(WEB) The Hell Yes Hierarchy: Week 7 2025.

Week 7.

I think, dear readers, it is time to say it plainly: we’ve arrived at, and now surpassed, the representative sample for the 2025 NFL season. 6-7 games (depending on bye scheduling) is quorum for the formation of an intelligent opinion on these teams. That’s a good thing and a bad thing. A blessing and a curse. For one thing, if you’re the sort of person who likes to put a little action down on a game, a wager here and a wager there, you can begin to feel confident in your picks if you’re an ML bettor and assured, if you like better odds, in the fact that most spreads are going to be close to a coin flip when the ball gets kicked off each game. This, in other words, is probably the best we’re going to know these teams, at this point. Peer upon the sadness of the BAD teams and the HORRIBLE: there might be some question as to who would win if you pitted these teams all against one another in a five-man Round Robin, but few would dispute that the Jets, Titans, Dolphins, Raiders and Saints are somewhere between BAD and HORRIBLE. We have substantial data to tangibilize that reading. But let’s not dwell on the denizens of the NFL’s hell tier just now. Look at the GREAT teams in the league through 1.75 months: the Chiefs, the Colts, the Lions, the Packers, the Rams, and the Buccaneers. These are teams who have clearly found an equilibrium between offense and defense. Most of these are offense-led; that’s the NFL in 2025. But it’s not the same league we had from about 2011-2021. Defense matters more now than it did then. The GOOD teams can tell you that. The Cowboys are one such. Their offense is as good as any in this league – it’s as talented at the wide receiver position, certainly – and their quarterback is firmly in the MVP conversation. The one thing that could strike down this illuminated team, whose most recent full season was defined in equal parts by awful injuries and blowouts of 24+ points at home, is their still toddler-like defense, which is still surrendering prodigious point totals early and in the rare instances where the offense can put them into cruise control territory, in the unique sporting dimension of “garbage time,” where nothing really matters except for statistical accruals that may mean something to prop betting gamblers or fantasy football devotees.

Garbage time tends to be a poorly defined but instantly recognizable state of play: when the score, whatever the margin, is so lopsided, the seesaw so quantitatively encumbered with one team’s scoring totals, that for the team hoisted unhappily into the air and held up as loser to descend back to the loving earth and steal a win is unthinkable. Typically, we know garbage time when we see it. And garbage time appeared to have shown its face and bespattered its splotches irremediably into the turf of Empower Field at Mile High as the Giants brought a 26-8 lead into the final 10 minutes of their road game against the flashbanged Broncos. That a home blowout by a team whose record the past three seasons stood at 11-29 entering this contest could befall the Broncos on a day when they inducted a late franchise hero, Demaryius Thomas, into their Ring Of Fame was an ignominy that felt sickening to watch – and one, incidentally, that Bo Nix and the rest of his band of crusaders decided could not and would not happen. The Broncos reeled off 33 points – four touchdowns, two two-point conversions, two extra points and a victory-sealing field goal – to wrench back their dignity from the jaws of an all-time home embarrassment. It left everyone in that stadium feeling good, and it left Giants fans with Big Blues. But it left the Personal Vowels national desk with a bit of a quagmire: how do you rank a win like that? How, moreover, do you rank a loss like that? Are the Broncos a GREAT or GOOD team for coming back? Or are they a BAD or HORRIBLE team for letting the Giants score 32 points on them in their home stadium? On the other side of the aisle, are the Giants a GREAT or GOOD team for opening up such a momentous lead on the Broncos in the first place – or do we penalize them with scourging disdain and cast them into the ranks of the BAD and HORRIBLE for letting such a golden opportunity slip away? In the heat of the moment, in the twinkling twilight immediately after the  it’s easy to go the route of the former for the Broncos and the latter for the Giants. The Broncos are GREAT for showing grit, perseverance, resolve, whatever you wanna call it, and coming back. The Giants are HORRIBLE for letting the win dissolve in an orange and navy puff of suffocating smoke. And we the viewers are the beneficiaries of total wildness in the waning minutes of a crazy game. We have to assign a point value, 1 to 5, to the game’s result – and we did end up saying that the Broncos’ win was a five-star one, a roulette spin that lands on green when you actually put money down on the green 0 spot, and the Giants’ loss was a one-star abomination, a haymaker to the side of the face when you have three cavities and a sinus infection. That’s what we think of the feelings that work in either orgasmic or orchitic ferment in the hearts and minds of the teams that authored them. But there’s more nuance, more complication, more alembicated subtlety than simple delight and dismay based on what the score is when the zeroes appear. The Broncos need to be fairly worried that they’ve allowed two straight NFC East opponents, who have had significant issues on offense, blow holes in their defense through three quarters, necessitating comebacks to win; the Giants meanwhile ought to be damn excited about how their young offense is developing, especially when the leading receivers on the day were Wan’Dale Robinson, Daniel Bellinger and Theo Johnson. They put up 32 points on perhaps the healthiest and most talented defense this season without Malik Nabers – with only four people catching passes! Think on this and think how, one, this Giants offense could and will look when their 2024 first-rounder returns next season and, alternately, what the Broncos should be expected to look like against the league’s best, healthiest, and most talented offenses; clearly, teams with big issues have been able to run and throw on them. What happens when the big bad K. C. Wolf comes to town? Looking even less far down the road, what happens when the Cowboys, who are glowing with royal blue electricity, rides into Denver on October 26?

These are questions that we feel less confident in after the obfuscating chaos of the fourth quarter in the Mile High City. But there are flags planted in the ground that only strengthened our sense of who other teams are, too. The Raiders were coming off an uninspiring if clear win over the sarcophagus-subsumed Titans at home last week. What would happen when they played a real team with a real coach and a real offense? We now know. The Colts had dined sumptuously and sanguinarily on horseshoe fodder defenses in every game so far; how would playing a Chargers team whose defensive identity, cemented in 17 games through 2024 but newly questionable after a string of falterings in late September and October, go for them? We now know. And how would two NFC Super Bowl representative hopefuls in Tampa Bay and Detroit look with questions about each of their offenses – in Tampa Bay, interrogatories arising from injury issues, in Detroit, suspicions that their gameplan was not suited to playing from behind – swirling about their team facilities, threatening to engulf them each in Bad Vibes? Well, we got some good answers there too. Not only are the teams with definitive DNA and palpable pedigree as winners asserting their rightful ownership of the high spots in the nation’s various power rankings and the Hell Yeah Hierarchy’s coveted 5-star slots, teams whose 2025s have been a breath of fresh air in a smoggy, industrial factory town dotted with many recent seasons’ worth of disappointments rising up and showing that in the NFL of this moment, it doesn’t take long, and it doesn’t take all that much, to go from ugly duckling to aquiline apex predator. For a team like the Colts, that came about through a still-young but cast-off quarterback whose powers were never proven, but were latent all the same, on his former team. For the Bengals? Well. When you’re a big cat roaming the jungle who’s wounded and disoriented, as these Bengals were, sometimes you need a game warden, a forestry-versed “jungle guide” as Michael Lewis would dub it, to see you back to the carven path that leads from the mouth of the Amazon to El Dorado. An elder statesman. An oldhead. A regular Joe, in other words, that can when supported be irregularly incredible. Week 7 gave us all this – and more.

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“Hell Yes!!!” Taxon

Indianapolis Colts:

The 2025 Colts Are An Unheralded Hammer In A World Of Unsuspecting Nails. Danny Dines on Every Defense.

And my friends, he is an omnivore. Much like how Randall Cunningham once re-ignited the fabric of the NFL landscape on a well-run, professionally-administrated, talent-oozing Vikings team, the reversal of regression triumphantly undergone by Daniel Jones shows yet again that escape from the stony tyranny of the NFC East to greener, more verdant pastures can only be good for a wayfaring quarterback. Who knows how good they’d be without their version of 1998 Randy Moss, Jonathan Taylor – but it certainly hasn’t hurt the 2025 Indianapolis colts to have a true MVP hopeful on tap to assist in the vivisections that Danny Dynamo has subjected immobilized defenses to week after week. The organ harvest is ongoing, bountiful, and, in true spooky season fashion, endlessly and thrillingly chilling for the Colts’ conveyor belt of helpless victims. Just how good can this team be??? For now – or by this point, whichever proves more enduring – the only company the Colts are keeping in their points-per-drive masterpiece season are names that you already know, or should. Only they, the 2007 Patriots, the 2018 Chiefs, the 2020 Packers and last year’s Lions score more than 3 points per drive. Three of the four seasons just mentioned that are not ongoing had the regular season MVP on their roster, and the 2024 Lions, the one team that did not, won 15 games and ran away with the #1 seed in the conference. The corollary of this statistical imperium that the Colts enjoy is that their punter, Rigoberto Sanchez, does not yet qualify for punting statistics on the ESPN website; since punters must do their duty at least 2.5x per game to appear on the representative leaderboards, he has literally not seen the field enough to be counting. The Colts are leading the league in points per drive and unhelmeted punters – two things all squadrons should aspire to. One of the amazing things about this team is how they seem able to play “their game” each and every week. Their un-plugging of a backs-to-the-injury-forced-wall Chargers team unfolded in much the same way that their disintegrations of the Titans, Dolphins and Raiders: balanced, unflappably even-keeled playcalling based heavily on play action, receivers flooding towards the boundary and over the deep middle, and Jonathan Taylor letting would-be tacklers cascade off of him like scrambled eggs off a Teflon cooking surface. The Colts have not yet struggled on offense, at all. If anyone can slow them down, it is likely the Chiefs or Seahawks when the Colts play those bruising units on the road. Other than those potential stumbling blocks – and maybe including them – the maniac’s buzzsaw will continue to lay open the shackled scream-queens of the AFC and NFC South until someone figures out which combination of garlic, crucifixes, silver bullets and direct sunlight can slow this offensive monstrosity. Don’t hold your breath for that, even if this is a horror movie in which the Colts are the abomination and all their opponents are the silent-as-the-grave teens that hope to slip away quietly with just a cut or scratch. 

Season Score: 4.286

Kansas City Chiefs:

KC Supremacy Definitively Re-Established Over AFCW With Inferno Carwash Of The Las Vegas Clown Car.

For the Chiefs, the turf of GEHA Field at Mile High is an Edenic, lush, fertile valley of bountiful possibility that, once attended by the right version of the home team, can provide row upon row of nourishing crops in the form of divisional victories. For opponents visiting, it is a Miltonian hellscape appointed with the requisite demonic machinery needed to permit the torment-minded proprietors all that they need to grind their divisional enemies’ bones to make their bread. To take an objective view of the media landscape between Super Bowl 59 and now, it must be said that not quite as many ill-informed or willfully ignorant bad actors feeding the Hot Take Industrial Complex chose to cast purposeless aspersions on the Chiefs as, say, in 2022, when the sporting world was convinced the Nathaniel Hackett Broncos, Josh McDaniels Raiders and Brandon Staley Chargers would either individually or as a body rise up and overtake the apparently fading Chiefs. Not so then – and not so now. The Chiefs, who are eruditely practiced in demolitions of the Silver & Black, delivered the most singular and dominant devastation of their ancient blood rivals on Sunday afternoon in the Andy Reid era. The figures from this game are nothing short of stupefying: the Chiefs owned time of possession 42:08 to 17:52, outgained the Raiders 434 yards to 95, picked up10 3rd or 4th-down conversions, and did not concede a single conversion of the same stamp to the Raiders, who went 0-for-8 on 3rd and 4th down. But we haven’t even gotten into the really repellent reference points yet. The Chiefs gained 30 first downs, the Raiders gained THREE. And in the two most unbelievably dominant stats of the season so far, the Chiefs’ 30 first downs equaled the number of plays the Raiders ran. The Chiefs’ points scored (31) actually outnumbered the number of plays the Raiders ran. Mahomes, as you would expect, was the star of the show, despite what PFF’s quizzical evaluatory metrics for quarterbacks would have you believe. He toyed with the Raiders in ways you rarely see a quarterback attempt, but was similar to how Tom Brady would attempt audacious, borderline-reckless feats of daring against woefully overmatched Jets teams, or how Josh Allen has bludgeoned the Dolphins in years past, in that one could see Mahomes trying things that he would not have otherwise attempted against a competitive opponent. These included but were not limited to “no-look” throws (which if we’re being strict about defining was really more of a “no-head-movement” throw), throws back across his body to the middle of the field, and madcap scrambles and ultra-quick-throws meant to deceive or overwhelm the Raiders defense with speed and schematic skullduggery. The highlight of the day, other than Rashee Rice’s return and instant re-integration to the WR1 role, was the fourth-down fake hard count play where Mahomes pretended to try to lure the Raiders offsides, bemoaned in full earshot of the onfield mic that such ploys “never fucking work,” and then actually ran a play on fourth down. They got it, of course. Later in that ultra-long drive the Chiefs deployed a goalline formation that looked carbon-copied from the 1930’s New York Giants, with four different people in the backfield – all of them in a three-point stance. It got flagged for a false start, but it was fun. The whole game was one long, uninterrupted, deeply fun romp for the Chiefs, who possess that rare combination of authentic confidence and substantiated bona fides belonging only to those who’ve been to and won the Super Bowl and know they can again. This team’s matchup with the churning furnace of productivity that is the Indianapolis Colts’ offense should be in primetime. Other than they and the Bills – hell, even including those two teams – who can match up with this team when they’re at full strength?

Season Score: 3.571

Dallas Cowboys:

The George Pickens-CeeDee Lamb Experiment Will Work. Not That Anyone Was Doubting That.

On the eve of the season, it looked as though the Dallas Cowboys would be firmly and diamantiferously chained in the oubliette of the NFC East, and perhaps the conference itself. The questions of whether the Jerry Jones-built roster could withstand the dual blows of a rehabbing Dak Prescott and a hole where Micah Parsons once rushed the passer were frequent and pessimistic, and the idea of a dual Brian Schottenheimer-Matt Eberflus led offensive-defensive combination engendered few plaudits but plentiful pokes-at. Now? They’re only 3-3-1, true. But knocking off a rising power whose 2024 made the Cowboys look like Cretaceous bygones feels pretty damn good. And it’s the Cowboys offense, not that of Jayden Daniels and Kliff Kingsbury, that reigned on Sunday. “Sun”-day, it was shaping up to be called, given meteorological reports of glaring solar rays that could inhibit the vision of the Cowboys and Commanders pass catchers and passers. Only one team looked like it had sun in its eyes, though, and only one team saw its quarterback finish the game, un-sunburnt by the opponent’s pass rush. Dak Prescott played much the same type of game he’s played all season, a Steve Young 1994-like controlled slashing of the pass defense that relies on a hellaciously talented corps of pass-catchers and an underrated running game that seems able to always get the team out of trouble. CeeDee Lamb’s glorious return was glorious indeed: in the dappled rays of an autumn Texas sun he caught 5 passes for 110 yards and a touchdown, having lost not a step in coming back from his minor injury. George Pickens’ production crested from lunacy-levels to merely high-effectiveness, going 4 for 82 and no scores. In one of the most efficient games of the year, Jake Ferguson caught all 7 of his targets and scored twice despite only registering 29 yards. Doesn’t matter when Lamb and Pickens are stretching the opponent defense vertically like a football torture rack and vacating the open field underneath for the tight ends and receiving backs that staff the rest of the O. And the defense proved that – at least at home against a flagging, injury-riddled opponent – it can do enough to not make life total hell for its offense. DaRon Bland, the little-heard-from one-time-phenom whose nine interceptions and five pick-sixes in 2023 was followed up by a zero-INT 2024, got another interception returned for a touchdown in this one. And Shemar James, a rookie linebacker, forced a fumble and sacked Jayden Daniels – injuring the second-year passer of whose injury more will be known in coming days – in a very rare show of young Cowboys defenders earning their stripes. This is the type of win the 2021-2023 Cowboys became accustomed to: a late-afternoon walkover of an overmatched and undermanned team that couldn’t mount a fair fight. Maybe that’s all this is for the Cowboys. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s a spark that can kickstart a tinderbox of victories.

Season Score: 3.286

Denver Broncos:

A Comeback For The Ages On Demaryius Thomas Day Is Almost Worthy Of 6-Stars. Still…the Giants?

I mean, the Giants. The Giants!!! Let’s get the cosmetic diminution of this comeback happening against the rebuild-merchants of the league out of the way before noting that this comeback was an INSANE one in a world of unlikely comebacks becoming more and more frequent, likely, and predictable. In the history of the NFL there have only been a handful of 19-point comebacks, period; the Broncos, for comparison, had been 1-112 in games where they trailed by 14+ points entering the fourth quarter before their October 5th game versus the Eagles. Three games later, they’re 3-112. Absurd! The Giants are deserving of their special, unalloyed and pointed recriminations for blowing this game as it was three-quarters in the bag later on, so we’re sticking to the bravery and heroism of the Broncos here. There were seven different scoring plays in the fourth quarter of this game alone – needless to say, the majority of them (five!!!) belonged to Broncos Country. 33 points in a single fourth quarter is, remarkably, not the record; however that is the record for points scored in the fourth quarter by teams that had been shut out through three quarters previous, as you might have expected. Bo Nix added to the majesty of this game by becoming the first player ever to rush for and throw for 2 touchdowns in a single quarter. Only 69 players had ever accomplished that in an entire game coming into Sunday. There’s not a concrete statistical reading we can affix to this last bit, but most impressive to the onlooker while the action was unfolding was how the Broncos fired off four of their revolver’s slugs into the seemingly deathless Imhotep of the Giants lead, taking a brief lead, surrendering that lead, then taking aim and firing off the final, fatal round into the monster and retaking the lead for good and all as time expired. The doom of the Giants was not as straightforward as that sequence makes it seem, though; the Broncos had to overcome a conspicuously stunning intrusion of Brad Allen’s referee squad into the action on the Giants’ final, would-be game winning drive, making for what was almost the worst loss of the season without any doubt whatsoever. The issue with games like this is that someone has to lose, and whenever there’s a giant comeback it feels like someone messed up really bad – either the team that took the original huge lead, for squandering it, or the team that had to author the comeback, if they concede the game at the end, for not completing the comeback (the “failed comeback” scenario). Once the Broncos took a 30-26 lead, that was the situation facing these teams: someone was going to go home feeling like they’d just lost the game to alien invaders and would now by token of their defeat have to watch in horror as the Earth was destroyed. The Broncos escaped that fate due to heroics from their young quarterback and cataclysmic decision-making from Brian Daboll and Jaxson Dart. You don’t have to give any of these back, Denver – but this isn’t a game you win most Sundays.

Season Score: 3.143

Cincinnati Bengals:

Joe Flacco Is Doing A Better Joe Burrow Impression Than Burrow Himself. Where Has THIS Team Been???

If Joe Burrow played this game exactly like Joe Flacco did, he would be in the MVP conversation. If Joe Flacco continues to play like this and resurrects the Bengals offense, Flacco WILL be in the MVP conversation. He’s already in the Comeback Player Of The Year conversation after a single game’s worth of blowing open the atrocious Steelers secondary, which if Flacco’s season ended tomorrow would be well enough for a memento of his 2025 season. But his season will continue into December at least, barring an injury of his own; he has been the best Bengals quarterback this year, bar none. In fact, he has been too good. The Bengals will need to make a decision at some point when Joe Burrow’s health is nearing playable levels again – Joe Flacco, assuming, again, he does not suffer horrible bodily injury or plummet to sub-Jake Browning-levels of play, will still be the starting quarterback at that point. If Flacco continues to murder defenses between Halloween and Black Friday, the decision will not be as easy as saying “put Joe Burrow back in whenever he can play.” The additional complication is that the injury Burrow suffered contains a built-in gray area for when he could reasonably return, which can be expedited or slackened. At the very least you would expect the Bengals to err on the side of caution for their quarter-billion-dollar franchise QB with mercenary Joe playing like he is, but we’ll have to see. You would like the call on playing Burrow versus Flacco to be as simple as possible – in fact if you’re a Bengals fan you’d like to win games with Flacco playing worse and worse as Burrow’s health improves. You want it to be The Substance, not The Monkey’s Paw, when replacing the aging starting quarterback with the long-lost but unbanished younger QB1. Frankly it will be difficult for Joe Burrow to play any better than Flacco has, though: Flacco targeted Ja’Marr Chase like he was a fantasy football manager who’d been body-swapped into the Bengals QB’s frame, chucking it to the receiver enough times for Chase to set a Bengals franchise record for receptions in a game despite having several catches taken away from him on patently ridiculous replay reviews (he managed to catch a pass on the next play in two of these instances anyway). Flacco operated calmly and imperiously in the pocket, looking far more serene and unfazed by pressure in the pocket than Burrow ever did this season, and was almost untouched by the Steelers’ wanting pass rush. This helped not only the Bengals’ passing game, which was peerless, fearless and deleterious to the Steelers defense on Thursday night, but the running game: the Bengals entered this game averaging an unholy 56 yards per game on the ground, by far the worst in the NFL and 25 yards fewer than second-worst, and left the game with a 33-31 win and 142 yards on the ground. It is arresting how much different the team looks with Joe Flacco at the commands. If we’re being honest with ourselves, it’s doubtful it lasts. But as we said about the Cowboys – there’s no reason this game can’t be the impetus for a season-salvaging win streak. The answer to “Who Dey” is, apparently, the Steelers – for one Thursday Night Football moment of supreme triumph for an aging Delaware Blue Hen, at least.

Season Score: 2.000

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“Hell Yeah.” Taxon

Detroit Lions:

With An Assist From An Asynchronous Bucs O, Detroit Proved Pulverization Is Still Their Export.

Like they did after Week 1 in Lambeau Field, the Detroit Lions responded off a bitter loss and bitter-er media cycle the following week, punishing and perplexing Baker Mayfield into a performance that made him look like the 2019 or 2022 version of himself that other teams decided to discard in favor of more traditionally appealing passers. It helps when you’re up against a Bucs team missing a whole mess of skill players, but it’s hard to say that those absences alone are the reason the “Motor City Muscle”-uniformed Lions emerged from their blacked-out savaging of Tampa Bay victorious. The Lions still feel like a novelty, and maybe that’s why so few on social media seem to profess the expected exhaustion with their winning ways as we see with the Chiefs, Eagles or Bills. Or maybe it’s because of the wayward, unglamorous, paucity-of-pedigree path that their leaders – Jared Goff, Dan Campbell, Amon Ra St. Brown, David Montgomery, I could go on – have taken to arrive at their greatness. Or maybe it’s because the Lions are fun in a way that, for those who care or allow themselves to be deluded into believing such stuff, does not appear to be referee-assisted or luck-driven. The Lions are an iron-fisted football team, and that’s the long and short of it. They proved that this ferrous fist has numerous dangerous digits on it during the first leg of the Monday Night Football doubleheader, summoning the services of Jahmyr Gibbs, the most modern running back in the NFL today, and reaping the reward of a 218-total-yard evening that included a 78-yard, nearly effortless jaunt to paydirt to make the game 14-0 and, unbeknownst to anyone at the time, out of reach. Jared Goff has not been his same 2022-2024 drone-strike-precise self the last two games, but thankfully, the Lions don’t need him to be. This team feels like the best version of the Kyle Shanahan 49ers once they really started to jell from 2019-2023: a team that uses a bounty of crisp route-runners, physical freaks and brutality-imbued backs to impose forcible degradations on defenses. Their defense is akin to the best versions of the healthy Niners DL too, with Aidan Hutchinson, Derrick Barnes, Al-Quadin Muhammad and Alim McNeil every bit as imposing as the Nick Bosa, Drake Jackson, Arik Armstead and Javon Kinlaw line that the San Fran teams could roll out to destroy OLs caught unawares. This wasn’t the biggest STATEMENT GAME of all time, but it’s a satisfying and much-needed proof to the rest of the NFC that the Lions and Buccaneers are decisively on even footing and will be vying alongside the Packers, 49ers, Seahawks and Eagles for a shot at the #1 seed. The conference is wide open, and the Lions can be counted upon to be battling to the bitter end for playoff positioning and postseason glory.

Season Score: 3.857

New England Patriots:

Is Drake Maye The Best Quarterback In The Division This Week? (Since The Bills Are On Bye: Yes. But Afterwards…?)

The gentlemanliness of the Patriots in this game was admirable, what with the New England visitors to the barren confines of Nissan Stadium spotting the Titans an aesthetically-pleasing 13-10 lead late in the first half before annihilating them. Vrabel left little question as to whether his former organization made a mistake in letting him go, and the Patriots left no question whatsoever as to the wisdom of pairing a young, talented quarterback with a proven CEO-style head coach who knows how to run a team and develop his players. The multivariate Titans decision-making apparatus should take notes – and make penance. The notion that Amy Adams Strunk intentionally snubbed Mike Vrabel and the cadre of former Titans coaches that now make up some of the Patriots’ staff after the resounding Patriots win could be heat of the moment stuff, or it could be premeditated, or it could be something else entirely; frankly it could be that Amy Adams Strunk, an absentee, bordering on deadbeat owner who doesn’t even live in Nashville and seems preoccupied with matters besides Titans franchise history, simply didn’t recognize her former coach. Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity – or in this case, indifference. Something else that looked stupid and indifferent on this day was the Titans’ defense after the first quarter, a unit that did almost nothing to trouble a surging Patriots passing game that was nearly perfect on the day. Drake Maye threw only two incomplete passes out of 23 attempts, which due to low passing yardage totals for those figures and “only” two passing touchdowns is well south of perfect, but was beyond adequate for the task at hand. Mike Vrabel opted for the “4.86 yards and a cloud of dust” approach in this one, recognizing that against a Titans team going absolutely nowhere there’s no need to flip to the back of the playbook when the first two pages will work just fine. Despite the team’s investment in Treveyon Henderson, Rhamondre Stevenson, fumble warts and all, still remains the unquestioned lead back in the offense with Drake Maye’s quarterback runs the most prominent secondary supplement. The effect that this has on defenses is evident in the Patriots’ 5-2 record; the effect that Henderson’s absence from most of the box scores has had on America’s fantasy teams is incalculable, and disastrous. The Pats don’t care though. They’ve mowed through a cakewalk schedule with unmissable aplomb, a Week 1 loss to a Raiders team that hadn’t fully entered their sarcophagus just yet the only real blemish. Had they taken care of Josh McDaniels’ old team with a more effective #RevengeGame we’d be talking about this team like we’re talking about the Colts – an out-of-nowhere, hopeful electric factory aflame with youthful power.

Season Score: 3.714

Los Angeles Rams:

Los Angeles Effects An English Deformation Of London’s Adopted Team In A Stafford Statement Game.

2021 Jameis Winston, meet your spiritual successor. Matthew Stafford didn’t do anything through the air that seemed too insane, but insanity is what one is met with when they see the eye-popping touchdown totals the L.A. QB knocked down in Londontown. The Jaguars offered such little resistance one wonders whether they, somehow, had the worse approach to acclimating to the time change, despite they and not the Rams flying to England early. If Los Angeles can do this on a totally screwed-up biological clock against a 4-2 team, imagine what they can do with an optimized circadian rest cycle against piddling 0.500 or worse squads! The final score of this one was both deceiving and truthful. It was deceiving in that the Rams did not feel like a team that projected the dominance we tend to associate with 35-point-scoring teams; it was truthful in that the Jaguars absolutely felt like a team that did not deserve to put up any more than 7 points, if that, on the lonely Jaguars-dedicated section of the Wembley scoreboard. Matthew Stafford’s five-touchdown game was one of the silliest five-touchdown games in the history of five-touchdown games; his only real competition is Jameis Winston in Week 1 of 2021, who gunned down the packers with less than one clip of passing ammunition, metaphorically speaking, by notching 5 scoring strikes on a mere fourteen completions – a meager 20 attempts! Ludicrously efficient passing performances are now back on the menu in games played in stadiums belonging to neither team playing in the game (that 2021 game was played in Jacksonville due to a hurricane affecting New Orleans), as Stafford came close to besting Jameis’s stupendous mark of low yardage-to-high TD pass-volume. He got to 182 yards – still not a heck of a lot, but more than Jameis. He didn’t need to throw anywhere near that much because of Jacksonville’s abject and offensively challenged day, but Stafford was still the best thing going in the Rams’ offense: Kyren Williams and Blake Corum didn’t crack 90 yards despite 29 combined rushes between them. Usually with the Rams we see them perform operationally well on offense without putting up huge point totals – on this day, the opposite was true. This team is a perplexing one in that they could have scored something closer to 14 points in this game if you look at their undersized total yards but still felt firmly in control of this game. Is it not the case that every result from the Rams’ young season, save for the Titans beatdown, could have gone the other way if just a couple things went differently? I feel that that is the case. This team doesn’t look Super Bowl-worthy right now, but give them credit: they make the short putts. Their defense, though not receiving the attention that their rivals the Seahawks are, can be thanked for that – they put Trevor Lawrence down 7 times today, and held the sputtering Jaguars offense to 5-of-21 on 3rd and 4th down conversions. Stifling in extremis.

Season Score: 3.429

Chicago Bears:

For Once, A Bears Schedule Is Setting Up Nicely, Making For An Extended Ben Johnson Honeymoon. Huzzah!

To the dismay of midwestern group chats everywhere, the Bears are an actual football team this year. For now, that is. It was but one calendar year ago that the Chicago Bears under then-head coach Matt Eberflus smote down a collapsing Jaguars team in London to the tune of four Caleb Williams touchdown passes to get to 4-2 before the wheels, the seatbelts, the plush cushions, the transmission, the engine block, the matte chassis and the shatterproof glass all exploded in a mushroom cloud of dysfunctional ballplaying. It’s not against the law to reserve the right to treat with skepticism an overachieving Bears team that hasn’t even made it to November with a winning record yet – at the same time, the Ben Johnson Bears feel better run, more astutely administrated, and better possessed of sound practices. Like the Patriots in Tennessee, the Bears’ roughing-up of the dome team, rebuilding, very much talent-poor Saints appeared to the engaged viewer like a “take care of business” game – Ben Johnson and his offense looked to be intentionally holding back, ensuring that they didn’t burn through a ton of trick plays or put their more exotic passing patterns on film. Instead, on a day when Caleb Williams looked like third violin to the symphonic soloists of Kyle Monangai and D’Andre Swift, who piled up 203 rushing yards between the two of them. Though the passing game was held to 172 yards and no touchdowns, Williams found 8 different receivers, and looked like he was beginning to see the field more as a pro than as a first-read-then-scramble prospect. Penalties were an issue for this team – they had 10 penalties for 92 yards, with five of them false starts. It feels like false starts are being called at a gigantic clip this year, though – unless you’re the next team on this list – and these things can be corrected with drill and discipline. With the QB1-lacking Ravens and Bengals up next for this team, 6-2 is within grasp. The Bears have often been the team that prevents the Bears from reaching their full potential, though, and if they can’t put up humongous productivity on the Ravens, whose pliant defense has made every opposing offense look like the 1901 Michigan Wolverines, you can be certain that discord, from Bears fans, Bears players or both, will ensue. Winning over this Saints team is not the most nourishing victual matter in the grand scheme of triumphs, but it’s a nice snack before a potential seafood jamboree by the Inner Harbor in B-More. The 2024 Bears would have found a way to lose this one, so it’s a nice win…but the real tests are forthcoming.

Season Score: 3.000

Philadelphia Eagles:

Though The Best Day Yet For The League’s Blandest Air Attack, Was This The Worst Perfect Passer Rating Ever?

It’s hard to take too much issue with a 158.3 passer rating, the highest possible in the NFL’s formula. Nevertheless, I am going to point out some imperfections in the Hope Diamond of a day that Jalen Hurts and his Viking-destroying Jotuns DeVonta Smith and A.J. Brown visited upon Minnesota. In short, Hurts just had more time to throw, and far less resistance in the form of sticky coverage to plow through after the ball left his hands, than in previous games. The Vikings, bizarrely, were simply the team least suited to make the Eagles’ offensive approach look as one-dimensional as it should. You can’t do better than perfection – everyone knows that. It’s an “all bachelors are single” type of observation. But still – to quote Eva Green, the notorious Vesper Lynd, in Casino Royale: “There are dinner jackets, and dinner jackets.” And Jalen Hurts’ game was firmly in the former category. According to NFL’s Next Gen Stats, the only quarterback who took more time to throw in Week 7 was Caleb Williams, who simply couldn’t find anyone open. Hurts deserves credit for keeping the play alive when quick reads did not manifest themselves – as does his offensive line – and so do his receivers deserve credit for sprinting back towards the line of scrimmage on scramble drills or firing far enough downfield and with enough separation to make Hurts’ sideline strikes or deep thrusts through the Vikes D worthwhile. 19 of 23 for 326 and three touchdowns is very good. It’s also a statistic that fails to incorporate three sacks taken by Hurts despite pristine protection from the Vikings’ vaunted defense, two of which killed their drives, and necessarily ignores how bad ass DeVonta Smith and A.J. Brown are. Don’t get me wrong – this was a hell of a game by Jalen Hurts, and he should be commended for making the most of limited passing attempts here rather than receiving opprobrium for not being asked to throw the ball 40+ times a game. But this offense cannot and will not look anything like this most weeks – nor would it have looked as good as it did when all was said and done if Carson Wentz had not failed time and time again to seize the initiative and turn eventual field goal drives into touchdowns. The Eagles only won by 6 and could have easily found themselves trailing at numerous different points and after numerous different thwarted Minnesota drives in this game – it’s a testament to the way this offense has been built, and the way the Eagles defense made life just a touch too hard for Wentz, that they pulled this one out. The person who deserves no credit for this win is Saquon Barkley, who is having possibly the worst non-injury-affected post-2,000-rushing-yards season ever. Today was probably the worst one yet: 18 carries for 44 yards, with a long, a long, of 9 yards. And one catch – for -2. The most impressive part of Hurts’ comparatively ho-hum perfect passer rating day was how he was able to do what he did without so much as a squeak or a simper from his RB1. I still don’t think we’ve seen Nick Sirianni and Kevin Patullo land on a unified theory of offense philosophy for this team as currently constituted this season – it’s Week 7, folks. Will this be the high mark of the 2025 Eagles? The answer isn’t a definitive no.

Season Score: 3.000

✪✪✪

“Hell, Sure.” Taxon

Seattle Seahawks:

Losing Turnover Battle? Bad. Winning Actual Game? Good. Crushing An Offense Into Nothingness? GRRREAT!!!

The Game That Wouldn’t End, it will be forever remembered as. Even though Seattle showed a mildly concerning level of impotence when targeting people who are not named Jaxon Smith-Njigba, any worrisomeness arising from the offense’s B-to-B minus game late Monday night evaporated in a pass rush paroxysm of College Navy, Action Green and Wolf Grey, a.k.a the color palette of Seattle’s football team. On a night when another Seattle team was ushered out of the halls of history on a night when they coulda, woulda, shoulda made their way to their first-ever World Series, the Seahawks gave Seattle’s fanatics reason to think that the Mariners did not blow the only chance Seattle’s sports teams have at a title in the 2025-26 sports season. JSN, MVP. Could he do it? Could he be the first wide receiver to net the laurels of Most Valuable Player? This is a world that has been inhabited by the likes of Jerry Rice, Randy Moss, 2019 Michael Thomas and 2002 Marvin Harrison, after all, and none of them could wrest the diadem of Best In Show away from even less-than-stellar quarterback campaigns. But none of them have been as puzzlingly good or fabulously leisurely in their highlight packages from their respective MVP-considerable campaigns as JSN has been. The instant connection between he and Sam Darnold has the appearance and sheen of two old pros who’ve been doing their thing together for 5+ years – even though Jaxon is only 23 and in his third NFL season and Darnold is still in the first half of his first season in Seattle. It’s on enemy defenses in the NFC to dream up some way to stop them, because it ain’t happening yet – the guy is on pace to catch 119 passes for 89 receiving first downs and 1,989 yards (if he meets or exceeds that first figure he would be in the top ten for best receiving seasons by first downs accounted for of all time – and if he meets or exceeds that last figure he’d be the NFL record holder). It’s indeed a year for unsung heroes in the Emerald City, and perhaps no position or group of positions lends itself better to the forging of unheralded champions than well-coached, superstar-less defenses, which the Seattle Seahawks indubitably are. They – along with the irrepressible and maddening interior dysfunction of the Texans’ offense themselves – made life hell and a half for C.J. Stroud and his lost cosmonauts, who seemed to be playing several difficulties higher than the Seahawks offense the whole night. The largest reason for their inability to get anything going by earth or by air was the pressure generated by the new-look Legion Of Boom that pillaged the off-balance Houston OL all night and forced C.J. Stroud into poor or over-hasty decisions. When it was all said and done, the Seahawks had held Houston to 243 total yards…on fourteen drives. They surrendered an average of 17 yards – one measly first down – a drive. The only touchdown marshalled by the energy-sapped Texans offense (Darnold authored a concerning endzone blooper by being sacked, losing the ball, and allowing Texans pass rusher Will Anderson to recover the fumble for a defensive touchdown) came with almost no time remaining and only after five different plays in the Seahawks redzone. Seattle hit Stroud seven times, sacked him thrice, and generally made life utterly nightmarish for him. This team just might be a favorite in their division. The Week 1 loss to a much different 49ers team than what they’re fielding now hurts, but it’s not an unavengable defeat. The Twelfth Man is happy right now. 

Season Score: 3.429

San Francisco 49ers:

Closer To Full Strength, Shanahan’s Offensive Armada Can Strike Down Most Anyone Left On Their Schedule.

The great teams in this league, like the metaphorical Japanese soldier in John Basilone’s speech to his boot camp detachment in “The Pacific,” can draw potent and invigorating nourishment from the most minute boons. Not, in this case, a meal of “maggoty rice and muddy water,” but the reintroduction of a limited but spirit-boosting George Kittle. The 49ers, like that battle-hardened soldier, can endure misery that most teams can only dream of – with a winning record. And when you build the muscle that comes only from the grueling workouts supplied by playing with a deeply injured roster, getting a few good men back can be trampoline-like in its ability to take a team to the next level. The 49ers have had three constants this year: Christian McCaffrey left, Christian McCaffrey right, Christian McCaffrey up the middle. They did not deviate from their core competencies on Sunday night in front of an eager home crowd, shuttling the ageless and, apparently, now-durable back down the Falcons’ throats 31 times for 201 total yards, most of it on the ground – a stark and demoralizing contrast to how the Falcons employed their own superhuman RB, Bijan Robinson, who was outrushed by 10 attempts and 89 yards by the elder McCaffrey. The long-ago Stanford Cardinal paid homage to his nearby alma mater by looking like the all-purpose offensive weapon that he was in his college days on Sunday night: not merely content to crush Atlanta on the ground, he was also the best receiver on the night for his 49ers, catching 7 passes for 72 yards to go along with his two rushing scores. He was targeted 8 times through the air, failing to catch only one ball thrown his way – had he caught it he’d have had 32 touches on the night, a beautifully even 8 per quarter. That’s an engine of an offense right there. It’s the kind of performance we came to know and love from total randos that Kyle Shanahan would pluck from the depths of the depth chart or waiver wire to ruin enemy defenses and fantasy football teams alike from 2019-2022, but concentrated in the person of one single almost-certain future HOFer. They lost Fred Warner to a heartbreaking, life’s-just-not-fair injury last week in Tampa Bay, but they did get better personnel-wise this week in another area, with George Kittle’s rapprochement at least bolstering the run game even if he didn’t catch a pass. It seems that the formulary for taking yards from inflexible defenses this season has been decided upon by Kyle Shanahan: McCaffrey, all directions. If they want to grind out every last yard from him in pursuit of the ever-elusive Super Bowl victory that has evaded their grasp for so long, they’d do well to keep at it – and hope that their wide receivers can get healthier in long convalescences that has kept them out of the spotlight for so long this season.

Season Score: 3.286

Green Bay Packers:

These Cheesy Would-Be Champs Need To Stop Playing With Their Avian Fare, And Love Needs To Be Great(er).

The Packers “only” ran 53 plays on Sunday in the desert against the newly troublesome Cardinals, but they didn’t need to run a single one more to exceed the LD-50 for an enemy offense using a backup QB against a good team. Jordan Love “only” completed 19 passes, but he made them count. Josh Jacobs “only” registered 13 rushes, but he wrung every last unit of utility out of those chances. But for the star of the show for the 2025 Green Bay Packers, their free agent defensive messiah named Micah, there was nothing “only”-like about his performance – he won this game when he was on the field, through simple pitilessness and dogged drive. The arch-enemy of talented teams before November and December is complacency – and no one would have faulted the Packers for possessing a sense of superiority to a deeply embattled Cardinals team, roster, and perhaps coaching staff coming into this game. Arizona is missing its entire starting offensive backfield and still hasn’t worked out how to get Marvin Harrison Jr., who might be the best Jr. of all time in football if we go off nominative determinism, the ball. Not with any consistency, at least. The Packers continued the disjointed and underwhelming woes for the second-year embryonic offensive weapon, holding him to 2 catches on 6 targets and a mere 58 yards. But the defense had other issues containing Arizona’s Jacoby Brissett-led offensive pulse, including conferring on themselves the comparative ignominy of being the one team against whom all-galaxy tight end talent Trey McBride can consistently find the endzone. The pass coverage was wanting in Arizona, but the rest of the team, as it has in almost every situation it has needed to this season, rose to the occasion to ensure the Cleveland Catastrophe loss in Week 3 was not given a Sonoran sequel titled the Arizona Atrocity. New Packers kicker Lucas Havrisik set a Packers record in his second appearance with the team, launching a 61-yard field goal as time expired in the first half to make this a one-score game. Then the Packers mounted three touchdowns in five drives through the third and fourth quarters, culminating with a game-winning drive given to the Packers O by a clutch fourth-down stop from their defense and led by the trio of Jordan Love, Tucker Kraft (who picked up first downs on both a third and fourth down) and Josh Jacobs, who smacked into the endzone with 1:50 left. It was Micah Parsons who made certain, though, that the Cardinals could not win this game. He had five (or at least should have had five) difference making plays – three sacks, a TFL, and another sack that was called back for unnecessary roughness. His presence still had the desired effect on the non-play that they took away from him, though; Brissett was on his toes all game avoiding he and the rest of the Packers rush. A final sack on the last Cardinals drive of the game didn’t end the afternoon, but it hasted the curtain-call for the Cardinals. Jordan Love took a while to “get warm” in this one – sort of like a bygone-days Bobby Layne or Ken Stabler, but for very different reasons, surely – but he came up huge when they required it of him. This team’s your NFC 1-seed through seven weeks, and there isn’t anything to suggest they won’t be in contention to keep it through the rest of the late months of 2025. 

Season Score: 3.167

Carolina Panthers:

The “Ugly Wins Against Non-Falcons Teams” Counter For The Bryce Young Panthers Now Sits At 1.

Unfortunately, it will probably stay at 1 for a bit since Young is now sidelined with an injury suffered in this game – a high-ankle sprain that will keep him out of action in Week 8 and most likely beyond. Fortunately for the rest of the Panthers, you don’t need anything close to a #1 overall pick playing QB to beat their opponent on Sunday, the New York Jets, and an agéd Andy Dalton proved just as useful in dispatching the unthreatening Gang Green football team as anyone. This one still goes in the books as a start and a win for Bryce Young – all starts by any QB whose team wins the game do, including the utterly delightful case of Landry Jones against the Browns in 2015, who threw 4 passes before exiting with a foot injury and giving way to a himself-hurt Ben Roethlisberger who threw for 379 yards and 3 touchdowns in relief – but since he played three quarters and led the Panthers to all the points they needed or would score, we consider this one “official,” like how the MLB records games. Got it? Good. Because that’s really the only interesting part of this game. We’re not a gambling newsletter, mind you, but we will note that you should not be gambling if you took whatever the “over” bet was on this game. This was the most 13-6 game ever. If you compiled all the 13-6 final scores in history, this would be the most 13-6 of all of them. Indeed, even the Jets seemed destined to score 6 instead of 0 points, with the football gods permitting two unappetizing but tangible field goal drives on the day to the less-than-one-dimensional Jets offense. Those two scoring drives consisted of 16 plays combined and featured 3 completed passes. Put some respect on the Panthers’ defensive name: this Jets offense has been horrible almost nonstop since Week 1 outside of a predictably prolific if totally meaningless afternoon against the Eberflus Cowboys, but we’ve still seen flashes from the Jets. We saw none of those today, especially not when Jaycee Horn was thrown at: the former first-round pick intercepted two passes on the day, both inadvisable deep throws from Tyrod Taylor who looked better through the air but ended up faring just as poorly in scoring offense as Justin Fields on the day. The Panthers sacked the unhelpful Jets QBs six times on the day and ended up allowing only 220 total yards to the Gotham Football Club. It was ho-hum and unexciting, but it was still a win, dammit – those haven’t been easy to come by for the Panthers of recent vintage. The hope is that the Panthers can look halfway decent with Andy Dalton during his time as relief starter, whether that’s one game or several, but this is when it helps to have a QB who’s been there for a few years as the backup. That doesn’t always turn out well – c.f. Browning, Jake – but Dalton’s a pro’s pro. He has some play left in him. As long as he doesn’t totally piss the sleeping bag against the Bills next week at home this team is in fine fettle. And who knows? Could the Panthers pull off the heist of the century against Buffalo at home? Other items of priceless beauty have been pilfered in broad daylight recently – why not a stunning upset against a two-game-losing-streak Josh Allen squad?

Season Score: 3.000

Minnesota Vikings:

Coming Close And Failing Won’t Cut It – But With Carson F***ing Wentz, It’s A Sign The Rest Of Your Team Is GOOD.

As a Vikings fan, you must content yourself with the knowledge that Kewsi Adofo-Mensah and Kevin O’Connell are both startlingly expert architects in the domain of team-building as well as Shoeless Joe Jackson-batting-average-esque identifiers of quarterback talent. That’s the good news. The bad news is, that second part of the equation does not seem to be materializing in 2025. You can’t panic yet – J.J. is still around, still obscenely young, and still not even close to possessive of a representative sample sufficient enough for anyone to make the call on whether he’s “The Guy” or not. But Carson Wentz cannot continue on as starter if this is what we’re getting. He straight up cost them a win today! No good coach with a solid other option could continue to traverse the turbulent trek involved in scaling the Carson Wentz As Starter Matterhorn after what we saw on Sunday – the issue is that KOC may not have a solid other option. At this point, some allowance needs to be made for the caution around J.J. McCarthy and the KOC treatment of him – this youngster suffered a season-ending injury in preseason of 2024 and had to exit the starting lineup again early this year, and whether you think that that second injury is a “soft benching” or not, for both the physical health and emotional confidence of the Michigan product, you cannot throw him back out there if there’s any chance his pride or bones will be broken again before this season is up. On the other hand, you cannot keep trotting out this version of Carson Wentz and expect to have a chance against the competent teams of this conference. Wentz may have been O.K. for much of this game – I’d accept that argument as somewhat valid even though I think from snap-to-snap he was no better than a C or C- guy – if you didn’t included the two-pass, two-interception interlude of the early second quarter in your tape evaluation. That sequence – a six-play jaunt into realms of football body horror that included a pick six, an XP, a kickoff return, a one-yard Jordan Mason run, a Carson Wentz aborted snap and a deep-shot interception by the Eagles’ Jordan Mukuba – effectively decided the game. It wouldn’t have had such an outsize influence on the result if you were working with a different quarterback, but Wentz’s combination of gun-shyness, indecision, inaccuracy and occasional overconfidence in his waning athleticism all led to drives that could have and should have been touchdowns turning into field goals. Never mind the annoying overturn of a T.J. Hockenson touchdown (that ball probably hit the ground, even if it didn’t seem to meet the necessary indisputability criterion for reversing the call on the field) – that’s a ball Carson Wentz has to throw better. But even with Wentz’s predilection for profuse corrigenda as signal-caller, this game could still have been won with the Eagles’ 22 points if the Viking pass defense had gone to the trouble of showing up for the game. They did not. It’s unclear why exactly the Eagles, who have garnered a reputation for unimaginativeness in their passing attack, were able to so thoroughly and uncontestedly blast their way through the Brian Flores defense, but a huge part of it has to be because of the lack of a pass rush that has been so bedeviling to every other team this season. Jalen Hurts, as mentioned above, had #AllDayToThrow, and could have listened to the Fountains Of Wayne anthem “All Kinds Of Time” on blissful repeat in the pocket the way the Norsemen were trying and failing to reach him. This is a week of soul searching for the Vikings – they came close despite playing pretty terribly all around, which is a plus, but they played pretty terribly all around, which is a minus. Thanks a lot, guys – now we have to spend the week hearing about how the Eagles are BACK.

Season Score: 3.000

Cleveland Browns:

This Team Isn’t A Circled Win, And Dillon Gabriel Is More Than Just A Name On The Post-1999 QB Jersey.

Quinshon Judkins is a nasty boy. And he’s exactly the kind of energetic, unslowed, absolutely brimming-with-bestial horsepower back that you do not want to face as a team on the ropes who’s struggling to locate any kind of defensive identity. The Browns in general are an unpleasant team to face right now – they’re finding themselves and they have enough powerful rookies to make their offense a handful for whoever is trying to slow them downs. The third week of Dillon Gabriel looked a hell of a lot more like the Oregon Duck was playing in an offense that was molded to his experience level, skillset, and pedigree: which is to say, like a run-heavy college offense that asked him to find open receivers for positive yards, period. I want to give the Cleveland offense some slack here despite their low total yardage output (a paltry 206) – they did what they had to on Sunday. They took what they could and gave nothing back, like a Pirate of the Caribbean, which Miami is kind of close to? There were hardly any yards to even be gained for the Cleveland O – they had 11 drives, and FIVE of them started in Miami territory. They jumped out to a 17-3 lead and realized they could just put the car in park and still win the game, it looked like. And that’s what should be encouraging for the Browns – and conversely what should be so gut-wrenching for the Fins: Cleveland, kind of like the Falcons or Lions, have a way they want to win in mind, and they’ve configured themselves effectively enough that the burden of stopping that offense has to fall on the enemy defense. The Browns, in other words, have shown us they can play “their game” on offense and produce winning football. Not against everyone, and not to such dizzying heights that they’re within reach of a winning record or the playoffs, but with enough consistency and oomph and zhuzh to give Stefanski and Andrew Berry breathing room for this season. That the Dolphins tried, and failed, to play their version of high-octane, speed-fueled football and barely wound up with more total yards than Cleveland’s intentionally lumbering, heavily-regulated attack is a sigil of utter doom for the Dolphins. As are Tua’s three interceptions, all of which looked like they were firmly on him, his decision-making, and his arm strength. We saw the Raiders and Titans, two bad teams, play each other last weekend, and emerged with a firm picture of who the worse bad team was; the same can be said of this game. The Gabriel-Fannin-Judkins baby triplets that the Browns have going for them are enough to worry opposing DCs who aren’t playing with oodles of talent on their side of the ball; a stolen win from the dumpster-dwelling Ravens here, an upset of old flame Joe Flacco and his Bengals there, a hard-fought rematch with Pittsburgh mixed in, and this season isn’t a disaster by any means. And isn’t that progress?

Season Score: 2.571

✪✪

“Hell’s Bells…” Taxon

Tampa Bay Buccaneers:

Baker Listened to “Overthrown” by Arsis One Too Many Times In Pre-Game…and the Run Game Evaporated.

It would appear at first glance that there’s an entirely simple explanation for the Bucs’ unexpected dud on Monday Night: the injuries are simply becoming too much to bear on offense. But that ignores a quite voluminous mass of Baker Mayfield overthrows. It almost became comical in the second half, he the diminutive quarterback, Tez Johnson, Emeka Egbuka and Sterling Shepard the diminutive receivers, vying for passes that exploded out of Mayfield’s hands and often wound up deep out of bounds. This didn’t look like an imitable blueprint for future games, in other words. There was an extraordinary imbalance in this game that developed between Baker’s pass attempts and the run game: Baker dropped back 54 times, and the running backs (mainly Rachaad White, as Sean Tucker received one lonesome carry) ran the ball just 11 times. It was the first time all season that the Buccaneers failed to register at least 15 rushing attempts as a team – and hopefully it will be the last. It’s fair to point to run-play totals with skepticism and note that any argument founded on the notion that higher rushing attempts tends to equal higher success and more wins ignores a fundamental question of causation versus correlation, but in this game it was pretty clear: they were not going to beat Detroit by throwing incompletion after incompletion after incompletion. Whether speedy backup Rachaad White could have gotten more going if he’d handled the ball on the ground a few more times is uncertain (he had only 38 yards on his 10 carries) but at the very least it would have taken a bit of pressure and responsibility off the shoulders of the Bucs passing offense, which in one of the worst moments of the season lost Mike Evans to a broken collarbone, ending his season and in all likelihood shattering any chance he has of extending his streak of consecutive 1,000-yard receiving seasons by another year. The Buccaneers defense played as well as they could, surrendering one horrendous 78-yard touchdown to Jahmyr Gibbs but otherwise keeping the tamps down on what had been a sizzling Detroit run-pass combo. And as is the case with many games in the mid-2025 season, the referees decided that they needed their day in the sun on this night too, stretching out a late Buccaneers drive with numerous reviews, reversals, and conferences that made this game feel all the longer. This was one to forget for Tampa, who have been cruising on overdrive the last couple weeks and probably needed a heat check to better understand where their limitations lie. They can’t hope to beat the best defenses in the NFC with volume passing as banged-up as they are – if they can retrieve Bucky Irving and Chris Godwin from the first aid station come the Bucs’ post-bye section of the schedule, they are still as dangerous as any team in their conference.

Season Score: 4.000

Atlanta Falcons:

The Jocular Falcons Defense – And Suspect Late Playcalling – Is No Laughing Matter Indeed.

There’s a Tweet that went viral a few years ago purporting to disclose a conversation overheard at a local Lowe’s hardware store. One man, at his wit’s end with another customer, explodes, saying to the second man “I’m in here 50 times a day, 7 days a week. You’re a Saturday guy.” The implication being, of course, that Man 2 is what’s called a “casual” in modern parlance – someone who has access to resources or culture but lacks the goods and savoir faire to make fullest use of them. The time may be approaching when Falcons Nation (a nation akin to the Federated States of Micronesia in size and relevance to the broader NFL landscape) must reckon with the question: are Arthur Blank, Raheem Morris, and Michael Penix all “Saturday Guys?” Arthur Blank has a strong case against being a Saturday guy since he owns a store that is a direct competitor with Lowe’s – the Home Depot – that out-earned Lowe’s by over $20B in Q2 2025. But Michael Penix might be the elemental definition of a Saturday Guy, and beyond the strict denotation assigned by the angry guy in Lowe’s: he might be just a good college quarterback, i.e., one whose best work was done on the fall Saturdays of 2018-2023, and not the NFL Sundays of 2024 and beyond. Raheem Morris? He might just be a casual in the traditional sense of the word, in the way it was applied by Angry Lowe’s Man in the first place: a casual, non-difference-making, unable-to-be-relied-upon-in-adversity duty officer who can mind the store but can’t put out fires in the lumber department or convince hesitant customers to sign up for the ultra-premium protection warranty plan. In sum, the Falcons show time and again that any kind of a deficit piled up by the opponent is most likely an insurmountable one. They went down 3-7 early against a spirited, newly George-Kittle-infused Niners team and never really challenged the 49ers again. Sure, there were Bijan Robinson highlights. Sure, the numbers for Penix don’t look too terrible. And sure, 20-10 isn’t an ass whooping of mythic proportion. But the ironclad certainty that the Falcons would not find a way to dig themselves out of a measly 4-point deficit – forget the 10-point crater they found themselves peering up from when it was 13-3 or 20-10 – was never, ever, in doubt. Penix threw 17 incompletions on the evening, and none of them looked like they were the receiver’s fault for not catching them. The lack of Bijan Robinson rushing yards (his damage was done mostly through the air, with 6 for 52 and a touchdown) and the invisibility of Drake London for almost all of this game (the nominal WR1 caught 4 passes for 42 yards and seemed allergic to routes that crossed the middle of the field) meant that the Falcons’ identity was challenged – and that’s bad news for a team that, so far as we can tell, can really only win if they’re playing from ahead from very, very early in the game. If Zac Robinson is indeed a 50x a day 7x a week guy and not a Saturday dilletante he’ll be spending the rest of the week gameplanning on how to attack a rotting Dolphins squad not just to win but to showcase all the different kinds of things the Falcons can do. Because let’s face it – this team needs to show it can get the job done in the proverbial wind and rain, without fancy tools, using shovels, trowels and spades, and not just when their giant Bobcat Excavator has a full tank of gas.

Season Score: 3.167

Pittsburgh Steelers:

Get Kerosene, Soak The Film, And Burn The Tape Of This Game. This Was A Defensive Letdown To Forget, Forever.

Go back and listen to Mike Tomlin wax awestruck about the specter of Joe Flacco, both in his press conference before their Week 4 Irish jig against the Vikings and in the leadup to their Thursday Night Football implosion against Flacco and his new team. Many mistook Tomlin’s initial comments for pointed, barbed slights against hiatal QB Anthony Richardson in Indianapolis; in fact, they were merely the grave musings of a wise and wizened coach who knows all too well who his enemy is, and what his capabilities, manifold and misery-inducing for defenses that show him the right looks, are. It was christened the Icy Hot Bowl by Cam Heyward, and as such it shall be known forever. It didn’t come late enough in the year, or with enough on the line, to have a more formalized, sports-media-bestowed nickname, so I.H.B. will do, but it’s fun to kick around ideas for this team’s next meeting, too: the Old Ass Spittoon, Paul Bunion’s Axe, the Old Croakin’ Bucket, the Deep North’s Oldest Rivalry, I could go on, and on, and on, but let’s stick to the game at hand. This game could have been a Pittsburgh runaway, as indeed it was shaping up to be. This was probably the best the Steelers have ever looked this year on offense, and in a wasted effort, no less. They epitomized the best qualities of old Arthur Smith offenses in just about every portion of the game save the late first half (which ended up being a great portion of their undoing): controlled passing volumes that nail the deepest open receivers, outside zone runs that relied on speed and toughness from gritty backs, and quarterback mobility that isn’t setting new standards in human evolution but still makes for a more-difficult-than-usual sack for the defense. All this and more was on display – and yet, despite the defensive wasteland that opened wide vistas for Flacco, Chase, Higgins, Iosivas, and Brown to saunter through and about, Rodgers’ two interceptions in the second quarter were probably what helped ignite the white-hot, white-helmeted, white-jerseyed and white-panted Bengals into full blaze. Neither of the picks were terrible throws by Rodgers – especially the second, which was a true 50/50 ball that you’d expect your receiver to at least force an incompletion on if he couldn’t reel in the catch itself – but when you play this brand of ball that moves from station to station in measured meter, you can’t have these things, nor can you afford to waste touches on someone as unlikely to bust a long one as Kenneth Gainwell, who hasn’t done anything since the Vikings game. The defense? It was a smoldering nuclear mishap of a unit for almost the entire game, unable to adapt to the impossibly-easy short throws, unable to cover the intermediate outs that Flacco peppered them with, and horrific when Flacco loosed anything deep downfield. Though this was a game to remember from the two eldest men on the field, the quarterbacks, the one who looked the oldest was Jalen Ramsey, whose loss in coverage of Tee Higgins effectively ended the game. Rodgers’ authorship of one final Hail Mary throw, which ended up being the furthest pass attempt by air yards since at least 2017, was a fitting end to a game that symbolized just how far the offense of the Steelers will need to propel this team if the defense continues, as it has since, I don’t know, 2014, to be awful against competent quarterbacks with good receivers. A puke-inducing defensive performance – but in the ashes, through the haruspex’s capnomancy, there’s reason to have hope with an offense that can do stuff like this. 

Season Score: 3.167

Los Angeles Chargers:

Okay, Now The Death Lemonade Unitards Seem Kind Of Fucked Up. Did The Defense Lose Its Charge, Too?

The latest cadaver to be fed into and ground out of the engine of horror that is the Daniel Jones Colts Offense were these guys – the NFL’s Yellow Wallpaper team. Like the first-person narrator of that short story examining themes of isolation, madness and imprisonment, the Chargers found themselves trapped on Sunday: trapped in the barbarically garish yellow outfits they debuted, trapped in endless disadvantageous downs and distances on both offense and defense, trapped in a nauseating encore of every other promising Chargers season this century, and trapped with a lineup and rotation of role players that is nothing close to who they expected to be out there in Midsommar. Mid-summer. Get it? Several horrible Halloween puns later and the Chargers are still scraping their banana-peel outfits off the smoking turf of SoFi Stadium. The Colts have had to travel to Los Angeles twice in the last calendar month and in neither game did the opposing defense appear to offer much in the way of resistance to their war machine offense. The Rams, at least, got to see the Colts hoist by their own petard when AD Mitchell’s brash hotdogging cost them a score while his irresponsible blocking later cost them a touchdown, but those issues seem to have been corrected. At least you would think so watching this game. The Colts pulled out every stop on the infernal organ in attacking this Chargers defense, giving nine different players touches while continuing to channel their unholy horseshoe magic through Jonathan Taylor, the heart of this darkness. The Chargers allowed touchdowns on drives of 75, 70, and 80 yards – in their first three drives. They valiantly forced a three-and-out on the Colts’ fourth drive of the game before turning right back around and giving up three more scoring drives of 62, 14 and 73 in quick succession and on consecutive opportunities. Justin Herbert looked lost, friendless, and deeply overburdened, having lost his two best linemen, his two best running backs, and the whole of the good vibrations he’d helped enkindle during that remote and bygone 3-0 start to begin the season. It’s not that, even with all the disadvantages the Chargers had to shoulder in this game on offense, they had no chance at all in this one, it’s just that they would have had to play perfect football. In a way it was like the Eagles-Patriots Super Bowl, with Herbert in the role of Tom Brady: his defense, which had been vicious and full-throated in its ferocities early on, could not withstand a team that was riding a towering blue tsunami of confidence, and Herbert himself would have had to throw for 500+ and 4 touchdowns to keep them in contention. Instead he resembled Young Goodman Brown out there, a hunched, unsure, frightened but good-hearted soul in a wolfish wilderness harboring dangerous, diabolical powers. It was a bad game. This Chargers team, which looked last year like they forgot Justin Herbert played for them, has now reverted fully to “Make Justin Herbert Be The Hero” status. That’s fine if you have enough OL and run-game help – not to mention a halfway decent defense – to support him in his questings. But the Chargers don’t. The future is not crackling with electric brightness right now – it’s a mottled, melted yellow.

Season Score: 3.143

Washington Commanders:

The One Thing That Could Not Happen May Have Happened: The Future Of The Franchise Has Been Wounded.

It was cute when the Commanders took an 8-7 lead over the Cowboys super early in this game. It was far less cute when that ended up being the highlight of their afternoon, and the bright spot of it. Dallas easily dispatched an ever-loosening Washington defense in a Carrie-like blood sacrifice, dishing it back to the team that had put a final punctuation mark on their funereal 2024 season by opening up a 41-15 lead in the third quarter and winning easily, 44-22. The Commanders had designs on being the NFC East’s newest bully in a division that has traditionally been ruled by strongman teams whose hallmark is machismo, toughness, and willingness to trample on their inferiors, professional politesse be damned; instead, their 2025 second act with Jayden Daniels, who left with yet another concerning if non-season-ending injury, has made them look like the fake tough guy who can’t take a punch. Jayden Daniels is what he is: an ultra-talented, precocious, experienced, slim quarterback. What he isn’t is a QB who you trust to take punishment when the pass rush gets home. It’s clear that the guy has a certain nous when it comes to designed runs or scrambles, being able to evade most big hits. But what about when his OL can’t band together and solidify a wall in front of him at all? That’s what it looked like was happening on Sunday afternoon in the boiling sunshine, with Jayden Daniels taking a number of QB hits and turning 2 of those into sacks – the last and most grievous one an afternoon-ender that reminded all of us the 2025 version of Marcus Mariota is not the 2014 version of Marcus Mariota. Mariota should be given some consideration since in just 12 dropbacks he suffered two sacks of his own, a clear and present indication of just how much extra work this offensive line – which has not really helped generate all that much of a run game that isn’t entirely reliant on Jayden Daniels in the multiple games we’ve seen from them this season – forces its quarterbacks to do. There are a lot of key pieces missing from the chessboard right now for Washington, including Deebo Samuel and Terry McLaurin, their top two receivers, but that doesn’t excuse the combined feebleness of the Washington line and the inability of the quarterbacks behind them to evade the steady rush. Still, the names of the people this offense had out there on Sunday are, well, jarring: Robbie Chosen – yup, that guy – was the leading receiver by number of receptions, catching four passes for 36 yards. Two people whose Christian names are Jaylin Lane and Chris Moore were tops for receiving yards at 60 and 59, respectively. And they do still have Jacory “Bill” Croskey-Merritt – but he added only 33 yards on 13 carries. To best the bruising offenses in this division the Commanders need their ammo back. Think of this game as a drawn-out, costly version of the scene in Disney’s Hercules where Zeus, king of the gods, says “I need more thunderbolts!” That’s what Kliff Kingsbury was muttering to himself in so many terms after this one. Thankfully, Deebo Samuel and Terry McLaurin look like locks to return in Week 8 – the same cannot be said for Jayden Daniels, whose injury will keep him out of the lineup against the…gulp…Kansas City Chiefs. Good luck, Marcus! (He has beaten the Chiefs under unkind circumstances before.)

Season Score: 3.143

New Orleans Saints:

Another Week, Another Yawn. NOLA Is The Least Disastrous Of The Very Bad Teams. Put That On A Banner.

You won’t see too many rushing totals worse than 17 carries for 44 yards as a team in any given season, but that’s what the Saints put up on the box score versus Chicago. In years prior, New Orleans, a dome team through-and-through, has been able to shake off their disinclination towards the outdoors and batter bad Bears teams like the non-competitors that they were. But the Bears are better now, and New Orleans is worse, and Chicago is windy, and these various factors combined on Sunday to spell bad things for a wandering Saints team who are lucky that the Dolphins, Jets, Titans and Raiders exist to take the heat off their sluggish start. Need we really say more? This team’s calling card is its small but shifty and speedy receivers in Chris Olave and Rashid Shaheed. Those guys can indeed take over games – they did so to an extent against the Giants at home a few weeks back – but they can also be neutralized in situations where the passing game cannot be relied upon to be totally crisp, calculated and pristine. Such as outdoors in Chicago with the temperature below 50 degrees. Indeed, the two receivers weren’t “lost” on the day – Olave had a solid game, with five catches for 98 yards, and Shaheed caught four passes of his own – but they and Juwan Johnson were the only threats the Saints posed to the Bears, and the Bears keyed in on them as such. Shaheed especially could not maximize his opportunities, with those four targets representing less than half of his targets (9), which led to more than a few dire plays for quarterback Spencer Rattler. The ball sailed on him more than once in the Windy City, leading to three interceptions that gave the Saints zero shot of coming back in this game. They didn’t have much more than a ghost of a chance by the time the offense really got going – it was 20-0 in the second quarter – but down 9 with less than 10 minutes left, a ghost of a chance was still winnowing in the windowsill. Rattler’s final two interceptions banished that ghost away, leaving an empty, unhappy, and 1-6 Saints team drearily unhaunted by specters of victory. New Orleans’ next month of opponents are the Buccaneers, Rams, Panthers and Falcons. 0-4 might be the likeliest outcome. The Fleur De Lis is the Fleur De Least-Interesting-Team-In-The-NFL right now.

Season Score: 2.571

Arizona Cardinals:

Two Dimensions Of Suffering Prevail In The Last Two Losses: They’re Close, & the Team Looks Better With Brissett.

Ravaged by injuries, the Cardinals backfield could be forgiven for lying down to a rampaging, feeling-good Packers team that has been able to coast for almost all of the season without reaching anything close to their fullest offensive heights. But that’s not what Jacoby Brissett is about. Any team with the journeyman pro has a chance of keeping the game close, and an expectation that borders on a guarantee of professional-looking, non-embarrassing football. That’s what the Cardinals effectuated on Sunday in their close, non-disgraceful loss to Green Bay – but that’s not going to be enough to keep Jonathan Gannon, Drew Petzing and, perhaps, Kyler Murray employed. Hell, are we sure Monti Ossenfort the GM is totally safe? If you were approached by the demon Faust, who told you that you’d be given exciting football every week from your favorite team but that they would always lose the thrilling games, would you accept? Most wouldn’t – but a couple sickos would. In any case, it’s not an outright impossibility that someone in the Cardinals fanbase hasn’t made that bargain, because the agonizing Arizona Cardinals have, after starting 2-0, lost their last five games by a combined 13 points – and have held a lead or been tied with their opponent entering the fourth quarter in four of those five games. The one game they did not possess an advantage on the scoreboard entering the final stanza – that the TNF game against Seattle – they pulled off a magical comeback that saw Kyler Murray and Marvin Harrison, Jr. explode into fantastic offensive life, only to lose at the gun on a game-winning field goal. What gives, Football Gods? To make it doubly bad, they’re without their QB1, RB1, and RB2, and to make it triply bad, THE TEAM LOOKS BETTER IN ITS CURRENT STATE! Nothing about this Cardinals season has made sense in a vacuum; what has made sense, or at least emanated pheromones of familiarity, is the simplest and most brutal meditation there is: these are the Cardinals, for many the NFL’s most irrelevant team, and bad things have always happened to them. At points in 2023, 2024 and even early in 2025 things seemed to be on the ups for them – but the embers have never been fanned into a bonfire yet, and it’s not apparent to anyone that that will ever happened under this coach and this quarterback pairing. Whether Kyler Murray can save Jonathan Gannon’s job, or vice versa, or whether they can save each other, is a dramatic plotline for the latter half of the NFL season that promises tension, devastating human drama, and a whole lot of monochrome uniforms. I’m game! The Cardinals were game for a lot of this game, too – Jacoby Brissett, after all, doesn’t keep getting paychecks from NFL teams for his knitting, but he seems to have, to his great misfortune, mastered an abysmal art form: being the surprisingly better quarterback in games that he ends up losing. It’s kind of his move. Under fire from Micah Parsons and the rest of the cheeseheaded pack of beasts that Jeff Hafley has frenzied into fearsomeness this season, he couldn’t escape the ceaseless torrents of pressure consistently enough in crunch time to give his team a shot at a miracle win; still, he has shown through halfway-masterful quarterbacking that Trey McBride can, in fact, score touchdowns (he went nuts with 10 grabs for 74 yards and a pair of scores in this game) and that Zay Jones is still a thing. What Brissett hasn’t been able to do consistently is feed Michael Wilson and Marvin Harrison, Jr., who are nominally this team’s top two receivers. That’s an issue that someone – potentially a different someone than Drew Petzing or his vertically-challenged acolyte Kyler Murray – will have to figure out someday.

Season Score: 2.286

Tennessee Titans:

The Beatings Will Continue – Whether Morale Improves Or Not. Still Think Vrabel Wasn’t Good Enough, Amy?

You don’t get to 1-6 by being a constantly competitive football team whose only problem is at HC, and the Titans lived up to their rigid tradition of being clearly worse than their opponent on Sunday, rolling over for a Patriots team that barely erred on offense. Cam Ward’s hellish education continued under a new schoolmaster in Mike McCoy, but the hard lessons that the defenses he faces seem intent on inculcating into him remained the same. This season is so far lost that one has to wonder what a reasonable mission statement encompassing what this team hopes to accomplish the rest of the year would even look like – at the moment, the most pressing matters are simply to stay healthy and not regress so far as to be irretrievable in your bad habits. We’ll see if that hurdle, too, is far too high to clear. Precious little can be gleaned from a team that fires its head coach, save for the ultrarare circumstance in which the interim skipper shows such leadership and acumen that he gets the team to the playoffs or challenges for the head coaching job. Hilariously, we have seen exactly that dynamic happen to the same team in the last four years – the Rich Bisaccia and Antonio Pierce Raiders – but I don’t think that mold is one that these Titans will fit snugly into. Mike McCoy did not wow in his first head coaching stint with the mid-2010s Chargers, and that team was positively brimming with talent compared to this Titans squad. But if he can do anything, he can probably act as an upgrade over Brian Callahan in the department that oversees the development of Cam Ward as a quarterback. Indeed, this was probably Cam’s best performance on the year, topping 250 passing yards and getting Chimere Dike a touchdown catch while throwing one interception – and losing a fumble and taking 6 sacks. That’s going to happen when you’re a helpless, John Elway-on-the-1983 Broncos-coded young QB, but something encouraging is how Mike McCoy, unlike a ton of Football Guy interim coaches, didn’t immediately pivot to a run-heavy attack that mistakenly de-emphasizes the developing passer he has on his hands. No, no – Mike McCoy only called 12 designed runs for the entire game, and let Ward throw it 40 times. That’s the power of having a former journeyman quarterback as your new head honcho (McCoy bounced around the league’s practice squads, NFL Europe, and was briefly on the 49ers as the fourth-stringer in the mid 90’s). There’s a flicker of something on the Titans – it might not be fully-fledged hope, but the hex code of the crushing blackness environing these Titans might not be #000000 anymore, just a really, really dark shade of gray. A step in what might prove to be a positive-ish direction. My words, as you can tell, are guarded.

Season Score: 1.857

✪

Hell. Taxon

Jacksonville Jaguars:

The Glorious Trevolution Goes The Way Of Boudica In A Wembley Wipeout To Erase From The Histories.

At 4-1, it felt like the Jags were doing something that’s not always easy to do: win close games. As a point of comparison, they really didn’t do much of that during the last most recent year that they came out of the gates gun blazing, in 2017 during the short-lived but much-ballyhooed #SACKSONVILLE phenomenon. That team annihilated bad teams but rarely found itself in tense affairs that it wound up winning, leading to a pretty mediocre 10-6 record and an AFC Championship exit that may or may not have included some poor and game-changing calls by those guys in striped shirts. This year, though, it doesn’t look like that Jags team’s descendants will ever get the privilege of playing in the championship game or pummeling deeply inferior teams – because frankly, the Jags of 2025 might be one of those arrantly pummelable squads that their 2017 forbears relished in reducing to pillars of salt with so much revelry. There are few other conclusions to draw after a 35-7 pummeling suffered at the hands of a team in the Rams who had shown they could win close games against good teams but hadn’t truly beaten down anyone outside the flailing Titans (who possessed a lead over the Rams at halftime of their Week 2 tilt, in what might have been the high point of Brian Callahan’s career when the bill is fully itemized). Matthew Stafford had a positively omnipotent day efficiency-wise, hardly reaching escape velocity on the 180-passing-yard ceiling but throwing five touchdowns against a subdued Jags defense that got zero help from their own offense. The offense went down 21-0 early and, to their credit, refused to make the game cosmetically more palatable but indistinguishable from any other result in the win-loss column by kicking pointless field goals. The result was a brave, if ineffective, 2-for-6 on 4th down. Despite not throwing an interception and reaching almost 300 yards passing on the day, no one would confuse Trevor Lawrence’s volume-heavy and bloated performance for that of a captain steering his ship effectively. He could not find receivers, could barely scramble when the passing patterns failed to materialize, and simply did not give his team the chance they needed to win. He received no help from his receivers, who dropped an astonishing 100% of their targets. Okay, not really, but at times it felt like that, and it’s not unfair to note that the Jaguars probably approached a 1.000 batting average for dropping the important passes of the game on third- and fourth-down. To augment the tough-to-stomach sloppiness that pervaded JAX’s performance on this day, the team racked up a tab of 13 penalties for almost 120 yards. Guys, London is supposed to be your second home! If there was ever a team that could expect to receive some benefit of the doubt from the refs, it would be in this game, which leads me to believe they actually committed far more than 13 penalties and just got dinged for the egregious or blatant perpetrations. This team is a long way off from where it sat after its gutsy, nail-biting win over the then-floundering 49ers, and could use a shot in the arm from getting to play a bad defense that it can run on and develop a less all-out aerially-driven gameplan against. Yuck!

Season Score: 2.857

New York Giants:

The Following Is Not Hyperbole: But For The Eagles Win, This Would Be A Fireable Offense For Daboll.

There’s almost no way to describe the inanity of the Giants-Broncos game without making massive allowances for flukiness and hand-waving away a lot of what seemed at the time like legitimate, authentic, well-schemed-up production. For one thing, in retrospect, that Theo Johnson touchdown was a fortunate bounce to end all fortunate bounces; it’s not indicative of the Giants wielding a bankable 19-point superiority to their orange-clad enemies on Sunday afternoon. And that last scoring drive? I’ve been to weddings with less interjection from the officials/officiants. The loss is a catastrophic one that, Jaxson Dart growth as a passer aside, could have and probably would have led to a Monday morning termination notice for Daboll if Dart hadn’t picked up two electrifying wins already. This was a coaching staff’s worst nightmare and probably extinguished any on-the-fence Daboll supporters’ burgeoning tolerance of the little-winning HC. You cannot tell the story of this game on the Giants side without first noting that taking a huge lead on the Denver Broncos is a praiseworthy accomplishment. That’s the doing of the players on the field, first and foremost, who were put in good positions by the coaches. For the Giants to blow that lead – a catastrophe of game management, more so than errors by the players themselves – is an inglorious, totally unacceptable, frankly humiliating result. And that aspect of this game has to fall on the coaches. Look at the game script once the game became a “game,” as the highlights shows would term it: Cam Skattebo did not touch the ball on either of the Giants’ third downs after the lead had shrunk to 10 points. There were only 5 minutes left in the game at that point. You have to make the Broncos burn their third and final one after they spent their first two stopping the clock after the initial two Cam Skattebo runs on the Giants’ third-to-last drive; there’s no guarantee, moreover, that Sean Payton would have even used the final timeout after a third Skattebo run with 4:56 left. Running the ball there would have been tantamount to torture for the Broncos, who would have been in a catch-22 with two scores needed and either less than 4 minutes left or no timeouts left. Cam Skattebo could have even picked up a first down running the ball. Who knows? We’ll never know, because instead of traveling that route, the Giants started down the road to infamy and damnation by throwing the ball, which turned into an evil-looking interception that the Broncos gladly took back to the Giants’ 19-yard line and scored four plays and one Kayvon Thibodeaux roughing the passer penalty later, without using a timeout. The Giants’ next drive took less than a minute off the clock, with the Broncos’ final timeout used to stop a second-down run. The Giants outsmarted themselves again on third down, missing a deep pass to Wan’Dale Robinson (the only Giants’ wideout to catch a pass the whole day). The Broncos, down 3, had all to play for, and they scored a touchdown to go up 4. The Giants, to their everlasting credit, did take a 2-point lead on a ludicrous drive that featured no fewer than four Broncos-averse referee interruptions of game flow including a Jaxson Dart rushing touchdown that stopped the clock (to the Giants’ detriment, it turned out) due to a referee’s review. The impotent Giants defense had too much time and too little field to defend, though, and a kick-in-the-balls miss of the extra point that would have made the worst outcome for Big Blue an OT period instead an invitation for Denver to complete a couple passes and win the game. It gave one a dreadful rash of goosebumps to watch. You knew that as soon the Broncos took a 30-26 lead that the loser of the game would have the mark of Cain upon them. This time it was the Giants – who are just experts at losing. There’s nothing nice to say about how Brian Daboll, Shane Bowen and Mike Kafka handled the last quarter of this game, except to say that they used their best plays during the game’s competitive phase and not in garbage time, which former Giants teams usually did the reverse of. This is really not the game you want to play before going back to Philadelphia and facing a pissed-off Eagles team that’s still surely smarting from the humbling loss these Giants stacked on them a few weeks ago. Something wicked might be awaiting them at the Linc. 

Season Score: 2.714

Houston Texans:

The Doom Of This Offense, And The Accelerated Regression of Stroud As Passer, Must Be Studied Scientifically.

The scholars, paleontologists, and historians of posterity will study with rigor and lucubration the downfall of the Texans offense from 2023 to 2025. There’s a pall over this team that has no explicable right to be there: C.J. Stroud didn’t suffer any kind of horrible injury over the 2024 or 2025 seasons or offseasons, they didn’t have a coordinator plucked away because they were so good at their job, and they didn’t lose significant pieces; Nick Chubb and Woody Marks are more than sufficient to replace a murky Joe Mixon, whose injury is clouded in weird obscurity, and they’ve been without Tank Dell for so long that his being gone is no excuse either. They drafted two different wide receivers named Jalen for that exact reason! The only saving grace for the Texans’ grave-like performance late on Monday Night is the notion that a lot of people probably didn’t stay up to watch them piss their pants over and over again on the Lumen Field turf. But anyone plugged into the NFL media cycle who didn’t see the spectacle for themselves and wants the skinny on their beatdown is reading something along these lines: “The Texans offense can’t do anything right.” They could have won the press conference afterwards, if they’d chosen to benevolently plagiarize the ancient and eternally relevant words of Saints coach Jim Mora: “We just got our ass totally kicked. We couldn’t do diddly-poo offensively. We couldn’t make a first down. We couldn’t run the ball. We didn’t try to run the ball. We couldn’t complete a pass. We sucked.” C.J. Stroud dropped back 54 times on the evening and lost more yards on his three sacks than he accounted for on any one passing play. With two scrambles for 25 yards, he was the Texans’ leading rusher. This team has NOTHING on offense right now. Who cares if Joe Mixon and Tank Dell can come back this year? They cannot save this 2-4, papier-mâché-consistency, uninventive and endlessly frustrating offense if they were the second comings of Ariann Foster and Andre Johnson. The only hope left for this Texans team is if they can find a way to sweep the Colts and win their remaining games against the Titans (sure) and Jaguars (no sure thing). Stroud is baffling in his decline. He still throws a pretty spiral from a nice throwing motion though.

Season Score: 2.167

Las Vegas Raiders:

Back To The Dungeon Once Again. For Sheer Snap-To-Snap Badness, This Might Be The Worst Team In The NFL.

For pure, unfiltered feebleness, for simple volume of horrific football squeezed tightly into each snap, for inability of the team to even attempt to challenge their opponent and long-time, irremovable oppressors, this 2-5 Raiders team might be the very worst, at this moment, in the league. You simply can’t compare their performance on offense to anyone else’s. They ran thirty plays in four quarters, good for 5 three-and-outs per half. That’s not exactly how the game script unfolded – but that is sure what it felt like. This is the bottom for the Raiders through a little less than half a season. It just can’t get worse. Not that the football itself can’t get uglier – I would not dare to hazard a guess at how abysmal that bottomless pit can become – but unless you are playing a team that is starting every drive from its own 1-yard line and using all four downs on every set of chain-moves, it is almost impossible to imagine a situation where a team doesn’t run more than 30 plays on offense. It wouldn’t make sense mathematically unless you turned the ball over like ten times. The Raiders are a tragicomedy right now in low-res; their offense is the lowest resolution it can get, something like 240p with buffering issues, and without Brock Bowers or a competent offensive line to bail out Geno Smith and protect Ashton Jeanty this team has absolutely no chance to compete down the stretch. The Chiefs haven’t even played that well in their front seven this year – forget the pass rush, which has been firmly among the league’s lower-half in production – and they managed to critically sabotage every single Raiders opportunity. On defense, this game was not as feeble, but was every bit as infuriating to watch unfold. Patrick Mahomes probably threw three or four passes that, if the Raiders were operating on the same mental level as the utterly decisive, occasionally-to-a-reckless-degree quarterback, would have been interceptions; but because Mahomes can preternaturally intuit when to take a chance and when to not, none of these opportunities wound up as an extra possession for the Raiders. Darnay Holmes in particular was victimized like a helpless bystander in the midst of a lupine feeding frenzy on one of the Chiefs’ scoring drives, being called for illegal contact early in the play, then losing track of Xavier Worthy, failing to deflect, intercept or even defense a 50/50 ball to the undersized receiver, missing the tackle and entering the video library as just another casualty in the catalogue of defenders left grasping unsuccessfully at out-of-reach red jerseys. The 31-0 final score, amazingly, is actually misleading: this could have been something on the order of 45-0 or 52-0 if the starters had stayed in and if the Raiders’ special teams, bless their heart, hadn’t pinned Kansas City inside their own 20-yard line four different times to kick off drives that eventually netted points for the Chiefs. Not just one – three different Kansas City scoring drives started inside their own 15-yard line!!! Two of those were touchdowns, and another touchdown drive started at the KC 16-yard line. Mix in a Chiefs touchdown march that “only” started at their own 35 and you possess the individual ingredients of a five-consecutive-scoring-drive (including four straight touchdown drives) vampiric feast that left Las Vegas, fittingly wearing their chalk-white and lifeless-looking away jerseys, exsanguinated and without a pulse. Things are not going well for Pete Carroll, and he needs to show that his roster and his coaching staff are not the biggest joke yet in a procession of punchlines that have also included the clown-makeup palettes of Josh McDaniels, Alec Pierce and Jon Gruden underneath Mark Davis’s very silly, and very uncompetitive, Big Top tentpole.

Season Score: 2.000

New York Jets:

Six Points Against The Carolina Panthers Is Unspeakable. This Team Is In Freefall On A Gas Giant.

The watch is now, officially, on. The 0-17 vigil we must hold until either the Jets win a game or the season ends in early January is a gut-wrenching one – not just for Jets fans, which the staff of Personal Vowels is not, and not just for the individual laborers whose task it is to watch the Jets, who put out bad and hard-to-analyze football, each week, but for humanity itself. The spotlight that shines scorchingly on uniquely miserable and potentially history-making bands of foundering professionals who are failing to hold up the standards of their profession makes for grim work – both by the athletes and the amassed throngs of viewership who line up just to be insulted with their team’s ineptitude week in and week out. You really have to hand it to the Jets – not only did they somehow manage to prove within the span of a single game after a credentialed reporter asked about Justin Field’s job security only to be upbraided by a haughty Aaron Glenn that Justin Fields is so terrible he cannot even play quarterback for the Jets, but they also managed to prove in the space of that very same game that somehow, someway, his backup was even worse. No bites of that messy dish of dysfunction vindicate Glenn’s ridiculous dismissal of the question about whether Justin Fields would remain the starter after a -10-yard passing day in London – it just shows that he and Darren Mougey simply have no eye for quarterbacks. They don’t seem to have much of an eye for anything, truth be told, besides knowing which defensive holdovers from the previous regime they should keep around, which most anyone would be expected to do. Even if the Jets get some credit for effecting something of a recrudescence of ineptitude on the part of the Panthers’ offense, guess what? NO ONE CARES! You have to WIN these games! It’s insane to see this team lurch from opponent to opponent, week to week, without so much as a heartbeat to indicate they are living breathing members of the football-playing human race. That’s the hallmark of the Dan Campbell Lions – being able to show up at home or on the road, in weather seasonable or inclement, against opponents formidable or feckless, and play good, competent, and usually winning football. Glenn and his pirate ship of dismal contributors have shown nothing to indicate they can ever get to that spot – let alone do so next week, or the week after, or the week after, or the week after. They’re the Mickey 17 of the NFL: you can kill them over and over, and they will simply repopulate, ready and willing to be slain again week next. This was a win this coaching staff and team absolutely needed to have. Without a 1 in the W column after playing the worst team by record over the past two seasons, the Jets have consigned themselves to a season of incessant stressors that may not subside. Each week accumulates greater dread as the losing goes on and on. And once you get to O-and-Double Digits, all bets are off. Here’s to hoping, for the sake of the men and fathers and sons that are employed by this team, that they at least snag a single win on this road to perdition. The Jets are not a corporation in the traditional sense, as their job is not to “create value for shareholders” on the field. That’s a good thing, because this team would be bankrupt and in liquidation if it was. This team is falling through the ethereal and alien atmosphere of a massive gas giant right now: only sulfuric fumes and wisps of unearthly chemistry are their companions, and there is nothing solid in sight to break their freefall.

Season Score: 1.714

Miami Dolphins:

All Is Futility Now. There Is No Saving McDaniel’s Job. Whether Tua and Grier Are Beyond Redemption Is Ross’s Call.

And, let’s face it, to harbor an expectation of sound or pragmatic action on the part of an ownership apparatus that hasn’t won a playoff game is a hare-brained way to approach the remains of the season. For the second week in a row, Miami is alone on the final page of the HYH, like Lucifer in his frozen Cocytus confinements. The Dolphins of 2025 are what happens when no progress is made from Year 1 to Year 4 under a coaching staff: stagnation, then self-sabotage, then suffering.  To find the last time the Browns beat a team by at least 25 points, you have to go back to 2023, when the Browns beat the Clayton Thune-led Cardinals by a score of 27-0. To find the last time they accomplished such a margin of victory before that, you have to go back to 2021, when they defeated the Bengals 41-16. And the last time it happened before that was in 2003, against the Cardinals, again. This just doesn’t happen very often; for it to happen twice in a generation is on the same order of likelihood as the Packers gallivanting from Brett Favre to Aaron Rodgers. And it happened to Tua Tagovailoa, and largely because of Tua Tagovailoa, the quarterback that the Dolphins in their 2019 nightmare year willingly surrendered their immediate future to draft. It is safe to say that the Dolphins’ deep and dark tank job perpetrated in service of enlisting Tua’s left arm was a massive and disastrous miscalculation, and this may be the lowest point yet. No, Mike McDaniel has not been the right man for the job in Miami, and no, Chris Grier hasn’t put the team in a great position the last two years. But the recent failures have to land as squarely on their QB1 as they do on their coach and GM. This is his mess. And he can’t help but make the mess larger than it needs to be with endless and tone-deaf podium moments that make listeners give credence to and consider the benefits of the monastic vows of silence that certain holy orders of ascetic monks take. This team is in a vorticular death roll with which Floridians who’ve seen crocodilians at mealtime are all too familiar. Stephen Ross has claimed that no changes to the Dolphins’ staff are forthcoming. I say, good – let the authors of this un-carpe’d diem live in their fears for one season more. Maybe the next coach, GM, and QB will recreate the flame that extinguished in this city when Don Shula and Dan Marino packed up and left. That transition ended in January 2000. We’re all still waiting for their true and rightful heirs.

Season Score: 1.571