagles comparisons, sure, but you don’t need to guess the proverbial Connections categories in four perfect tries every week, either; in some games, you just want to “get out of the inning.” Strike three guys out and leave. That’s what the Packers did against the drowning Bengals at Lambeau on Sunday: they threw a couple Ks, walked a batter or two, but ultimately got the three outs they needed to stay on top of the enemy bats. Jordan Love did that thing that, while maddening in the moment, can lead to many happy returns later in the game: he got the dumb interception out of the way early, rolling out seemingly interminably to his right, forcing the ball back into the field of play, seeing it get tipped and ultimately suffering a pick by a serendipitously-placed Bengals DB. The Packers were on top 10-0 for a stretch of time, then saw their lead dip to 10-7, eventually built up a 24-10 lead, surrendered a Bengals touchdown and two-point conversion to lead by only 6, and then finally banked an insurance field goal that ended the dramatic portion of the game – if you could even call it that. Once Flacco hit Chase Brown to turn a 24-16 game into a 24-18 game, most people probably realized that that represented the final two points the Bengals would score that afternoon. Jordan Love can be counted on to manage the Matt LaFleur offense as expertly as Aaron Rodgers in, like, 2019 – the first year he was in the LaFleur offense, and well before his consecutive MVP conflagrations began to burn bright – but right now this is a running game-based offense. Josh Jacobs is a powerful engine who engenders that rare but visible sense of reluctance-to-hit that DBs facing a truly nasty runner evince, as demonstrated on his early 4th-quarter touchdown run from 14 yards out. The Packers really do not need Micah Parsons to be a hybrid of Reggie White, Lawrence Taylor, Julius Peppers and Aaron Donald each week – it’s a nice added touch, though. With Detroit’s dropped game in Arrowhead the Packers look like a team able to carpe the diem in the NFC North. There’s a lot of football left to play, but no team’s coaching staff is more trustworthy than the Pack, even if they’re drawing fairly even with Detroit.

Season Score: 3.200

Chicago Bears:

On The Road Against A Team With Whom You’re Evenly Matched, You Need The Bounces. The Bears Got ‘em.

The way the game was unfolding was painfully familiar to Bears fans. Missed field goals, missed opportunities, mistakes and, in all likelihood, consequent misanthropy when the game was lost. But something happened then the Football Gods did not intend. The fumbled handoff was picked up by the most unlikely creature imaginable: a Chicago Bear. There remains a hazy, foglike, mad-scientist-like electric energy of nervousness and freneticism around Caleb Williams’ footwork and pocket presence that rears its head in the form of inaccurate passes and meandering scrambles an uncomfortable number of times a game, but he has progressed mightily from the ashen embers of where Matt Eberflus and his coaching staff left Williams and the rest of this offense last year. No, the Bears didn’t play a perfect game in this one – they were a very manageable Washington down and distance from having their backs to the wall and needing the combined clock-stoppage power of their two remaining timeouts and the two-minute warning to get the ball back for a last-chance drive – but they did enough so that if luck turned their way they could seize victory. This wasn’t a stolen win by any means – nowhere near the mind-annihilating unlikelihood of the outcome of the last game these two teams fatefully played – it was just one that the Commanders handed over inadvertently. Every team needs one or two of these to get to the playoffs. And Bears fans concerned about the apparent un-reproducibility of this one should take heart in the cleanliness of Caleb Williams’ box score, he going over 250 yards on just 29 attempts without a turnover. Three sacks by a wanting Washington pass rush need to be corrected, but that goes with that nervous energy territory; Ben Johnson is new yet, and faith should be placed in his development of the young quarterback.

Season Score: 2.800

Las Vegas Raiders:

Sometimes, Two Bad Teams Playing Each Other Is The Most Valuable Instructive Tool In A Season’s Course.

It is eminently possible that, at the end of the 2025 season, we will know within nanometers of perfect exactitude who these Raiders truly are. Their games seem to play out with a level of instructiveness rarely seen with such consistency and insight. We know exactly who they are better than: the Tennessee Titans. We know exactly who they’re worse than: for the moment, everyone else except the Week 1 Patriots. That’s just science. Who decided that Raiders-Titans needed to be a late-window game? What are you, some kind of sicko? Did they fall for the “first overall pick versus new-look Las Vegas Raiders” bait? Or do they have a Nashville area code on their phone? Whatever the reason, the minimal distractions in the form of other games concurrent with this one permitted our research team to get a good long look at the previously-freefalling Raiders. Their conclusions were that the Titans, dead sack of decaying organic tissue that they are, constitute merely a large rock on the side of the Himalayan mountain face that the Raiders find themselves tumbling down; a momentary softening of downhill velocity, in other words, that give us some idea of the kind of obstacles that a bad Raiders team is capable of handling. There’s very little to say about the Silver & Black in this one – how much does anyone really learn about themselves by defeating the Titans? Everyone defeats the Titans – and those that don’t find themselves in a vortex of pessimism, which, in its own way, is valuable too. It warms the seat under you and gets your ass in gear. The Raiders are probably the middle team in the NFL’s bottom fourth – I’d take them to win, narrowly, over such sadnesses as the Jets and Titans, and maybe if a couple things broke their way against the Dolphins and Browns, but not against anyone else. The entire NFC could beat them, rather soundly I think, at this point. Saints-Raiders could be exciting in a cornea-damaging sort of way, I suppose. And it says something about the general consensus the rest of the league has arrived at on these Raiders that this loss was the one that proved to be the impetus which thrust Brian Callahan past the abandon all hope ye who enter here-bespattered entablature and through the door to First Coach Fired status. Even though the Titans got doubled-up on in points, the Raiders were barely better on offense – hell, they may have been worse! Ashton Jeanty still can’t do anything on the ground against defenses not named the Bears, Geno Smith is still an incorrigible and unswerving turnover merchant, and the surrounding cast is still deeply unexciting. There are a lot of things this Las Vegas team needs to upgrade – probably in the offseason, after going 4-13.

Season Score: 2.167

✪✪

“Hell’s Bells…” Taxon

Buffalo Bills:

Optimists Would Say Josh Allen “Looked Past” The Falcons. Pessimists Would Say The Bills Have Fallen Far.

I thought we had gotten rid of this version of Josh Allen. I guess I was wrong. You would have thought this game came straight from the 2021 or 2022 vault and had been played against the Robert Saleh Jets or Kevin O’Connell Vikings; but nope, it’s the Raheem Morris Falcons who plunged the knife of takeaway-creation into the solar plexus of the previously turnover-averse Bills body this week. The Falcons? Seriously? As far as losses go strictly from a standings perspective, this one doesn’t hurt as bad as others might – it came out of conference and to a team that looks like it may finish with a decent record. But circumstantially speaking, this is as bad a non-playoff loss as the Bills have suffered since their 2021 seppuku nightmare against the unserious Urban Meyer Jaguars. This was a “forgot to show up” game. It is not unfair to bear in mind that these Bills were missing a lot of key folks on their end, including but not limited to Dalton Kincaid, Curtis Samuel and Matt Milano, three of the most important non-Josh Allens on the roster – but even so, the Falcons are a team that the acknowledged second-best, occasionally-first-best power in the AFC should make short work of. Just pound it into the line with James Cook and throw some play-action stuff to Keon Coleman and Dawson Knox, right? Whether that was a gameplan that would have worked we’ll never know, since the amorphous gameplan lolled about by Joe Brady and Josh Allen involved a lot of scramble-mad, indecisive, error-prone dropbacks by the quarterback, who didn’t crack 200 yards, only completed 15 passes and got picked off twice. By the Falcons??? Again…this is a Falcons team that lost 30-0 to the Panthers this season. And they just defeated a one-loss Bills team by ten points. We had thought that it was the Atlanta team in this one that was bipolar…but after six games of tape on the Bills, it’s possible that the more week-to-week unpredictable outfit is the one from Western NY. In a single two-game stretch the Bills went from running away with the AFC East to running with the devil – that being the Patriots – in a mad dash for first place in the division. It’s hard to think this won’t be the most ear-splitting of wake up calls for the playoff-minded Bills – but they have sloughed through extended periods of unattractive play before, too.

Season Score: 3.833

Jacksonville Jaguars:

No Team Has Been More Conniving And Consistent In Concealment Of Their True Identity Than These Jags.

Seven sacks taken at home against the Seahawks. Sometimes one stat can tell the story of an afternoon. And the way that the Jaguars allowed their quarterback to be hit, hassled, hurried, harried and hounded by a blooddrunk gang of marauders from the Pacific Northwest is just infuriating for Liam Coen, Grant Udinski, Shane Waldron, Spencer Whipple and Shaun Sarrett – or everyone involved in coaching the passing game – to see unfold. Trevor Lawrence is a good passer. I’m not sure if he’s a great quarterback. You can’t drop back over 50 times and not account for 300+ yards of offense if you’re a franchise quarterback, man – but that’s what happened. He didn’t allow himself to be intercepted by the Mike McDonald defense, which is a positive against a team whose “simulated pressure” scheme has made fools of everyone not named Baker Mayfield this season, but at the same time that fact makes it all the more agonizing that the Jaguars, playing at home at 1 p.m. ET against a West Coast team, could only score 12 points and come within 8 points of tying the game and yet still profit nothing from chance after chance at mounting a comeback. Unlike the Raiders, who we’ll get to and who we think we have the most authoritative and informational tape on so far, I still can’t hack these Jags. That Liam Coen and co. could defeat the mighty Chiefs with a game-winning drive last week in a win they scored over 30 points on (and should have had 38 or more during if turnovers didn’t sink them) and then turn around and put up fewer than two touchdowns and two extra points worth of scoreboard currency on the Seahawks is just a puzzling quandary. The important part of this team’s schedule is still ahead, with two games against Indianapolis’ reborn Shane Steichen offense to come, but the sloppiness on the part of the passing offense needed to be cleaned up. Otherwise, what’s going to happen when you meet the other good pass rushes in this league? 15 sacks? 20? 30???

Season Score: 3.167 

Dallas Cowboys:

In A Season Of Defensive Lows, This Nadir Will Be Truly Difficult To Delve Beneath. Can “Y’all” Stop Anybody?

The bad news is, you are still losing to teams that you probably consider yourselves to be better than. The good news is you aren’t setting records for one-sided home blowouts this season like you were last year. The other bad news is this is basically who you are at this point: the defense is fingernail-tugging-ly bad, the offense is not so unstoppable that it can hide all of the defense’s flaws each and every week, and the Brian Schottenheimer coaching experience is going to need more time to jell sufficiently. It’s not a “Rebuild” year in the traditional sense in Dallas – but it is a year of growth and building, which won’t please their big-talking, reality-immune owner. The stat of the weekend is the Bryce Young-while-trailing stat: a perfect 10/10 for 125 yards and three touchdowns. And one of those went to Tetairoa McMillan, whom the Cowboys were linked to in the draft. They ended up trading for George Pickens instead, who has been very good during Ceedee Lamb’s long and injured absence, and was simply supernatural in this game: 9 for 168 and a touchdown. Unfortunately, the other pieces around him did not come close to equaling their supremacy from the previous game against the Jets in this one, with contributors Ryan Fluornoy and Jake Ferguson combining for just 6 catches and 63 yards. Dak was still able to find enough landing zones for his missiles to have another great day on offense, but the passing game shrank to microscopic proportions in crunch time, going 3-and-out and losing 8 yards on the final possession before punting it back to Carolina for their own game-winning drive. This team is basically pulling off on offense what we thought the Bengals might going into this year: one great quarterback throwing to two great receivers, the team entirely on their back, a franchise trying to win with three superstars versus the world. It hasn’t worked out so far, as the ‘Boys’ 2-3-1 record testifies. It was thought that the 7.5 game win total being bandied about by Vegas sportsbooks was far too high for this team going into 2025, and through a third of the season, that’s been the case. The offense cannot be expected to continue to be this majestic through the air the rest of the season, and when that bow breaks, this will be one of the worst teams in the NFL. They kinda are already.

Season Score: 3.000

Denver Broncos:

There Are “Ugly Wins,” And Then There Is Whatever The Hell The Broncos Pulled Off At Wembley. Blech!!!

We’ve said it before and we will mention it, briefly, again: a win is a win is a win. But no further plaudits or pats on the back will be going to the Broncos after this one. A truly terrible game that would have landed them in the 1-star taxon if they’d found a way to lose barely gets a bump to the 2-star suite because of the better outcome: this was a show of non-force by the offense that cannot be repeated this season lest every conceivable alarm go off on the Sean Payton-Bo Nix partnership. This isn’t the first time both teams failed to put their best foot forward in Merrie Olde Englande, but this might have been the worst example of it regardless. Bo Nix looked only moderately more competent than his neutralized foe on the other team, Justin Fields, floating 30 aimless passes for a net total of 168 yards. That’s still 178 more yards than Justin Fields threw for, hilariously, but that’s missing the point. This Broncos defense deserves all the beer and wine and liquor on the plane ride home, having held the Jets offense to three measly field goals while almost being betrayed by their own offense who gave up a safety and, if the defense hadn’t stiffened once more, this time for good, on the Jets’ final drive, would have placed New York in a position to win the game outright with a late final field goal. Not so this go round, as the combined powers of Nik Bonitto, Brandon Jones, Jermaine Johnson, Jonh Franklin-Myers, Eyioma Uwazurike, Zach Allen, Talanoa Hufanga, Justin Strnad and most of all Jonathon Cooper all combined to construct an enneract of sack-artistry on the canvas that had once been Justin Fields, including on the game’s deciding fourth down. We are looking with the most unmistakable of side-eye suspicion at this Broncos offense, which hasn’t looked truly awesome once this year save for some, some, moments against the Bengals. This is not a playoff-caliber unit right now – they have to find a way to do more through the air, especially if the curious case of Davis Webb’s name being linked to head coach openings is to continue on and not be laughed off by owners and insiders by the time the season wraps.

Season Score: 2.833

New Orleans Saints:

If Such A Thing As A “Workmanlike Loss” Exists, This Would Be A Good Example Of One.

You know what? Spencer Rattler hasn’t been half bad this season. No, he isn’t chucking touchdowns at the rate of an ’04 Manning, nor eliciting the efficiency scores of a 2020 Aaron Rodgers, nor adding the rushing value of an early-career Steve Young or Michael Vick, but in circumstances that place austere delimitations on what is possible for this offense, he’s been minding the store as well as you could expect an unheralded sophomore season slinger to. Alvin Kamara is on this team – for now – but he isn’t the same Alvin Kamara that stole the spotlight on highlight shows and won fantasy leagues across the country back in 2020. He’s an older, more staid back now, without the straight-ahead rushing prowess that whippersnappers like Cam Skattebo and Jahmyr Gibbs possess. If nothing else, Spencer Rattler isn’t doing him the disservice of not giving the aging back tons and tons of chances to show off the goods for prospective win-now teams that may seek to trade for the receiving back, with #41 getting 15 touches for 76 yards against a Patriots defense that felt solidly in control for much of this game. If they could ever add another receiver to draw some of the double coverages away from Chris Olave and Rashid Shaheed, this would really be a lot for an opposing defense to handle; as it stands, it looks like Klint Kubiak’s two-game symphony of scoring offense from early last season is as good as it's going to get for a while, since the other pieces on this offense provide little to nothing of material value in playing winning football. Juwan Johnson is a fine tight end, but he’s entirely an auxiliary option without more bountiful pieces around him to free him up; Kendre Miller has been deeply disappointing as an RB2, not just in this season but since he arrived in NOLA; and Brandin Cooks and Taysom Hill are a combined 200 years old. Pickings are slim on this offensive unit. At least Rattler isn’t pissing down his own leg every week, like many thought he might. We need a full season of tape on this team to know exactly what needs to be augmented, tinkered with, up-leveled, etc. Patience ought be preached in the Big Easy – and if this is the result each week, that’s not the worst thing in the world.

Season Score: 2.667

Cleveland Browns:

No, Quinshon Judkins Wasn’t Out Against Pittsburgh, Making It All The Weirder That Gabriel Threw 52 Passes.

And took 6 sacks, meaning he dropped back almost 60 – 60!!! – times against this pass rush, with this offensive line, and these weapons. Tell me why I should be confident in this coaching staff going forward – never mind the tattered and tossled roster, which feels like it’s in the rebuilding equivalent of “states of undress” – when it can’t even recognize when it has a new Nick Chubb in the offing in the form of Judkins, Quinshon, and instead seems dead set on making Gabriel, Dillon, a #thing against a vehement and predatory Steelers pass rush. A debaculous fiasco seems to be boiling over in the Cleveland locker room. With Joe Flacco on the outs, shipped away to the comparative offensive Elysium of Cincinnati mid-week, and the two depressing options of raw but vivacious rookie Shedeur Sanders and fourth-year journeyman Bailey Zappe backing up besieged current starter Dillon Gabriel, we have to start asking if there is any plan at all for the future of the Cleveland Browns quarterback position percolating in the minds of Andrew Berry or Kevin Stefanski. There might be one percolating in the meddling brain of owner Jimmy Haslam, as the Browns’ draft-day choice of Shedeur Sanders following their earlier pick of Gabriel may have indicated, but he’s not the guy calling the shots on Sunday afternoon. It’s entirely possible that the current regime, ironclad, adamantine and teflon as it seems to be (because who else but this nuclear war-surviving GM/HC combo could withstand the disaster of the Deshaun Watson trade and remain employed on the team they committed this act of roster sabotage for) simply wants to subject its two rookie signal-callers to baptismal infernos week after week and see who comes out in one piece and with a passable statline. A Navy SEAL “Hell Week” approach to teasing out your QB room, in other words. If that’s the case, we’ll probably see Shedeur at some point this season – whether that’s because Gabriel plays himself out of the starting role or absorbs enough punishment from lip-licking enemy defenses to land him a long-term stay in a Berea infirmary is the only meaningful question in need of an answer if that scenario plays out.

Season Score: 2.500

Arizona Cardinals:

It’s Unclear Which Is Worse For Kyler Murray: Seeing His Team Lose, Or Seeing Them Look Great Without Him.

It is probably the former. Probably. We can’t be sure of anything with this team, to tell you the truth. But not even Jacoby Brissett seems to be able to fully unlock Marvin Harrison, Jr., whose Week 4 explosion against Seattle felt like a turning point at the time but feels deep in the rearview mirror now. The good news for the Cardinals is that their four consecutive losses have all come by less than a touchdown – two have come by exactly one point. The bad news is that they’ve all come in success, like accumulations to a roaming downhill snowball. I’d hate to be the coach or quarterback left holding the bag at the bottom of the sledding hill when the abominable avalanche makes landfall. This Cardinals team has been buffeted. They’ve been buffeted by an agonizingly close loss to San Francisco in Week 3. They were buffeted by the blow of another game-winning field goal loss to Seattle the next week on Thursday Night Football despite wearing those sick Rivalries jerseys. They were buffeted by the lobotomizing shock of a one-in-a-trillion loss to Tennessee which was fully self-inflicted in its disastrousness. And now they’ve been buffeted by the twin electrocutions of losing Kyer Murray to short-term injury and losing yet another game, this one a comeback victory (and thus also a blown save) by the Colts in Indy. Kyler Murray will return at some point, but the Cards can’t go back in time and choose a different route for Trey McBride on 4th and goal to defeat Indianapolis, nor can they take back the unthinkable Emari Demercado goal-line touchback, nor can they re-kick the final kickoff against Seattle nor go for it on their last 4th down on offense against the 49ers. This team’s season has boiled down to such minute, yet identifiable, moments of weakness or questionable decision-making that there is reason for hope this team can yet turn it around. No one’s blown them out, so that’s a plus. But if a team continually loses on the margins, the natural question to ask is whether such missteps can be corrected without a change in leadership or without anointing new decision-makers from within the existing staff.

Season Score: 2.333

Baltimore Ravens:

The Lamar-Less 2025 Ravens Are As Bad As Any Team In Football. “Season From The Depths Of Hell,” Anyone?

The Cooper Rush Era has officially come and gone. The former Cowboys stand-in, whose 2022 relief effort was commendable until the Eagles snuffed him and his team out in primetime of that season, could recapture none of his past quarterback acuity in Baltimore, looking like the least effective passer in the NFL not named Justin Fields for the entirety of his tenure as starter. Many in sports media are loath to write off these Ravens, even at 1-5, with the idea that Lamar Jackson’s return can jumpstart a life support-needy season and maybe just maybe net a playoff appearance or, if things really get miraculous, a division championship. I expect none of that. This team and defense was DOA since the fourth quarter of Week 1. There’s a DOA/DVOA joke lurking somewhere in my cogitations, but I’m not going to waste such a laugh riot on the no-laughing-matter, serious-as-a-heart-attack, sepulchrally horrible Baltimore Ravens of 2025. What is this team? Where did all the talent go? A lot of it went to injured reserve, no doubt about it – but that can explain this defense being mediocre, or average. What remains inexplicable is how unprepared for Lamar Jackson’s absence the rest of this offense appears to be. It’s not an admission of weakness to develop an offensive scheme that is not wholly and totally dependent on a single player – and yet, every time Lamar Jackson has had to leave the lineup since 2020 for injury, the Ravens look like a team who hasn’t practiced for the foremost emergency, that being the loss of the starting QB. Even though Tyler Huntley was farcically selected as a Pro Bowl alternate one year for his role in relief of Lamar Jackson late in the 2022 season and in that year’s playoff game against Cincinnati, no one would be fooled into thinking that constituted a passable stretch of play. They positively limped into that game, which if one cares to recollect was also marred by Lamar’s contract talks. Cooper Rush was even worse than 2022 Tyler Huntley or 2020 RG3/Trace McSorley, so what did the Ravens do? They brought Snoop Huntley back, of course – wearing Joe Flacco’s old #5, it’s worth noting – and he was infinitesimally better. He did throw the ball away on 4th down, which is literally the most cowardly act you can perpetrate as a passer, but we’re not looking for the epitome of courage in Lamar’s backups, just competence. Maybe Huntley gives them that next week. But for the time being, there is zero, nil, nada expectation that the offense and defense of this team can work in tandem for four quarters to produce a winning effort. I wouldn’t even want to return to this team this year if I’m Lamar Jackson – his play through 3.5 weeks was the only deed by a Ravens player worth commending.

Season Score: 1.833

Cincinnati Bengals:

Okay, Sure – Maybe Joe Flacco Can Resurrect The Rotting Fantasy Seasons Of Chase And Higgins, If Nothing Else.

It’s been a bad year for former overachieving backups thrust into the starting role for the second time in their careers. You can take your pick between who has been objectively the “worse” quarterback in their spot-start roles between the AFC North duo of Jake Browning and Cooper Rush, but it’s clear to me that the more depressing tenure was turned in by Browning. This guy was probably viewed as among the best backups in the NFL – they kept him around, after all, and even though he isn’t making $2M per year (that’s the Bengals for you) he clearly was viewed as valuable to the Cincinnati franchise. But he was the most turnover-prone passer in the NFL when he was a starter, which is simply unacceptable. Flacco was better, kind of – but this all feels meaningless in a world where the Bengals are probably the worst team in the AFC North, one to fifty-three, with Burrow gone. There are “seasons from hell” such as what the Ravens are undergoing – and then there are “what is the point?” seasons, akin to this Bengals team. I understand that Burrow is not lost for the season – he didn’t rupture his Achilles, he didn’t tear his ACL, he didn’t do anything so colossally catastrophic that his 2025-26 season is over and done sight unseen – but with where the team was when he left, and with where the team sits now a month after his departure to the Bengals’ infirmary, it’s not unreasonable to ask whether there’s any point in rushing back from injury to rejoin this rampaging mess of a roster if they don’t have an inside track on making the playoffs. Have we seen anything to suggest contrariwise? This team enters “garbage time” quicker than anyone else – not because their defense is so putrid that they surrender seven touchdowns a quarter, but because their defense in conjunction with their offense poses so little threat to the enemy that anything beyond a 7-point deficit is too steep a rock face to scale. Tee Higgins, Ja’Marr Chase, Chase Brown…these are guys that needed Joe Burrow in the lineup to be maximally themselves. Joe Flacco is better at getting the ball into the hands of these playmakers than the not-NFL-caliber version of Jake Browning we were getting in 2025, but he’s still got a hard ceiling to hit his head against – and which good and great defenses will be able to lower even further than where the Packers installed it. Sure, Chase (Ja’Marr, that is) had a decent game – 10 for 94 will do great things for those of us in PPR leagues – but it’s only the second time he’s been kept under 100 yards despite catching double-digit passes. That tells you how crowded and hemmed-in this offense is by its passer and its sieve OL right now. Sheesh and good riddance, Bengals – you took the funnest offense in the NFL and soiled it, soiled it, soiled it.

Season Score: 1.500

✪

Hell. Taxon

Philadelphia Eagles:

Last Week’s Loss Felt Like A Wake-Up Call. This One Feels Like An Alarm Bell.

There were no lofty proclamations this offseason about the Eagles’ being a “dream team,” as there were before the 2011 season. Just a panoply of congratulations on netting another Super Bowl But there are many reasons to draw comparisons between that year and this one. I mentioned that this is the first year in quite some time that the Giants are “fun”; I think it’s fair to say that the last time the team was truly fun (2015 shootouts and plucky 2022 triumphs aside) was also in 2011. That year was not kind to the Eagles, whose “Dream Team” moniker appeared on the lips of free agent quarterback Vince Young in the 2011 offseason. This year has a feeling of familiar unease beginning to settle over it. The laurels of a New Orleans Super Bowl victory are fading and falling into dilapidation; the questions of whether this Eagles time can satisfactorily maximize the chandelier of alpha dogs on their roster that seem to be vying for significantly limited touches, targets, and lanes through which to weave their way to paydirt are beginning to encircle the hearth where said laurels once sat. The stark and striking difference in visual power between the Fun, Aggressive, Dynamic, Exciting, and Devil-May-Care Giants (the F.A.D.E.D. metric, a proprietary formulation of Personal Vowels LLC) and the Plodding, Unattractive, Sluggish, Simplistic, Yawning Eagles made for delectable food for thought on Thursday night. It was not too long ago that the Giants were the bottommost ladder-rung upon which the conquering Eagles stepped forcefully and propellantly at the start of their 2022-23 playoff run, cranking up a 28-0 halftime lead behind an all-systems-go barrage of run and pass mixed beautifully and in harmonious complement of one another. That Eagles team feels long, long ago; those sad-sack Giants, by point of contrast, are comparatively nearby in the rearview mirror and for all we know might come back to haunt the new corps of Big Blue playmakers, but I digress. Even though the Eagles have still got all the principals on the offensive side of the ball when it comes to actual ballcarriers – and have markedly upgraded from Miles Sanders to Saquon Barkley – they’ve gone backwards when it comes to things that are harder to take note of, such as offensive line chemistry (losing all-time-great Center Jason Kelce and Super Bowl starter Mekhi Becton, though discreet moves, have caused noticeable dips in the OL’s efficiency) and Jalen Hurts’ decisiveness (either the receivers aren’t open, he isn’t seeing them, or both). At this point it’s worse than “something seems off” about the 2025 Eagles – multiple things are off, and it doesn’t seem like you’d need to be Steve Belichick to figure out what it is. And when the viewing public can see that you’re doing something poorly, it’s already a far bigger problem than it ever should be at the NFL level. And though this team has problems, plural, there are two that reared their heads conspicuously and cantankerously on Thursday night: the failure to feed A.J. Brown, the nominal WR1 and indefeasible deep threat of years past, and the failure of Saquon Barkley to find any sort of consistent running lanes in which to extract hard yards from opposing defenses. In other words, the two biggest additions to the Eagles offense outside of the draft have disappeared from the scoresheet seemingly overnight. That this team has still gotten to four wins – four ugly, unpleasant, and at times painful wins, to be absolutely certain – is a testament to the resilience and pluck of this Eagles core; but we knew they could win without those pieces. They got to the playoffs doing just that in 2021, whereupon they were easily and rather unchallengingly ushered out of the tournament by a superior Buccaneers team. The Buccaneers did the same to the 2023 incarnation of the Eagles. That 2022 team was the one that had everything go its way – the division sagged as the Eagles soared, a wafer-thin Cowboys season built on deceptive blowouts notwithstanding – before the Chiefs beat them in a shootout. That season was defined by the emergence of Jalen Hurts as a formidable pocket passer, who was able to use the different tips of his three-pronged pass-catching trident of A.J. Brown, DeVonta Smith and Dallas Goedert in not always equal but eternally effective measure. Well, those guys are all still here, and unless I missed something are all still in starting roles. So what happened exactly? For one, Jalen Hurts has now had four different offensive coordinators in four consecutive years. That normally wouldn’t be a problem for a team with a supposedly “offensive” head coach – but since his departure from the role of Indianapolis Colts OC in 2020, Eagles head coach Nick Sirianni has taken little interest in the innerworkings of offensive playcalling, leaving this to the succession of coordinators in Shane Steichen (who in a circuitous sort of way eventually became the Colts’ new head coach), Brian Johnson, Kellen Moore and now Kevin Patullo. But Kevin Patullo has been in the building as the passing game coordinator since 2021 and has a good argument for being the one person other than Sirianni most familiar with and able to make full use of this personnel; and yet through his first six games, not once has the team strung together four quarters of good passing-game football. How much of this is on him is anyone’s guess, but it definitely isn’t all on him; Jalen Hurts, beloved and leader-like though he is, has regressed. He seems to be holding onto the ball longer than ever before – perhaps accustomed to open killshots that have not materialized this year as they have before, While no one wants their passing game to be too east-and-west and without a passable vertical component, there have been many times this year where Hurts doesn’t just seem to be indecisive, but also without the privilege of a checkdown or drag route to toss a ball late in the play to. The entire feeling of the Eagles’ passing offense is a disjointed one – but the issues do not stop there. The running game – the meaningful part of it, at least, which doesn’t involve a player’s ass being pushed by two hefty men behind him – has been stuck in something worse than neutral for the entire season. Saquon Barkley, who just set the record for most rushing yards in a regular-and-post-season combined, is on track to have the worst non-injury-shortened season of his career. He’s sixth in rushing attempts but twentieth in rushing yards – and his long rush on the season is a puny 18 yards. By the numbers he is averaging only 46% of his rush yards per game from a season ago. And let’s call a spade a spade: it’s a poor choice to release a propagandistic, self-aggrandizing, heavily subjective documentary about yourself in partnership with a league streaming partner in a year of such poor production; to schedule the grand premiere for the same night as the game in which your former team beats you with your de facto replacement, Cam Skattebo, thoroughly outperforming you? It’s simply another insidious ingredient in the ever-thickening stew of negative energy that is swirling around and dousing the Eagles locker room in a title defense that has felt deeply discouraging regardless of the early win streak. It does not help that, for reasons both fair and unfair, the entire sports media world is awaiting what’s been more or less pegged as an inevitability – that being a drama-creating social media post or public statement from the low-producing wide receiver, A.J. Brown. The wideout’s comments after the loss to the Giants, in which he disputed – and later, confusingly, retracted his disputation – the report of a long meeting between himself, DeVonta Smith, and Jalen Hurts, are just another needless if intriguing spritz of discontent upon the cosmetically barren Eagles landscape. Hey man – 4-2 isn’t half bad. And you’re still the champs. But we’ve seen this team, attempting to navigate the late-season and playoff minefield on stilts made out of the flimsy plywood of vanilla offensive scheme, collapse under the weight of outsize expectations and well-heeled opponents. This season bears ominous hallmarks to that ill-omened season of 2023. It’s still early, and we know the time of year that really matters to this team is still far off. But we must ask ourselves if a team that clubbed all in its path into submission through simple, overpowering football last season doesn’t stand to suffer a lot more from persistent negativity than a team with sound schematic advantages which beats you cerebrally and precisely. Storminess in Philly.

Season Score: 2.833

New York Jets:

0-6, With A Franchise-Worst Passing Day And Loss In London To Boot, Means Aaron Glenn Is In Dire Danger.

I don’t want to say Aaron Glenn is finished as HC of the NYJ. But the evidentiary matter suggesting that he will not have the option of resigning as that abbreviation of that acronym, as another famous coach once did, and will instead find himself removed from the position before too long, simply cannot be ignored at this point. The two things that Glenn would be expected to accomplish either on or close to Day 1 have been two of the things the Jets are the worst at: in-game management (who better than Dan Campbell to learn at the knee from on how to call an aggressive game with a historical loser franchise that may be undermanned so that you give yourself at least a fighting chance?) and defensive stalwartness (the Jets notched their first takeaway, of the season, on Sunday in London; it was a fumble recovery that they did not force the fumble of). Glenn’s unaccountably absurd mismanagement of the clock at the end of the first half should speak for itself: this isn’t someone who “gets it” right now the way the great ones do, and it’s uncertain if you can expect a coach to learn timeout etiquette this far into their career. As lackluster as the Book of Glennesis has been so far, it’s only fair that we also note: this version of Justin Fields might be the worst quarterback in football, starting, backup, or practice squad-rostered. Negative ten passing yards. NEGATIVE. TEN. PASSING. YARDS. This is the version of complementary football that bad teams play, in perversion of the type that good teams play: they find ways to ensure that an excellent effort on one side of the ball is squandered by the other side. Because that’s what the Jets offense did today: they found the one way to ruin what was an utterly suffocating day from the defense against an unbalanced enemy offense that was, frankly, there for the taking. How do you lose a game where your defense records a safety and holds the opponent to 13 points, under 80 rushing yards and under 170 passing yards? By taking 9 sacks for 55 yards while only completing 9 passes for 45 yards. This was the worst 9-for-9 that any ballpark has ever seen and probably has Woody Johnson wishing he could sit down in front of some playoff baseball and drink 9 beers to forget about this game – which, hilariously, he undoubtedly watched either in the company of or shortly after or before meeting important U.K. personages that he got to know during his ambassadorship to the country. This was about as bad as it could have gone for the Jets, the entire operation top to bottom, in London. If Aaron Glenn is indeed a one-and-done coach you’ll remember this game as a significant step in the thrilling journey towards dismissal.

Season Score: 1.833

Tennessee Titans:

Farewell, Brian Callahan. You Were Not The Man For The Job – But With This Ownership, Who The Hell Is?

There’s really not that much to say about the Brian Callahan tenure in Tennessee. It will be remembered, if it’s remembered at all, for the lack of wins the guy got his team to. But there’s a larger issue that he will form a memorable filament of: the unbelievably capricious, and entirely fruitless, ownership stint of Amy Adams Strunk minus the stabilizing force of a no-nonsense, potentially generational head coach. On certain occasions it helps to just list things out in catalogue instead of trying to contrive a lively chunk of prose to get your point across. And that’s what I’m going to do in my summation of the state of the Tennessee Titans in 2025. Since 2015, the year that Amy Adams Strunk assumed principal ownership of the team, this is the succession of managerial mucky-mucks the Titans have employed as GM or HC: Ruston Webster, Ken Whisenhunt, Mike Mularkey, Jon Robinson, Mike Vrabel, Ryan Cowden, Ran Carthon, Brian Callahan, Mike Borgonzi. One could potentially understand if the Titans cycled through head coaches with alacrity a la the Steinbrenner Yankees or the current Panthers – dysfunctional, impatient teams do such things – but what’s uniquely tenebrous about the Titans under Strunk is that this team has not only had five head coaches since 2015 – they’ve had five general managers too! Surely it cannot be that hard to find one or another coach or general manager that you are willing to place total faith in and stick with to get your team back to competitiveness – and yet if you made the 2015-25 Titans your sole object of study in pursuit of that question’s answer you’d think that prospect made Fermat’s Last Theorem look like a Terry Bradshaw spelling bee contest. Maybe Mike Borgonzi – who appears to, at the present moment at least, be the power behind the throne – will get the next hire right, as Mike McCoy pilots the ship for the rest of 2025 (barring yet another impulsive termination by Strunk, Borgonzi, or whomever is calling the shots). But we need to be real here: if none of that list of names could hack it in Tennessee, mightn’t the issue lie further up the totem pole? Food for thought in the Music City as the small violins play a threnodial requiem for Brian Callahan’s atrocious 0.17 winning percentage and Super Bowl era-worst 4-19 record against the spread. We want the best for Cam Ward, but we can’t be sure this team knows what’s good for him – or for it.

Season Score: 1.833

Miami Dolphins:

The Bottom Has Fallen Out. Tua Can Be Counted On To Throw Late Picks. The Defense Is Done. The End Is Near.

The Mike McDaniel-Tua Tagovailoa Dolphins are being hunted to extinction by a preponderance of problems – many of them self-inflicted. The passing game has not showed a positive charge for all four quarters a single time this season. The running game behind Devon Achane and Ollie Gordon has barely appeared for more than a quarter at a time, and when it has, as in this game, it didn’t help them control the clock or win the game. The vibes were awful after Week 1, and while they may not have metastasized to unprecedented proportions, the rolling boil of infighting and toxicity that the Fins’ principals have made us privy to leave everyone asking the same question: how much longer can this go on before heads roll? It’s been a season of losses for Miami. Losses in the Win-Loss column. Losses of prestige. Losses of innocence. And worst of all, losses of trust among the stated leaders of this team. The most dismaying was delivered ex cathedra on Sunday after a 29-27 loss to Los Angeles, a loss Tantalus-like in its proximity to being a win instead. The erosion of trust was touched on by Tua Tagovailoa, who if he had stopped to consider the import of what he was saying while it was being said would probably have realized that he was deepening the divisions between players, amongst the players and coaches, and most importantly between fans and team. He noted that players weren’t taking accountability, were not showing up for players-only meetings, and may need to be instructed that such meetings were mandatory. Perhaps he was right – we the public have no way of knowing, obviously – but if he was, he needed to issue this admonition in a private forum, not blast it across the audient airwaves for scribblers like myself and others to dissect and lampoon. He has since issued an apology for said admonition, but the damage has been done. As a fan of this team, you already suspected that you couldn’t trust Tua to string together a full game of awesome play through the air the way this team was constructed in 2025, Tyreek Hill or no Tyreek Hill – now, as a player on his team, it’s fair to question whether you can trust him to do the leadership-demonstrative things we expect of franchise quarterbacks in service of both winning and maintaining equilibrium of team chemistry. We already doubted that Mike McDaniel would be able to keep a lid on the tempestuous cauldron of discontent and raging personalities that was this locker room – it's beginning to look like their QB isn’t up for the job either. Eleven more games of this would kill or stun most able-bodied adults, and yet, they’re coming, and you can do nothing to stop them. This is a check-back-next-year team whose formless, driftwood-built ship of state looks like it’s got problems at all four positions of responsibility: QB, HC, GM, and owner. It’s an aqua-and-orange mess in Miami, like chum slurry wrapped in a tangle of seaweed. 

Season Score: 1.667