(WEB) The Hell Yes Hierarchy: Week 9 2025.

Week 9.

We made it to the halfway point, the All-Star Break, the trade deadline, the fourth-and-a-half inning stretch, the Middlemarch of the NFL season. Fellas, it’s been a weird one so far.

Take the curious case of the Green Bay Packers. Here is a team that by all rights should be something a lot closer to undefeated than 5-2-1; instead, because of a glut of situational football lobotomizations of their own infliction, disrepute in the kicking game, a pathological inability to take the dregs of the AFC and NFC seriously and a quarterback whose brainwaves seem to occasionally transmit vistas of utter lunacy in utterly insensible ways onto the football field, their record looks like someone counting down from 5 who forgot that the numbers 4 and 3 exist. They still hold a slim division lead over the chomping, fast-approaching hounds in Chicago and Detroit, but only just; their symphony of self-sabotage committed in sepia and navy on Sunday afternoon was far more disastrous from a conference standpoint, as they relinquished their one-seed status to Philadelphia and additionally fell behind Tampa Bay, who was idle the past week, and Seattle, who frankly looks like they’d casually dispatch Green Bay without breaking more than a couple beads of easily-wickable sweat from their raptorial brows. The Packers’ offense, which has looked lethal and indefeasible at various points with Jordan Love taking snaps and throwing passes, does not feel in the least bit “dangerous” right now. They’ve been a station-to-station affair the past several weeks, *just* scraping by against Arizona and falling with astonishing dishonor to a warm-weather, talent-starved team at home versus Carolina this week. There is beginning to be some frost in the air, and to borrow a line from a poet whose name shares the characters of that meteorological phenomenon, this Packers team has miles to go before it sleeps – soundly, at least. They have some late nights of poring over film, some ruminations on how to get back some of their offensive fabulousness, some lucubration on how to maximize their increasingly weird assortment of skill players on offense before they can feel at ease and confident going up against the fellow big dogs of the conference.

But Green Bay has an advantage, or rather a sought-after prerequisite, that some other teams cannot claim to have at the moment – they’ve got their starting quarterback in the lineup, and even if he’s playing like a guy who feels like he needs to pass an eye test against non-conference pushovers in NCAA 26 and thus needlessly takes extreme risks that don’t pay off and come back to bite him in the ass, he’s still in there. The same cannot be said, after this week, for two teams with young quarterbacks of their own in Houston and Washington, D.C. Both C.J. Stroud and Jayden Daniels left their games with hard-to-watch injuries in Week 9, games that eventually became losses – one close, one not close. The size of the margin of defeat does nothing to dampen or worsen the blow of losing QB1, however, and with backups that everyone knows are heavily limited in Davis Mills and Marcus Mariota, the questions of what’s possible this year, in the here and now, may soon sublimate into questions of next year – who the Texans and Commanders can keep, who they’ll need to get rid of, who they need to target in the draft. One of them is 3-5 (HOU), one 3-6 (WAS), both in desperate doldrums given where the rest of their conference’s contenders are sitting right now. We do not know yet whether we have seen the last of Stroud or Daniels for 2025, but we need to get used to the possibility that we have. With both teams splashing around in a deepening pit of quicksand with weights on their ankles they may be unable to untie, it’s not clear whether the young guns will even be asked to come back – or if they’d even want to – when they are convalesced and salubrious once again, anyway. Dark days for two teams whose futures seemed bright and shiny in August.

The low-stakes rosiness of August brought flowery musings for several other teams, too – Las Vegas, Atlanta, and Cincinnati. These are teams that had a quarterback of their choosing, even if, as in the case of Cincy, it wasn’t the one they would have most liked to start in this game, for the contests they contended this weekend. All three fell to teams they seemed evenly matched with. The nihilism of November can strike fast and poisonous if you are a poorly-run, historically no entitative, fireless team with questions swirling, which all of these teams are. Who can say whether we’ll see Pete Carroll, Raheem Morris, and Zac Taylor back on the sidelines with their furrowed brows and perplexed moues come 2026? The early returns would indicate that their incumbencies have been jeopardized by the onfield products they’ve purveyed.

Of course, the true titans of the game are still around. And we got to see what happens when an all-systems-go, fully-bought-in, get-ours-while-the-getting-is-good Buffalo Bills team gets to square up with a faltering Chiefs operation still going through the yearly picaresque of figuring out who they are, who they can be, and who they need to be to win it all. Buffalo always wins the first round – that’s basically a fait accompli at this stage. If Buffalo can finally use this win against KC in the regular season as a springboard instead of a strength-sap on its way to dethroning the emperors of the conference in January, I won’t be too surprised. I’ll be quite struck if the Chiefs go out this way again, though.

The midpoint. The halftime of the season. The 50%. The two-quarters poll. We’re halfway home on the journey of a season. Let us look closer at where all the pieces are placed, nine or eight games in. And as an ahead-of-its-time show once instructed: “All the pieces matter.”

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“Hell Yes!!!” Taxon

Seattle Seahawks:

The Murder Machine from Seattle, WA Easily Dispatched The Moribund Has-Beens From Washington, D.C.

For many, the 5-2 Seahawks, despite playing several different games in primetime, were still in want of a true, dominant, unimpeachably visually arresting, “GO GET YOUR F***ING SHINEBOX!!!”-level win to grant an ennobling imprimatur to their record. The Washington Commanders, by this point wholly dispossessed of any hallmarks that would show them to be a team capable of resisting an upstart team playing with serious mojo like Seattle, were more than willing, if not happy, to convey this stamp of approval on national television. The Seahawks of Mike McDonald inhabited a strange world last year. They never really “bottomed out” with their previous coach, Pete Carroll – never appeared to be truly behind the curve but perceptibly incapable of mounting a competitive challenge to the high mucky mucks of their division or conference, with their signature dip in aptitude as a football team essentially coming in the form of a four-game losing streak in late November that moved them to 6-7, a losing record from which they barely recovered (they would finish 9-8 and without a chance at the playoffs). The team last year did much the same, making too many at-the-time pardonable mistakes in the form of losses to superior teams. But lo, that outfit had to make do with Geno Smith, a quarterback firmly in the waning days of his career, and to go from Geno Smith to Sam Darnold (as long as you’re not the Jets) is tantamount to going from Mad Dog 20/20 to a ’61 Bollinger. Sam Darnold has done the impossible, given where his career was just a few short seasons ago: he has gone from bust in New York, to *a* quarterback in Carolina, San Francisco and Minnesota, to the quarterback in Seattle. There was fair speculation as to whether he could replicate, or even approximate, his Minnesotan success in Seattle, who appeared on paper to have significantly worse weapons given the absence of Justin Jefferson and T.J. Hockenson. It appears they’re just fine. Jaxon Smith-Njigba has become the best wide receiver in the NFL in 2025, and it’s not close – he put even more distance between himself and second place on Sunday night with yet another 100-yard game. His crisp, jaggedly-exacting routes remind one of a bursting-onto-the-scene Amon Ra St. Brown, or to go back further, a young Michael Thomas or Calvin Ridley. All those receivers had other WR1As to contend with, or at least to supplant, though – that’s not the case here. JSN is the unquestioned and inviolate alpha dog of this receiving corps in a way rarely seen in the modern NFL, a target-devouring gravity center that sucks in the matter of the defense to the delight and benefice of his brother receivers on the Seahawks perimeter. It helps to have a Sam Darnold whose mechanics, confidence, collectedness and decisive enterprise are all dialed as far to the right as the knobs will go. No, it’s not a certainty that he can continue this into the cold of January and February. But for the Sundays of late 2025, this is the quarterback, these the receivers, and this the team of the future of the NFL. Darnold’s perfect first half testified terribly to that fact – a 16-for-16, 282-yard, 4-touchdown evacuation of the Commanders’ hopes and dreams that felt mightily Heisman Moment-y for a fiery QB. His second half wasn’t quite impressive enough for this to stand up to the scrutiny of “MVP performance” talk, but that doesn’t matter. This team will take a division championship, one-seed in the playoffs and easy path to Santa Clara in the stead of that statue (it’s all possible from this vantage). The Seahawks pride themselves on the twelfth man, but this season is showing that eleven is already more than enough with Darnold and JSN throwing and catching.

Season Score: 3.625

Chicago Bears:

It Will Be Known As The Caleb Williams Game. Or The Colston Loveland Game. Or The Kyle Monangai Game. Shrug.

At 41-27, almost 48-27, the game looked so hopelessly over for the Bengals that this game was firmly and fixedly in the 5-star win category for the Bears. But then multiple lightning bolts of sheer football insanity struck the Paycor Stadium turf, enlivening this sleepy if high-scoring contest with inane gusts of outrageous fortune that would have made defensive minds of days gone by vomit onto their sweater vests. For one coach and quarterback, it was an arising – not apotheosis, not ascendancy, but an act of standing up straight on both legs, announcing boldly to the world that they are here and they mean to make noise in this division and this conference. For another coach, and for his current quarterback, this game represented a visitation of football mortality – an eidolon, a theophany, of a cloaked figure come round to collect on a debt that will soon be outstanding. I leave it to you to decide which of the coaches, between Ben Johnson and Zac Taylor, heard that grisly visitor rapping at their chamber door – it’s unlikely you’ll guess wrong. But leave the larger forces of coaching and playcalling aside for a moment. It’s an interconference game and a showdown between a second-year and a nineteenth-year quarterback; in other words, on paper, this game did not possess the makings of a classic “quarterback duel.” The Bengals were coming off a ball-busting loss to the winless Jets, and the Bears had just gotten kicked out of the Bank in Baltimore by means of a 14-point loss to a Lamar Jackson-less Ravens team. If both of these teams found themselves in a death spiral, the only possible positive outcome would be for one team to recapture their tight spiral, and gun down the opponent to steal the scarce good vibes remaining to the two of them. By God did the Bears do that. When you’re faced with a bad defense that you know is bad, sometimes, the best possible option is to take no chances at all and still try to kill them as if you were up against the Steel Curtain. At least, that’s what Ben Johnson did in this game, reaching shoulder-deep into his sack of trickery to come up with not one but two plays where quarterback Caleb Williams was the receiving option. One of these went for a touchdown on 4th and goal and was essentially a plagiarism, though a vivacious and not at all unwelcome one, of the Philly Special. But Joe Flacco and the Bengals were not to make it easy on them. When you’re playing another team, especially when that team possesses an inept defense, you might find yourself playing more against the opposing offense than the eleven defenders in front of you – like the final round of beer Olympics staged in the 2006 comedy classic Beerfest, the Bears and Bengals were simply going at each other with haymakers each and every drive by the time the fourth quarter rolled around. The offenses were the two drinking teams, the defenses, the beer. Even though Chicago saddled Cincinnati’s soulless defense with 41 points halfway through the fourth quarter, the Bengals offense puked and rallied, with Joe Flacco accounting for a monstrous 470 yards and 4 touchdowns through the air. He also threw a would-be killer interception on a late fourth quarter drive that looked like it would end the game. Not so at all. That interception, which could have made the score 48-27 and effectively ended the afternoon, was ruled to have been one that saw the defender go down where he caught the Flacco pass. After a fruitless Bears drive, Flacco and the Bengals tank-treaded their way straight through the Bears defense and scored a Noah Fant touchdown. Then they recovered an onside kick, down six, re-greased the treads, and fired off another, potentially fatal, shell into the heart of the Chicago defenders. This time it was an Andre Iosivas touchdown with under a minute to play. Never to be outdone in howling dysfunction, though, the Bengals allowed Caleb Williams to scramble for 14 yards on the next drive’s first 3rd-and-10, and then, on the deciding snap of the game and, perhaps, the season, second-year Bear Caleb Williams found first-year Bear Colston Loveland for a 54-yard touchdown with only seconds remaining. It’s a phrase often ridiculed and pilloried when it’s employed in service of the SEC, but this game truly seemed to mean more to the Bears than the Bengals. And why should it not? After a loss last week that calendrically occurred in exactly the same spot as the Hail Maryland one year prior, the Bears needed to prove that they were not a team merely for the balmy sunshine of September and October. They didn’t just tell us as much – they showed us. For the offense, it was what the Ben Johnson offense is supposed to look like at its highest calibration: efficient, run-game-forward (rookie Kyle Monangai rumbled for over 100 yards to share the rookie spotlight with Loveland), aerially sophisticated, and zested with suavely-timed trick plays. For the Bears defense, there’s things to work on – but the Flacco Bengals are one hell of a handful, it must be said. And for the Bengals defense…one might say that after this loss they need to take a long look in the mirror. But, soulless as they are, there might not be a reflection there to study.

Season Score: 3.250

Carolina Panthers:

Kitty’s Got Claws. And Dave Canales Has A SIGNATURE Win To Cement His Once-Uncertain Employment Status.

An old NFL Top Ten episode, one of the great masterpiece series in the repertoire of the NFL Films empire, features a bemused but knowing Steve Mariucci reflecting on his 2002 San Francisco 49ers team’s 24-point comeback in that year’s Wild Card round. He says that he had thought about gathering his coaching staff after the game’s conclusion and asking them to say, honestly, what they were thinking when the score was at its worst. Well, I’d personally like to know the same of the Panthers coaches – except I’d ask that the moment of reflection be at kickoff in Lambeau Field, not during a moment within the game itself. Because, seriously, who in God’s name thought this was possible??? To slay a dragon in its lair, you need it to make mistakes. It needs to fail to maneuver itself well, letting its tail, talons, and fire-breathing snout smash up against the close confines of its treasure-laden cell. You need it to miss you with its column of exhaled fire, to swing and not connect with its claws, to lose you underneath its swollen bulk. Above all, you need to avoid taking too many cuts, scrapes and direct hits yourself, and when the opportunity comes along, you must plunge the black arrow deep and true into the unprotected underbelly of the great beast, having located the loose scale that permits the entry of your arrowhead. While the Panthers have quite often made their opponents look more like the dragon Smaug when he initially destroyed Dale in the lead-up to the events of The Hobbit – all-destroying, invincible, wantonly rapacious – they played the role of St. George on Sunday November 2 much better, downing a perplexingly poor Packers team with a grit and resolve typically reserved for conference bullies like the Eagles, Rams or 49ers. How could this happen, the Packers have to have been asking themselves – the paradoxical Packers, by way of some explanation, have done this before, toying aimlessly, messily, and ultimately catastrophically with their eminently digestible food in the form of the Browns back in Week 3, also a game involving alternate uniforms in direct contravention of a classic look (in this case the Browns’ all-umber look). Perhaps something is deeply and insurmountably accursed in the Packers befouling the frozen tundra of Lambeau Field with something other than their classic yellow-green-yellow look; if nothing else it’s a strong argument that the elimination of variables, even those sartorial, is a worthwhile pursuit. The Panthers didn’t really do anything special, much like Bard in killing Smaug – they simply played basic, run-first football, coaxed the Packers into committing issue-prone football that did not lead to good situations, and got a little lucky. This luck was best exemplified in two plays that the Panthers got the benefit of, but only partially forced: Jordan Love’s completely harebrained end-zone interception after a cross-body, no-chance-in-Hell throw, and a blocked field goal on the final drive of the Packers’ afternoon. Two words: Keep Pounding. Eventually, they’ll respect you.

Season Score: 3.111

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“Hell Yeah.” Taxon

Buffalo Bills:

Like A Personal Wellness Retreat, Buffalo Always Looks Great After Beating KC. In November, That Is.

In theory, any win against the Chiefs should be a 5-star one (unless you’re the boring-ass pre-Vikings game Eagles, who looked like they played a perfect version of terrible football to reach that result). But one team is exempt from that automatic accolade: Josh Allen and Sean McDermott’s Bills. It’s always great to defeat your eviternal hibernal rivals in the autumnal stage rehearsal of the regular season, sure. It feels damn good to outplay Mahomes if you’re Josh Allen, even if those stats are a bit misleading. And it feels amazing to know, as Sean McDermott surely does, that your current defensive personnel arrangement can work to slow and dull the arrows of the Kingdom. But they’ve done this before – four times, to be exact, in the last four years before 2025 – and in all of those seasons, they have either lost to the Chiefs in the playoffs or, ignominy of ignominies, lost to a team that themselves went on to lose to the Chiefs. This year’s chance of being different is neither proven nor disproven whatsoever by a regular season’s game result. This is a To Be Continued stretch of prestige television, if anything. Buffalo did what they always do against the Chiefs in November - win. This time, though, in a marked departure from previous meetings between these giants, Sean McDermott and Joe Brady appeared to make it a point to win this game in a new sort of way – by limiting Patrick Mahomes’ options while he was on the field, one, and also by ensuring that Josh Allen’s options were obvious and favorable. Allen only threw the ball 26 times – a difference of 11 attempts off his average of 37 when playing the Chiefs in his previous nine meetings – and completed 23 of those passes for 273 yards, with the only real explosive pass of the day coming in the form of a Dalton Kincaid catch and run for 47 yards. The requisite moiety of this approach is a strong running game, and this they got from their do-it-all back James Cook, who ran the ball 27 times for 114 yards and provided the true punch and verve of the offense on the day along with Allen’s own running. This approach helped the Bills build a 28-13 lead entering the fourth quarter, and the defense, which had a quite incredible day itself all things considered (aside from the horrible luck of pass rusher Michael Hoecht tearing his Achilles tendon and a memorable low-light from Joey Bosa who simply discontinued rushing the passer on a potentially game-sealing 4th-and-17 that was converted and turned into a Chiefs touchdown) looked, as it typically does in the regular season versus Reid and Mahomes, like it had a handle on the situation. But the fourth quarter wound up being an ominous one for the Bills – Allen threw for only 20 yards (granted, while protecting a 15-point and 7-point lead at various points) and took two sacks to give the ball back to Mahomes down 7. A rash of puzzling playcalls and an arm punt from Mahomes at the worst possible time gave Buffalo the reins back, but then, as defensive coaches seem unable to stop themselves from doing, Sean McDermott demonstrated the limitations of his game management understanding. All throughout the game he seemed to burn timeouts almost at random, and never in situations where one had cause to say “Yeah, that was a good use of a clock stoppage.” In the waning seconds and with a chance to go up 10 and truly end the game, McDermott used his final timeout one down too early, forcing his elderly kicker onto the field without the possibility of a clock stoppage and facing a very long field goal attempt. As you’d expect, Prater missed the long kick and gave the Chiefs one last chance at a miracle game-tying drive. Though Mahomes showed why he’s a leonine, demonic, utterly dynamism-pulsing football god on the second-to-last snap of the game with an eye-of-the-storm pocket calmness and a seraphic throw that hit Tyquan Thornton in the hands while he was leaping in the endzone, ultimately the Bills defense was able to prevent a meltdown that would have gone down in the most ignominious infamy. On November 2, they were able to. Whether the combination of the offense going cold in the fourth quarter instead of delivering a double-tap coup de grâce to the necromancer Chiefs and the decidedly un-erudite game management of Sean McDermott will come back, as it has in the past, to doom the Bills in January or February is a question that can’t be answered in November. But for the time being – rejoice, mafiosos. It never feels bad to fend off the monster.

Season Score: 3.875

New England Patriots:

Another Game, Another Tom Brady Rite Of Passage Accomplished By Drake Maye – Humiliating The Falcons.

It’s been almost 10 years since the 28-3 thing happened, and the wound still pulsates with pestilential bale. Not that any regular season game could possibly banish even a nanometer of that agony from the quavering breasts of Falcons fans, but a momentary surcease of sorrow can’t hurt. Alas, it wasn’t to be. Mike Vrabel moved to 2-0 all-time against the Falcons with a well-played shock of in-game decisions that once again showed him to be old hat at this head coaching business and with a gameplan that showed Drake Maye to be imperfect but still imperious. This wasn’t Drake Maye’s greatest day of the year – but it didn’t need to be. When you get the dome-team Falcons in a cold-weather city with their QB1 coming back off of injury and most likely rusty to wit, you can afford to coast just a bit. The Patriots front made Michael Penix look antsy and off by just enough to be not fully effective throughout the afternoon despite a couple coverage busts – or, rather, coverage misapplications – in the form of single coverage on Drake London, who totally overtook Bijan Robinson as the most difficult-to-contain Falcons skill player on the day, accounting for all three Falcons touchdowns and 118 of Michael Penix’s 221 passing yards. Drake Maye, Hunter Henry, Stefon Diggs and above all Demario Douglas proved more than enough to themselves overtake the soft-playing Falcons pass defense, which had few answers on the back end when the Falcons’ rush couldn’t get home (a Maye interception, his only bad play through the air on the afternoon, came on an overthrow of Henry). The rush did get home a few times, including in a critical situation at the end of the first half that led to the second of London’s three touchdowns. Drake London might have been the better Drake for fantasy football purposes on this Sunday, but the more valuable Drake for real-life football was on the Patriots; after a typically Atlantan missed extra point that would have tied the game had it been true and an ensuing punt from Atlanta late in the fourth quarter, Maye was entrusted with the throwing of the football on the game’s final third down, finding Henry in the flat for a first down that let New England run out the clock, winning 24-23. There are still tiresome inconsistencies in the backfield – Treveyon Henderson only had an expanded role in this offense due to injuries to Rhamondre Stevenson and Antonio Gibson, and was hardly featured any more than obscure backup Terrell Jennings – and there’s still not a true star on this offense that catches or runs with the ball, but that’s never been what New England’s been about, anyway. The Vrabel Pats are a lot like the Belichick ones – sound defense with few stars, sound offense with few stars, special teams that always gives you a leg up when you really need it, and more than anything else smart football everywhere that emanates in arresting waves from the brainy head coach and the ultra-determined and well-equipped quarterback. 7-2 and in command of the AFC East. Who’d’ve dreamt it?

Season Score: 3.667

Los Angeles Rams:

Stafford Just Doesn’t “Feel” MVP-Like in the Same Way as Allen, Mahomes or Maye…but Who Cares?

It was once a thought of mine that, the Jared Goff-Todd Gurley-Brandin Cooks era of the Rams having come and gone with early fireworks and a late fizzling-out of the offense before the arrival of Matthew Stafford in Tinseltown, that Sean McVay’s reputation as an offensive genius who can draw up immutable plans of attack to devastate any defense that showed its face to him and his quarterback was more than a tad overblown; after all, he didn’t inherit a talentless team from Jeff Fisher – far from it – and the 13-3 Rams of 2018, his best season with Goff, were just as badass on defense during long stretches as they were on offense. But seeing the Rams of 2025 specifically has made me think twice – Sean McVay and Matthew Stafford might be old dogs, but their tricks are still thrilling, and if they can just learn one or two more, this can be a team that pulls off the ultimate in sticking it to a rival: winning a Super Bowl in their enemy’s stadium. Half of the credit, if not more, for Jared Goff’s early victories with Sean McVay seemed to go straight to the head coach; a great to-do was made of the “answers” the coach gave to the QB in the interval between the playcall and the cutoff before the expiration of the play clock, and for more than a few who watched the Rams and the NFL closely the success of the Rams offense seemed to be entirely quarterback-proof. In other words, the pundits who indulged in lavishing praise at the feet of Sean McVay probably thought of him as the team’s quarterback. These individuals made themselves scarce when in 2019 and 2020 the offense began to undergo significant hindrances and lapses in productivity, only to make themselves the center of attention again when the Goff-for-Stafford trade underwent completion and the Lions and Rams switched out former first-overall QBs. That first year with Stafford was, indeed, a revelation – they went 12-5, Stafford threw 41 touchdowns (and his fair share of interceptions) and the team won the Super Bowl. 2022 was a dark year, though – by many metrics the worst title defense in history – and the way that the media reported on Sean McVay’s “exhaustions” due to the grind of being a head coach were enough to bring one close to a state of exasperation. It all just felt very rosy, the coverage of McVay, and very little of it was ever even haltingly critical. That annoys those of us who want objective coverage of everyone all the time, and it came as no surprise that the Rams’ bounce-back 2023 and 2024 incarnations, even though they too were closer at times to the stilted, low-watt offenses of 2019 and 2020 than the high-flying days of 2017 and 2018, were touted as true Super Bowl contenders even with the defense clearly leading the way. The defensive DNA of those post-Super Bowl teams is still here, but the offense has officially caught up – Stafford is gunning the ball around to a full array of receivers, not just locking in squarely on Puka Nacua and Davante Adams (a chest injury for Nacua during this game helped foster this generosity to lesser-known receivers, no doubt), and making full use of the entire field like a late-career Matt Ryan with Kyle Shanahan calling plays. The running game has become even better than it was in 2024 and before, with Kyren Williams and Blake Corum recreating Todd Gurley’s legendary 2017 self in the aggregate and sharing the load near equally with the O. When this team has a talent advantage over an opposing defense – which isn’t every week, mind you, but can certainly still happen in the playoffs even when the competition gets stiffer – they can easily overwhelm them; the schematic advantage will always be there. The Saints could barely withstand the Rams for a quarter before the game was lost, and had ways to slow down neither the passing game (32 throws for 281 yards and four more Stafford touchdowns) nor the running game (38 running back carries for 172 yards and another touchdown). The showdown between the Rams and the Seahawks for this division will be a thrilling, exhilarating, nostalgia-fostering one that ought to recall the hoary days of 2018 and 2019 when the West was the land of true superheroes – there may be a new batch of mutants in the offing this year.

Season Score: 3.500

San Francisco 49ers:

You Can Count On Exactly One Thing In This Life: Shanahan Annihilating Both New York Teams With Anyone.

Elsewhere in the NFC West, a contender that has had its stumbles and its falls proved that, as has always been the case, it can dispatch the coastal carnivals from the Big Apple with supreme and discerning ease. Kyle Shanahan could probably use a paperclip, apple core, ball of twine and rubber ball to beat the Giants if that was all he had on hand, so it’s no surprise that with half a roster of starters and a whole bunch of pissed-off-edness he and his Niners surged formidably to triumph against a vibes-leaking Giants team once more. It never comes easy in the NFC West, and the 49ers are the proof in the pudding of just how deep this division goes. Despite an early handful of magical moments for a team that seems to be weathering the inevitable tornado of horrible injuries better than it did last year, and despite wins over both of the interdivisional rivals that currently sit in positions of superiority to them in the West’s standings, the Niners still somehow have found themselves on the bottom-half of the divisional pyramid, looking up at teams in Seattle and Los Angeles that they’re probably thinking they’re better than. The least they could do on Sunday was not dig an even deeper hole for themselves to climb out of – and they didn’t. Fortunately for the gold rush, they got to play a Giants team decidedly after the bounce in spirits provided by the Jaxson Dart QB chance and after their two best players on offense (Nabers and Skattebo) had been lost for the season. That makes for easy, easy pickings for Shanahan and his defense. The Niners, to say it with vulgarian plainness, didn’t fuck around in this game, ceding an early 7-0 lead to Big Blue before wrenching out two quick touchdowns of their own and a field goal drive with one punt mixed in, simultaneously holding the non-scripted-plays part of the Giants first-half offense to four straight punts and a missed field goal. Mac Jones is still in there (one starts to question when Brock Purdy will return, and if health is still the sole consideration for his playability), but they could trot out John Brodie and make this work with Christian McCaffrey playing like the 2025 version of 1982 John Riggins. Even in his relative dotage as an every-down running back at age 29, McCaffrey continues to astound with his capacity for absorbing punishment and dishing it out in the same motor movement, with this win over the Giants being perhaps his most stunning performance of the season so far. The human motor of the San Fran offense carried the ball 28 times, caught 5 passes, and was the leading rusher, receiver, and scorer for his team on the day. His event horizon-like suction of defensive attention allowed a plethora of role players to impact the game in their own smaller ways, including Skyy Moore, Jordan Watkins, Kyle Juszczyk and Luke Farrell, each who caught exactly one pass – all of them for a first down. George Kittle, it must be said, is not the same George Kittle that decimated defenses downfield in 2019 and 2021, but he is still a nastiness-wafting run-blocker to whom significant credit for the puissance of McCaffrey must be meted. We will not have heard the last of this team until at least the final gun in Week 18 – and, most likely, far longer after that.

Season Score: 3.333

Pittsburgh Steelers:

Amidst A Whirlwind Of Goading Ravens Encomia, Pittsburgh Proved Their Huge Division Lead Isn’t Fake.

Everyone just went nuts when the Ravens, a team known far and wide for being expert and unrelenting at the exercise of beating embattled, less-talented teams into mortal submission, did just that to a Tartarean Dolphins team. The plaudits were manifold and multifarious – indeed, the Ravens’ chances of winning the AFC North were, at one point between their TNF win and the conclusion of the Steelers-Colts game, favorites to win the AFC North. Well, it’s not impossible. But the Steelers are still steely. Losses to Cincinnati and Green Bay don’t change that. Nor does a barely-closed-out win against the Colts prove this team is a Super Bowl contending juggernaut. No individual pieces of evidence can overturn the two decades of genetics that the Tomlin Steelers have encoded into themselves: the double helix of lunch pail contributors who don’t try to play astonishingly beautiful football, but do try, with every breath and step, to overpower or outsmart the opponent. You have to feel for the Colts a bit. They’ve had as gluttonous and gourmandizing an offensive start to this season as any team – ‘07 Pats, ‘11 Packers, you name it – could hope to have, but the first team they lost to was going to get the unfair and probably un-earned crown and titulature of “The Team That Figured Out The Colts.” The Steelers didn’t really do that – they just brought a ferocity and speed off the edge that the tackles Braden Smith and Bernhard Raimann were not prepared for. The dual tachyons Alex Highsmith and T.J. Watt, along with youngster linebackers Jack Sawyer and Payton Wilson, acted as the mortar and the pestle for the junket of takeaways jauntily fêted by the Black & Yellow. Six of them the Steelers snagged on the day. Six, a number that is two greater than four, which was the number of turnovers the Colts had committed all season coming into this game. You simply can’t predict or foretell when games like this might happen – and that’s because this wasn’t a total shutdown a la Tom Brady and the Patriots versus the Ravens in the 2009 Wild Card or Peyton Manning and the Broncos versus the Seahawks in Super Bowl 48. This was fluky, it was random, it was lucky. The Steelers can’t do this every week – nor will the Colts lose their composure over and over again on the worst possible down across a game’s worth of series. But they’ve certainly gained the important knowledge that they can wreak disruptive tumult on timing-based offenses that can’t match up with their own veteran front seven. That’s the skeleton key for this defense: they have to get home with the pass rush, because the secondary is the opposite of what the rush LBs and defensive line are – the DBs aren’t “veterans mixed with youthful energy,” they’re “old guys mixed with inexperienced greenhorns.” Not great. But they can make it work with opportunistic HAVOC plays and speed from the linemen. On offense, the Arthur Smith experiment continues to show that if you stick with it and have a patient QB willing to relinquish splash play opportunities to run checks, it can outscore other high-proficiency units. Both the offense and defense, then, can work in tandem – this is just the first time we’ve really seen it all come together. And it’s wise to be skeptical about whether this is the beginning of a new trend or just an outlier in a season that will continue to be defined by one unit soaring while the other sags.

Season Score: 3.125

Minnesota Vikings:

The Prodigal Son Wasn’t Excellent In Return, But Dammit, J.J. McCarthy Is Sufficiently Skillful To Start and Win.

J.J. McCarthy’s early career, and specifically his second season, has been a lot less like fellow Michigan product Tom Brady and a lot more like fellow also-ran first-round QB Zach Wilson. Injury concerns that have fused murkily and miscibly with concerns about “readiness” and “playability” have defined the first half of the young QB’s 2025 season, with a Week 1 NFC Offensive Player of the Week really only serving to dramatize the shortcomings and disappointments of the former Wolverine’s ascension to starter status. But give the young man credit. When his team really needed him – and, it shouldn’t be forgotten, with some seriously depressing rumors about rookie seventh-rounder Max Brosmer’s preferability flying around – J.J. stepped back into the starting role and helped bring down an old tormentor. J.J. McCarthy, take a bow, kid. This was a bad spot to have to step back into the spotlight during. On the road, division rival, off of injury, cold, you know all the different types of rigor and stringency that characterizes a young QB coming back into the fold – soft-benching or no. The way that this was supposed to go for McCarthy’s return is the way it went: limited passing (30 dropbacks all told) tempered with lots of run game support and hardcore defense that at least made life hard enough on the Lions for the team ethos of the Vikings to have a chance. Is that not exactly how the script played out? The surprise blockade that the Vikings defensive line put on the Lions’ running game helped out even more than Kevin O’Connell could have dreamed – the Sonic & Knuckles combination combined for just 20 carries and just 65 yards. It was the most disappointing outing of the year for the Lions on the ground, by far, given the circumstances. The Vikings had far greater success on the ground, outrushing the Lions by almost 80 yards on only 9 more carries. The Lions didn’t have Aaron Jones – the Vikings did. Finally looking healthy, the elder runner gave the new-look Vikings a spark they’ve been direly missing in the interval between their blowout of the Bengals and their Michigan quarterback’s return, making it a game where Jared Goff had to save them. Goff has been having a weird-ish season, while we’re on that subject – he played pretty great in this one, getting the ball to Amon Ra St. Brown and Sam LaPorta early and often, throwing two touchdowns, and not turning the ball over. But somehow the Vikings just had a bit more in this one. If these teams really are as evenly matched as they looked in this game – not a state of homeostasis you’d have expected when these two teams took the field a few weeks ago when the Lions were flying high and the Vikings looked to be circling the upper part of the drain – then one play can make the difference. That one shining play was McCarthy, drifting to his right, evading two tacklers (who took some of the worst angles you’ll ever see on a takedown attempt of a QB) and waltzing with an ease and familiarity into the endzone to make it a 10-point game. It was the right play at the right time – and not one that anyone in the Lions backfield could match on the afternoon. Who the heck knows with this Vikings team? McCarthy barely got over 100 yards passing in this game – a long, Willie Mays-esque catch by Jordan Addison helped get him there, along with a viscerally superiority-imposing Justin Jefferson jump-ball touchdown – and the defense didn’t exactly shut down the Lions outside of the running game. But they still did enough. That counts for something. It’s a divisional win – by what means shouldn’t matter.

Season Score: 2.875

Arizona Cardinals:

The Felicity Of Jacoby Brissett, Ever Waiting Nearby The QB Graveyard, Always Renews One’s Love Of Football.

Kyler Murray could only watch, a little sadly, as Jacoby Brissett pluckily piloted the Cardinals to an unchallenging win against the Cowboys and their tofu dreg defense. It could have been me, he surely thought. It should have been me, he might have mused. But it wasn’t – and for now, as well as for the next month given the bombshell IR designation that the team handed down to K1 midday Wednesday, Kyler’s not the main character of this team. It’s Jacoby and Marvin and Michael and Trey and Zonovan. Can we get some shirts printed with that catalogue of characters listed out? Take away the drama of Kyler Murray and the will-they-won’t-they circenses that have characterized his relationship with the Cardinals since 2022. Then strip away the location, arizona, and the team nickname, cardinals, from your intake of this game. Without those pollutant preconceptions what’s stopping you from taking this team seriously? Their record is doing them no favors, but they have been right, freakin’, there every single time they’ve stepped on the grass, the turf, the whatever. They’re 3-5 and could be 8-0. They could also be 0-8. These Cardinals are a classically maddening team – catnip for outsiders and non-fans who have nothing invested emotionally in them and are content to watch them burn down or blaze in glory, anathema for diehard fans who want to see them succeed. With Jacoby Brissett pulling the levers and manning the guns, this team is nothing to sneeze at; nor were they with Kyler in command, but sometimes having a neutral quarterback whom you do not expect to take off and run can affect and influence playcalling in such a way that you find the best version of your offense. The Cardinals might just have stumbled into such a situation. Take their clampdown performance against the Cowboys offense and defense on Monday Night: Having finally gotten their first-round pick, Walter Nolen, into the lineup, the Cardinals’ front seven suddenly posed a far more intimidating obstacle to the Javonte Williams traveling circus that had been mowing down poorly fortified lines across the NFC for the first two months of the season. Adding in just he, a great immovable cinderblock in the central foundation of the barricade, made this defense a deadly one against one of the league’s best offenses. The Cowboys only scored 10 points on offense thanks to the troubles visited on them by this unceasing Arizona line, playing havoc not only on the ‘Boys run game but dissevering the chemistry between Dak Prescott and both of his primary wide receivers in George Pickens and CeeDee Lamb. The Cardinals offense did not reach the Epicurean depravity of the Broncos, Giants or Panthers in their banquet at the Cowboys’ defensive buffet, but they did put up 27 points and could have easily scored more if they weren’t trying to protect a lead and play the field position game late. Marvin Harrison Jr., Michael Wilson and Trey McBride have not all shown up with their A game to the same contest before this game, but if they can, the Cardinals are a really, really tough out. This game proves it. Ave Jacobius!

Season Score: 2.500

✪✪✪

“Hell, Sure.” Taxon

Indianapolis Colts:

Every Monolith Has An Imperfection Or Two In Its Chiseling. For The Colts, Their Turnovers Proved That Flaw.

You have to figure out your weaknesses at some point – the Colts, a team who sauntered majestically into Acrisure Stadium having barely broken a bead of sweat on the season, were seriously in need of a reality check on where their limitations lay. The hard facts of a six-turnover, three-interception day provided that check to them, and it’s worth dropping a game or two like this if only to know that when adversity strikes in real crunch time, when divisions and playoff seeds and seasons are on the line, you have reference points on which to draw for strength. Let the record show – the Steelers barely stopped the Colts offense. They just took the ball away from them. A lot. It’s a weirdly agonizing loss for the Colts, too – only 15 teams since 2000 have committed 6 turnovers, scored at least 20 points, and lost by 7 points or fewer since 2000. In other words, the Colts are the 15th team to have one of these “throw the controller at the TV” games this millennium (and the first since Week 1 of 2018, a game that also involved the Steelers, where they battled to a deeply amusing and very silly tie with the Cleveland Browns), and it’s quite unlikely something like this befalls the horseshoe-helmeted boys again. This is a speedbump, a learning opportunity, a harsh tutorial in how fast the game can get away from you if the opponent brings blistering speed and power to the fight. It’s not a loss whose specific tone and timbre I think we’ll see again during this Colts season. Jonathan Taylor still looks intelligent in his choice of running lanes and explosive once he chooses; Daniel Jones is still seeing the field swiftly and incisively, with two of his three interceptions more along the lines of “good defense” than “bad reads,” as those go (the final pick to Joey Porter, Jr. was definitely the latter). And this offense can still go up and down the field through the air against zone or man defense; remember, Steichen comes from the early Jalen Hurts Eagles, and even if his offense has evolved significantly since the days of 2021 and 2022 when he coordinated a bruising, run-almost-always, throw-only-sometimes attack, those fundamental bones are still what bears the weight of new concepts in the Colts’ offense. The issue going forward for the Colts is less in guessing whether they can get one over on the opposing defense, but whether they’ll be able to outscore the supreme offenses of Kansas City and Buffalo in the playoffs (the only two teams I feel confident and certain will be there as Indy’s opponents); with a showdown against Mahomes and the Chiefs looming along with a later contest against Allen and the Bills, the Colts could hardly ask for a more apt trial by fire ahead of the playoffs to see where they truly lay on the ladder of elite offenses. But lessons must be learned from this one; the element of precise timing and flow in this offense was shown to be of the utmost importance through the way that the Steelers’ defensive front mangled the OL, disharmonized Jones’s mechanics, and threw off the synchronicity of the pass catchers from the second quarter on. Even if Pittsburgh was barely able to contain Jonathan Taylor (who didn’t have a great day according to the box score but for game script reasons didn’t have the number of touches he’d have needed to really get the motor going), they capitalized efficiently enough on the defense’s takeaways to turn this into a one-dimensional offense that could only throw, throw, and throw again. That’s not the game the Colts want to play. Cleaning up the self-inflicted wounds as the season progresses will ensure that the Colts don’t need to play anything other than the type of game they like and need to play very often.

Season Score: 4.222

Kansas City Chiefs:

Losing In The Regular Season, To Buffalo, In Buffalo? Not New. Going Creatively Cold In 2H? That Is New.

No one likes to lose, least of all a team like the Chiefs who’s accustomed to winning and wants another crack at the Lombardi Trophy as bad or more than the teams trying to deny them that opportunity. But losing to Buffalo in the regular season is more or less the cost of doing business for this team, who hasn’t beaten Buffalo in the regular season since COVID-19 but has roundly removed the bovine roadblocks from their conquering paths each and every time they’ve met in the playoffs (since 1993, at least). This loss comes at a less opportune time than the other losses have, though – only a game above 0.500, and with the strongest AFC West of the Mahomes-Reid era still to deal with, the Chiefs need to find late-game answers on defense and late-game answers on offense fast lest they risk their divisional championship streak coming to a painful end. This one seemed like it was heading toward true classic, badass shootout, mono e mono territory early, but it never ended up happening that way – the Chiefs expended an array of dazzlingly odd-looking formations early, many intended to funnel artificial touches to Rashee Rice, who still looks like clearly the most formidable weapon on this offense on a down-to-down basis. Travis Kelce still possesses an eldritch chemistry with Patrick Mahomes that cannot be stopped or stamped out for all sixty minutes, Xavier Worthy can speed breezily past the net of the coverage umbrella several times a game, Marquise Brown can find the open hole in coverage with his sharp route-running and Kareem Hunt can everlastingly be relied upon to pick up a couple yards when there’s 1 to go in the set of downs, but no one moves, oozes, revolts against inertia or does like Rashee Rice on this offense with the ball in his hands. Mahomes necessarily is the Queen (and because of his value, must also be considered to be the King) on this chessboard, but Rashee is a Rook, able to move long and short and occupy space and attention better than any other unsheathed blade in the sash of Patrick Mahomes. Yet the recently-returned wide receiver was nowhere to be found in the second half, having apparently used up all his ball-carrying and pass-catching magic by the time the score was 14-10. Late in the second quarter just moments away from the intermission it seemed like the Chiefs were going to regain control of this game in typically and insufferably Chiefs-ian fashion, courtesy of a conspicuously effortless three-play drive that brought their offense to the threshold of the endzone on a long Marquise Brown reception. But the Chiefs could penetrate no further than that, and had to settle for a field goal that kept the score 21-13 going into half. That’s what should concern the Chiefs much more than the loss itself – that they had a first and goal at the Bills’ 1-yard line and could not put the doggone ball in the doggone endzone with three tries. Should they have gone for it on fourth and goal? Maybe. The fact that that was even a question lends a more poignant air of desperation to this outfit than would be considered comfortable in polite society. Late heroics are a foregone conclusion with this team, and their 4th-and-17 evasion of total disaster ought not be forgotten, either – but after that they had two cracks at tying the game (one “actual” one, and an extra chance at the very end for a miracle that wouldn’t be out of place in the Pauline Gospel), and could not do it. This team needs different answers. And they need a vintage Mahomes game-winning drive to remind them that such stuff isn’t relegated to the realm of the past.

Season Score: 3.556

Los Angeles Chargers:

Justin Herbert Continues To Do Whatever’s Necessary For A Win, Including Leading His Team In Rushing.

The bulbs on the string of LED lights keep sputtering and going out for this team. The bonfires keep seeming to be lit, only to extinguish before the Chargers can really enjoy their coziness and profit from their life-giving warmth. But Justin Herbert keeps proving that he’s the lightning bolt in the path of every opponent that can strike anywhere and everywhere to enkindle new infernos where other ones used to rage – and for that reason, this team has as good a shot to compete in the AFC playoffs as any year since Phillip Rivers blew town in his oversize station wagon. Worse teams than the Chargers have piled up Doric columns worth of points on the decaying Titans, but that fact only serves to prove the falsity of “transitive wins” in the NFL. Every opponent deserves a measure of respect, every Sunday beseeches the NFL athlete to bring his very best or else, and every game has a shape and a contour that contains many things, but never a guarantee or vouchsafe of a win to any team. Thus the Chargers “only” winning by 7 against Cam Ward, Mike McCoy, and whoever else is still on the Tennessee NFL team, though cosmetically unimpressive and statistically pedestrian, represents an honorable doing. One could, if they were bitter and mean-spirited enough, give penalization to the Chargers for having to dig themselves out of an early 7-point hole that Herbert himself was responsible for (he tossed a truly inscrutable pick-six to linebacker Cody Barton on his second pass of the day) but I say that these things happen across the course of 1,000+ snaps in an NFL season, to both good teams and bad. The important part is that they didn’t let the early deficit fester into a middle-of-the-game deficit, or god forbid a late one. They went calmly about their business afterward and very swiftly turned it into a 7-7 game which they mostly controlled the rest of the day. Their fight on this day was less with the Titans themselves than with the scourge of injuries that has swooped down hard on the Californian teams of the NFL – brutally, the Chargers lost Joe Alt, who had just returned from injury, to a season-ending ankle injury. That’s what the fully-electrified Chargers experience is all about – bright, Tesla coil flashes of greatness that spark into and out of existence in the snap of a finger, ignited by promise and talent only to be sapped by the harsh conditions of our physical plain. This doesn’t end the Chargers’ story this season, not by a long shot – it just makes their book of recipes a couple important pages shorter around the ingredients list.

Season Score: 3.333

Denver Broncos:

Winning Big One Week And Winning Very Ugly The Next Is A Beautiful Thing To Be Able To Accomplish.

A young team coming into its own is pretty nice to see, too. But look closer. Is that exactly what we’re getting with these Broncos? They’re 7-2 and have course corrected magnificently after a 2-2 start that really could have seen them sitting at 0-4 and almost undoubtedly out of the playoffs, full stop. Instead they’ve done that thing that everyone wants their teams to do: they “found ways to win.” Not always pulchritudinously, but always conclusively. They did the same in this game. Houston’s defense gives everyone problems – even Seattle, who just brought out a sharpened scythe to harvest the soul of Washington, a team most thought would have a damn good defense themselves but simply don’t – and if you can escape with an 18-15 win on the road in H-Town, that’s a win. The Broncos are that rare team that seem like they have reliable ceilings and floors – you can go into games having a decently strong sense of how good they can play if everything goes their way while simultaneously having a strong sense of how they may fail to reach that standard if the bounces go to the opponent. Fortunately for the Broncos, things have really gone their way this season in a fashion unseen since the days of Peyton Manning. But even the most orange and navy-dyed fans, were you to funnel them truth serum, would have to tell you that it hasn’t all quite jelled yet – and Bo Nix is the reason. Like Daniel Jones, he seems like a quarterback to whom timing and flow is of utter and paramount cruciality. If the play’s orchestration is disrupted and his reads thrown off, it’s almost always a checkdown to R.J. Harvey or J.K. Dobbins or some other running back with a lot of initials in his name – or, it’s a scramble. Bo Nix is scrambling about as effectively as any quarterback – one notable exception of a game being his blowout against the Cowboys, where he didn’t need to run at all – but his passing has not been nearly as productive on a per-attempt basis as you’d hope for a first-round quarterback. Granted, he’s been about as good or better in that metric as other young quarterbacks – he, Caleb Williams and Drake Maye are enjoying a decisively more prosperous 2025 season than some of their other second-year compatriots – but this game marks the third outing in four goes that the Bronco has been held under 6 Y/A through the air. This one looked particularly grieving, as Nix dropped back 38 times and only passed for 173 yards. But he did lead two scoring drives in the fourth quarter, which is all you’ll ever need against a Davis Mills-led Texans team. Even so, this team had thirteen total drives on the afternoon, only three of which produced points. To hang onto their currently considerable division lead, they need more from their offense. The defense, which forced six straight punts to finish off the Houston O, is playing as dynamite as anyone in the NFL.

Season Score: 3.333

Jacksonville Jaguars:

Off Work Late? Hungry, But Too Tired To Cook? Try 42 Rushes Against The Raiders’ Defense – You Won’t Regret It!

The Jaguars have scraped by so far in this season. They’ve feasted on poor competition and cleared their hurdles by mere inches against the good teams they’ve played (think scores like 31-28, 26-21, 17-10). But it’s important to remember where this team was just one season ago – and just two weeks ago, in London, face-down and without a pulse in the dreary Wembley Stadium turf. The NFL season is a long one – a seventeen-course meal, with some dishes quite challenging on the palette (Los Angeles, Kansas City, San Francisco, &c.). Others are like crispy Karaage with a nice aioli – right down the gullet (the Week 1 Panthers spring to mind). Then there are teams like the Raiders, who should be easy to masticate, swallow and digest but give you more trouble than you’re ready for. “A playful, mysterious little dish,” as Patrick Bateman would say. Look, y’all. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. One minute you’re flying high, with a three-point win over Kansas City and a lush green countryside stretching out all around you. The next you’re giving up five passing touchdowns to Matthew Stafford in a strange land and wondering where all your good vibes went. And then you find yourself in Sin City, in overtime, against a team that’s 2-5 and playing with all the desperation you can muster. When that happens you really just want to cash out, collect your winnings meager though they may be, and get the hell out of dodge. And that’s what the Jaguars did in this one. Trevor Lawrence still hasn’t hacked it on how to make his generational skill set work for him in the same way that Andrew Luck, Peyton Manning and John Elway all did, but he never fails to give glimpses of his incredible arsenal of athletic weaponry on Sundays when his team is “in it.” That’s part of the problem, honestly – T Law doesn’t give us the fall gamut of his powers and potencies nearly as much as we’d like. But save those criticisms for another day, because the two touchdowns he didn’t throw through the air were accounted for by himself on the ground. A smattering of Bhayshul Tuten, Travis Etienne and Parker Washington touches later along with a very, very clutch DaVon Hamilton batting-down of an errant Geno Smith pass that would have given the Raiders a one-point win, and you’re home free. The Jags aren’t exactly “hot” on the Colts’ trail (they’re down two games in the South standings) but they still have two games against Indy. The Jags can still scratch. They’re alive!!! 

Season Score: 2.875

New York Giants:

The Natural Limits Of Rookie Panache And Still-Developing Talents Are Revealing Themselves In Jaxson Dart.

Going into 2025, it was thought by many – myself included – that the Giants had made a grievous error in giving Brian Daboll and Joe Schoen yet another season’s worth of rope with which to negotiate their rebuild. Through Week 3 and as their ill-fated dalliance with Russell Wilson was winding down into an 0-3 coil, that rope seemed less like a leash and more like an untied noose. But Jaxson Dart breathed electric life into the organization with two unthinkable wins versus Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Maybe that’s all we’ll get by way of highlights this year from the young quarterback, whose weapons are disappearing faster than wealthy New York aristocrats fleeing Zohran Mamdani’s Cheka legions. If that’s the case, well, I leave it to New York Giants fans themselves: Have you seen enough? Would what the Giants are putting on tape now be sufficient for Big Blue fanatics to concur in giving Daboll and Schoen still more room to maneuver for their jobs into 2026? Is this offense doing enough to convince you that the current regime is the correct one to develop the players on this team? Does Schoen’s draft history evince enough personnel intellection to warrant further roster building? Or is this going to be yet another sideshow in the long-developing post-Eli Manning procession of wanting QBs, wanting HCs and wanting GMs? Insufficiency has plagued the Giants everywhere for longer than you’d think if you only listened to NFC East-obsessed sports media pundits, and for the first time in a while they have juice at the QB position. Not since at least the Wild Card game against Minnesota in the 2022-23 playoffs has a quarterback flashed a combination of athleticism and accuracy like Jaxson Dart. It’s clear that the ragtag bunch of role-players the Giants are being forced to make do with since the injury to Malik Nabers, and especially after Cam Skattebo’s season-ending wound, aren’t close to a playoff team, but one must hope that injuries will not be the defining feature of seasons to come. If they’re not, and if Daboll and Schoen can play with a good hand of cards, there’s reason to believe they can compete in this division. The only issue is that on this day, they were up against a team that itself was dealing with a myriad of missing pieces – and that other team, Shanahan’s 49ers, pummeled them. One of these teams has been to the Super Bowl in the last few years, it should be noted. The other hasn’t been since the prophesied Mayan apocalypse in 2012 occurred. The Giants are learning, very slowly, how to be a good team again. Patience is needed for Daboll, Schoen, and Dart. It seems at this point that even more patience would be needed if they wanted to tear it all down and find their QB a new playcaller and GM.

Season Score: 2.667

New Orleans Saints:

The Saints Reached The “Total Pointlessness” Part of their Schedule Quicker Than Anyone Else. Congrats!

In 2024, the Saints’ Klint Kubiak-coordinated offense got out of the gates at an insane clip, bulldozing the twin punching bags of Carolina and Dallas with unmerciful stripes before floating off into space, offensive productivity and all. This year the Saints never really took off to begin with, but even so, in the last two weeks with Spencer Rattler exiting the lineup, the un-flown jet that never left the runway has seen its armoring, fuselage, payload and electronics stripped away for scrap. In other words, the plane never took off, and now the plane’s getting stripped down to the nuts and bolts. Why else are we still seeing Taysom Hill get meaningful reps? What YEAR is this, man??? In previous weeks, even before the wheels came entirely off and turned the Saints’ party bus into a party monorail without tracks underneath it, I had trouble discerning what the interesting things to say about this team were. There’s still nine weeks left and the ideas are dwindling, people. All I can think is that I feel bad for Kellen Moore, for whom this team is such a far cry now (having lost the services of Rashid Shaheed, at times their best receiver this year, and Trevor Penning, a troubled and troublesome but talented former first-round pick at tackle) from what it was when he took the job that the rest of the season will essentially be like a second, mini training camp. One has to hope that the Saints scouting department is working all the hours God sends on developing evaluations of the 2026 harvest of potential quarterbacks, because unless the thinking is that Tyler Shough, who made his first start against Los Angeles and put up a somewhat serviceable 176 yards, one touchdown and one pick on 24 attempts (roughly the same stats as Bo Nix, it should be noted, on 13 fewer attempts), can be evaluated in full and with a complete view to what he might become after trading away key OL and WR pieces over the next 9 games, the only hope for this coaching staff to produce dramatically successful results will be to get someone new. The Saints are a lot closer to the Browns than their media attention would have you believe. It’s interesting to think about where Spencer Rattler fits into all this – he might be on a new team next year. This team’s 34-10 loss is all about optics, at the end of the day; it wasn’t embarrassing, but it wasn’t competitive. And this defense is bad. The single notable thing about the 2025 Saints right now is that their defense is producing an encore of the dubious feat they accomplished in 2015, which is to say, performing at a level of such invitational hospitality to opposing passers that if you add up all the yards, touchdowns and interceptions exhibited against them at the end of the year, that fictional quarterback might be in the MVP discussion. C’est la vie.

Season Score: 2.556

Baltimore Ravens:

Unlike The Win Many In Baltimore And Media Would Like This To Be, This Win Is Nothing New, Nor Different.

Is it irresponsible to say that this team might be as high as a four-star or five-star entrant on the HYH had things gone differently in Pittsburgh this weekend? Because try as I might to ensure that each team is evaluated in as much of a vacuum, considerate only of that team’s doings on the field and to the exclusion of all other outfits in the NFL, this one seemed dependent for final scoring on whether or not the Steelers could stop their slide toward 0.500, which, bitter pill for Baltimore, they did. This is not a scathing indictment of the Ravens, mind you – it’s just the facts of life. Baltimore has had a very rough start to the season, and I’ll stand on the proverbial table when I say that I doubt their 28-6 maiming of the lifeless Dolphins told us anything we didn’t already know about them. The post-Ray Lewis Ravens have consistently done one thing with excellence and effortlessness – DESTROY the bad teams in this league. They have a PhD, an expertise, an adamantine mandate to do just that whenever a speed bag presents itself to these purple marauders, and they proceeded to add another hapless skull to their collection of defeated uncompetitive opponents on Thursday Night Football. This is the game that Lamar Jackson needed and got in his return from the injury he was nursing (who knows whether the Bears would have been nearly as flammable to his pyrotechnics as they proved to be against the altered gameplan that Baltimore had to roll out with Tyler Huntley at the command post), and it serves as a reminder that in primetime against a faltering team with nothing to stop the run-pass splendor of the Jackson offense, the Ravens will almost always get it done, and get it done in style. The low total passing yards (barely over 200 yards) and the high proportion of touchdown passes (four, or 100% of the Baltimore scoring on the day) put forth by Jackson reminds one of the 2019 massacre they dropped weightily on the down-turning Rams, in which Jackson had an even more skewed statline consisting of 175 passing yards and five touchdowns. The question remains: can this team output similar work when the competition isn’t composed of checked-out practice dummies who know their coach and GM are on the way out? We have yet to see it happen. The Ravens need to rattle off a whole lot more wins to put themselves in position to steal the North crown from Pittsburgh; thankfully for them they have two games against Mike Tomlin, traditionally a hellacious bugbear for Lamar’s style of quarterbacking, left to go. That will shine truthful light on a Ravens operation that has been damned by terrible defense and, until last Thursday, insufficiently prodigious offensive outputs that nevertheless show their quarterback to be a statistical apex predator. It’s still weird in Baltimore, and the requirement of a tithe of good wins against good teams is yet unfilled.

Season Score: 2.125

✪✪

“Hell’s Bells…” Taxon

Detroit Lions:

Detroit Could Have Seized The Initiative In The North And Ended The Vikings. Instead, They Gave Them Life.

In quick succession the shortcomings of this Lions offense seem to have come to light. They aren’t missing all that much from last year outside of coordinator Ben Johnson – but perhaps he is and was, as we all thought following the Week 1 implosion this Lions team suffered in Green Bay, a secret menu item of treasured value. The recent Detroit losses to Kansas City and Minnesota, two teams that oddly seemed to have “get right” games against the Honolulu Blue despite prior vicissitudes and despite Detroit’s reputation as a mauler of teams already on the ropes, have exposed a bifurcated something that appears quite dire: shutting down the running game is not as hard as it used to be, and Jared Goff doesn’t have quite so many easy answers as he did on previous scantrons. Goff is still playing at a mighty level when you peer at the guy’s box score, to be sure. But he certainly has not enjoyed the ducal insularity he came to expect from his statues on the OL in 2023 and 2024 this year, not by a long shot. True, he has been missing some very key pieces on that OL (Penei Sewell and Taylor Decker, this team’s Gargantua and Pantagruel of blockers, just returned to practice off the injury list midweek following the loss to Minnesota), but their absence and the lack of suitably gruesome backups to uphold the standard of nastiness they set underlines a key feature of weakness on the Lions: Goff is not good enough, nor is he of the archetypal stamp, to make up for lack of great OL play. That’s what separates many a Hall Of Fame quarterback from many a Hall Of Very Good passer: the consistent ability to play at largely the same level of dominance despite any injuries to those in front of him. Few can ever pull this off, and it’s not a knock on Goff specifically that he was under fire for most of the afternoon in Minnesota; rather it’s a joint indictment, with he and John Morton both parties to criminal mischief resulting in defeat. Where are the well-schemed running plays? Where have the wide-open lanes gone? And what happened to Jahmyr Gibbs the receiving back? Morton spoke candidly and self-effacingly about the lack of Jameson Williams’ full integration into this offense during the week – and to the credit of the Lions, the speedy wide receiver had a larger role in this game. But his grander introduction into the rotation simply cannot come at the expense of Gibbs’ de-emphasis. I wrote in the summer that Gibbs has the ultrarare skillset of a Marshall Faulk or Edgerrin James – a true four-down back that can make plays every way that doesn’t involve him throwing the football. That didn’t materialize on Sunday when this team needed it the most. The defense is at fault as well – 27 points? To the Vikings? THESE Vikings? Good news for the Lions came in the form of an inexplicable Green Bay loss to Carolina; bad news came in the form of an eye-popping Bears win. This team will be closer to fullest strength in coming weeks, and it need to recapture the magic of September and October when it is. Otherwise, teams with younger quarterbacks whose full majesty has not manifested yet may overtake the one-time bruising bullies of the North.

Season Score: 3.625

Dallas Cowboys:

The Twin-Engine Cowboys Plane Saw Both Its Turbines Sputter And Cease Rotating Versus ‘Zona. Season Over?

Before anything else is said, I want to acknowledge the tragedy of Marshawn Kneeland’s death. His loss is staggering and tragic – this is a young man whose first true career highlight came just days before his passing. Football isn’t real life, in many ways. And it’s a horror when we’re reminded of this in such a terrible way. I’m not going to try and spin the death of a young player into a broader commentary on the sad state of the Cowboys – they’re separate things. Kneeland needs to be mourned as a human being, not a helmeted one. The Cowboys have other issues on the field, which is the compass of this journal. They couldn’t stop anyone on defense all year, so why would they have started with a competence-building team in Arizona who has found a suitably steady quarterback to undo some of the freneticism that has plagued their otherwise star-studded offense? This might have been a game that Dallas could have won had they had the same electricity-enlivened offense that they’d come to expect the past couple months, but in this game, at the very worst possible moment (or, perversely, the best, since 4 million fewer people clocked in to watch this ESPN broadcast compared to the same window from a year ago), the offense disappeared in a puff of declamatory Jerry Jones pregame smoke. He preachified at length before kickoff on an unctuously self-congratulatory appearance on Stephen A. Smith’s radio program about a trade he’d agreed to in principle ahead of the trade deadline, then with cowardice qualified his comments and noted that he might not go through with it after all following the game. The aftermath of the defeat which saw Jerry walk back his comments (before, ultimately, going through with the trade he mentioned, which was either the transaction he executed for Bengals LB Logan Wilson or Jets DL Quinnen Williams) paints a satisfactorily fatuous picture of the Cowboys’ onfield woes at large. This team can’t figure out how to just be themselves – issues across the speckled season on offense (in Chicago, in this one versus Arizona, and late in the game versus the Panthers) seem to have flown far lower under the radar than they should have, with highlight shows and punditry focusing monomaniacally on the blowouts that they always seem to pile up against inferior teams taking center stage. Well, you should know by now: the Cowboys are the stereotypical schoolyard bully, one who delights in tormenting those who they know cannot mount a serious defense of themselves but who can’t operate at all when any firm resistance is offered. The Cardinals, who are essentially the polar opposites of the Cowboys on a national relevance level, have gotten the better of the Star-worshipping camarilla of Cowboys players, fans and personalities several times in a row now – Kyler Murray or no Kyler Murray. This is a team that runs on something very close to steam – hot air – in an age where nuclear power and renewable energy are outmoding the publicity-driven Dallas machine. All hat, no cattle – it was ever thus.

Season Score: 2.889

Atlanta Falcons:

For The Umpteenth Time, The Raheem Morris-Zac Robinson Duo Leaves Fans Questioning The Coaches’ Credentials.

A long-held belief for the staff of Personal Vowels concerns optics. More precisely, bad optics, and specifically the bad optics of defensive head coaches who don’t seem to allot themselves all that much responsibility on gameday. You see this phenomenon made manifest by the master purveyors of the art form each and every Sunday: Jonathan Gannon of the Cardinals, Dan Quinn of the Commanders, and Aaron Glenn of the Jets are all consummate practitioners of the craft. But perhaps the greatest, the most studied, the most prolific and indeed the most oblivious-looking of all these different artists is Raheem Morris, whose lockjaw, tight-lipped, dead-eyed expression of stoniness and unflinchingly lackluster stoicism on the sideline each Sunday does little to dispel suspicions that, to enter a Cris Collinsworth impersonation mid-sentence, “Here’s a guy who just doesn’t know what he’s doing.” The Falcons are spiraling. They have now dropped three straight games to three straight beatable teams – three straight teams that you would have expected them to beat coming into this season. They’ve endured kicking woes throughout the season and are now onto their third kicker in as many months. They’ve kicked up an embarrassing dust-storm of controversy by weakly noting that the Patriots seemed to illegally simulate the Falcons’ clap-based snap count (itself a collegiate vestige that has little justification to be used at the pro level by professionals) at the postgame podium before Raheem Morris even more weakly walked that line of criticism back during a midweek presser. They invalidated whatever legitimacy this complaint about snap-count simulation may have held (the play in question on which this happened led to an intentional grounding penalty that turned a 3rd and 10 into a 3rd and 20, which led to a 4th and 20, which led to a cowardice-riddled punt) by failing to sequence a logical playcall on the ensuing down that could have given them a chance at a fourth-down pickup. In other words, the things that the Falcons’ coaching staff could get wrong have been gotten wrong – at almost every juncture. We haven’t even been forced to confront the imbecility of some poor decisions that came in close Falcons wins or Falcons losses that had larger issues which defined them, including Drake London’s failure to reach the endzone or go out of bounds as time expired against Buffalo in the first half of a Monday Night Football game or the unpunished false start that Michael Penix, Jr. seemed to commit on a “lean-back” on a crucial 4th-down against the Buccaneers in Week 1. And we’ve already talked, at excruciating length, about the shameful blowouts to the Panthers (who might be kinda good) and the Dolphins (who are indisputably very bad) earlier this season. If Raheem Morris, Zac Robinson, and, yes, GM Terry Fontenot really are the men for the job, they need to show us as much in the season’s remaining nine games. Just a quick spoiler alert/predictive observation: game management, timeout use, and playcalling aren’t usually clubs in a coach’s bag that they get better at hitting during the regular season.

Season Score: 2.750

Houston Texans:

The Howling Confusion And Inconsistency Of The Texans Leaves Them Stranded In The HYH’s Midgard.

Do your best at figuring this team out, man – I know I certainly can’t. Houston’s rough start paints their team as on the lower end, the poor quality side of the “unpredictable teams” section of the great chain of being in the 2025 NFL. The Texans looked, for a moment, like they had a beat on the Broncos defense – then C.J. Stroud was lost to an unfortunate if not malicious concussion that forced the unwelcome installation of Davis Mills into the role of QB. From there, the Texans’ day was essentially lost. You can’t do anything about injuries in the NFL. They happen. And teams and fans of teams that lament with threnodial full-throatedness the unfairness of players they’ve lost to injury are ignoring the clear-as-day realities of contact sports – football is beyond “contact sports” anyway, existing in the realm of “collision” sports far more so than the prior appellation. But if there’s one injury we can sympathize with at least a bit, it’s for the team who loses their starting quarterback. That is not a position you’re expected to have more than one of. Running back, sure. Wide receiver? You have six of those. Cornerback, pass rusher, middle linebacker? That’s why gameday rosters are 46 men strong. But each team only has one real quarterback at a given time; if you think you have two, you have zero. And when C.J. Stroud was forced to exit the game against Denver with a concussion, an otherworldly sigh of surrender-adjacent, dismal exhalation could be sensed in the football cosmos. Much like how Jayden Daniels would go down later in the day, the loss of a quarterback to an immediate, visceral, and brutal-looking injury engenders nothing so much as pity, disappointment, and immediate and poignant sadness – indeed, an intermixture of the three that is hard to point to the existence of in other settings. The difference, small though it may be, is that the loss of Stroud early in the game with all the drama still to play for – and Houston leading, no less – felt like a slapping-down of Houston from on high just as they were gathering some important steam. The curvatures and corridors of fate that Stroud has traveled in his career to this point, both in college and the NFL, seem to be ones different than what many of us expected for him. At Ohio State he was either the best or second-best quarterback in the country almost his entire time as a starter; as a rookie in the NFL he was unquestionably one of the best first-year quarterbacks ever, a legacy that historians need to keep alive even as Jayden Daniels’ more successful 2024 campaign snuffed some of the glory from the pages. The last two years, though, have been unkind to Stroud, no doubt with some of the reason for the lackluster production and incompleteness falling on him. This wasn’t his fault, though – it wasn’t anyone’s fault. The defender hit the sliding QB hard, but not in the head; simply with enough force to knock the QB’s cranium dangerously about. His loss was the Broncos’ gain, as Houston never mustered a touchdown following the Buckeye’s exit. No one thought the Texans’ season could be going this darkly, yet even so, they’re only two games south of even. If Stroud was around, 3-5 could become 5-5 quickly. But he’ll be gone for the team’s next game, at least. Houston’s record seems like it should be far worse than it is, given the expectations coming into the year and more to the point given how their losses have looked and felt – feeble and uninteresting. Where this team goes from here once Stroud is back is anyone’s guess. Without him, they seem like a team with tickets punched for Lossville.

Season Score: 2.375

Las Vegas Raiders:

Lose Big, Lose Small, Lose To Good Teams, Lose To Bad. If It Involves Losing, These Raiders Can Pull It Off.

I told you not to believe in this team until they proved that they could win. I explained in clear terms why this rendition of the Silver & Black should not be thought of as any different from previous rebuilds that, ultimately, came to nothing except desert zephyrs and lost bets. I thundered in the summer that the much-celebrated inclusions of minority owner Tom Brady, new general manager John Spytek, and shiny onfield novelties Pete Carroll and Geno Smith weren’t to be trusted until they had demonstrated persuasively that the lights in Las Vegas weren’t too bright and the expectations of Sin City weren’t cancerously outsized. Well, well, well – we now know who is right, and who is dead. Brock Bowers is a shining ivory tower amidst the malevolent hovels of the desert necropolis. He singlehandedly powered the Raiders to 23 points, to overtime, and – almost – to a win. But he is surrounded by embodiments of typical Raiders inferiority. The offensive line can do nothing to maximize Ashton Jeanty. The defense can do nothing to stop determined offenses. And Geno Smith can do nothing to elevate, to raise the game of the good players around him such that they go from “startable” to “stardom.” This team looks like a lot of other Raiders teams, and that’s a god damned tragedy given where lots of people thought this team would be halfway through the season. As noted in a previous HYH, the Raiders’ win in Foxborough in Week 1 may just go down as the most unusual and non-predictively-deceiving result of the entire season, because if you take that game away, this team is 1-7 with their sole victory coming courtesy of an on-his-way-out Brian Callahan Titans team that couldn’t hit water if they were a decommissioned satellite being guided to the spacecraft graveyard. That’s in the “South Pacific Uninhabited Zone,” a large tract of the planet’s largest ocean with relatively little life or biodiversity for a flaming space husk to disturb. In that wise, it’s a lot like this post-trade deadline Raiders team. Maybe Spytek can send out some of his scouting department to see if the South Pacific is where all the promised Raiders wins in 2025 are hiding – they sure as shit aren’t on the upcoming schedule.

Season Score: 2.000

Tennessee Titans:

The Rudderless, Sparkless, Purposeless Titans Might Be Heading For An All-Time Bad Offensive Season.

Look, guys – a 7-point loss to a team that would be in the playoffs if they started today is progress. Sure, that team was dealt a blow of unthinkably inauspicious injury luck in the course of the game and was playing without anything close to a full deck of cards, so maybe you’d expect a closer loss, or even something meandering towards a win, from these Titans in this game – but that’s not the game the Titans are playing. The Titans won one game already – with the challenges arising from the likes of the Jets, Dolphins, and Browns with a view toward the 2026 NFL Draft, you really shouldn’t want to win any more games. You want to see Cam Ward begin to uncover and hone some of the latent skills we know he possesses along the way, but don’t let the plot get lost here: the “patience” that the Titans pretended to preach before the firing of Brian Callahan now absolutely has to rule the day. See what comes of this college crop, or trade that first overall pick away for a bounty of players next April. God knows, this season’s sure as hell lost. This is a haiku I’ve decided to write in praise of the Titans’ offensive effort on Sunday: Punt Punt Punt Field Goal/Punt End of Half Down Punt Field/Goal Nine Drives, Two Threes. Did you catch all that? If poetry isn’t quite your bag, just know that the Titans scored 20 points and did not author an offensive touchdown on the afternoon (their two 7-pointers came off a pick six and a Chimere Dike punt return). Their nine drives netted six points off of those “two threes,” and precious little else. They produced three three-and-outs and one two-and-out – all going for negative yards. Their best drive of the day was an 11-play, 71-yard marathon by Titan standards that brought them to the Chargers’ 1-yard line – mere inches from a touchdown that would have given them a 4-point lead – but which petered out on 4th and 1. Of course the Chargers took this ball, went 99 yards, and scored a touchdown of their own, effectively authoring the world record for longest, slowest and dumbest 14-point swing in football history. Not only is there no improvement on the offense, there shouldn’t even be any expectation of improvement going solely off the empirical evidence of film and tape. The spectral evidence, a.k.a. my gut feeling, informs me that this team simply cannot remain this bad for another 8 games. I’ve been wrong before though, and I’ll be wrong again. The Titans are the most pointless thing going in the NFL right now, and unless your favorite team is playing them, you have better things to do than to ingest the blind sidlings of a lost-in-the-shadows offense with no talent and no real coach. The Titans, to put it bluntly, are fast becoming the late-2020s version of the early 2020s Panthers. Not a place you want to be, and not a comfortable spot to find oneself in. We need a lot better from this franchise and its powers-that-be.

Season Score: 1.889

✪

Hell. Taxon

Green Bay Packers:

Halloween Came Late For Green Bay, Who Straggled Through Their Worst Nightmare In Recent Memory At Home.

Everyone has a “worst Halloween hangover” memory near and drear to their heart. You’re imaging yours, right now, as you read this. You know exactly the one. For the Packers, it’s a virtual certainty that when they woke into the cold light of day on Monday, November 4, less than 24 hours after their universe-defying loss to the lowly Panthers, they were firmly in the doldrums of theirs. Welcome to the shakes, Cheeseheads – this is a nightmare of your own making. The old saying from How I Met Your Mother admonishes that “nothing good happens after 2 a.m.” 1 p.m. Eastern standard time, when this game kicked off, is 2 a.m. China time, so if you were watching this game unfold from Zhengzhou or Chongqing, the saying holds. What the Packers did to themselves and to their fans on Sunday afternoon was truly unforeseeable. For a team that sat atop the conference to lose to a team that has lost games by scores such as 26-10, 27-22 (27-3 at one point) to the Cardinals, 42-13 and 40-9 is inconceivable. It’s the sort of loss that almost no self-respecting Super Bowl champion across the 59 years of the big game has committed. And the disgrace is redoubled on the Packers because of how this game unfolded. There were so many unforced errors committed by the Packers that, had they not occurred, would have given this team a still worrisome but probably victorious afternoon – Jordan Love’s endzone interception (the worst throw of the year by anyone so far), the missed field goal from deeply iffy field goal kicker Brandon McManus, the fumble from Saivion Williams on his first touch of the game. These are plays with unexpected outcomes, a reversal of any of which might have turned the tide in this game. The fact that we’re having this conversation about the Packers and their alarmingly low margin for error against a team that they should beat by multiple scores – a team that was a 14.5-point underdog at one point during the week leading up to this contest – is itself a deleterious metaphysical blow to the perception of a team still theoretically gunning for the #1 spot in the conference. Do better, Packers. Run the ball better. Throw the ball better. Play better defense on the final series of the game (don’t make Jeff Hafley look like an asshole). Above all, win the games you’re supposed to win. What in God’s name would Vince Lombardi think about this? He’d have the team doing up-downs until the practice field grass had worn away and all that was left was the rocky mantle underneath our planet’s crust. Right now you can’t trust Green Bay to do the unglamorous deeds that present themselves over the course of a full season – least of all, beat a team you were favored mightily against who brings their A game to the table. This is an inflection point, Wisconsin. Make the requisite changes before someone changes you out of your zenithal conference-dominating perch. 

Season Score: 3.125

Washington Commanders:

This Was The Game That Haunted The Consciousness Of Every Commanders Fan. It Came Terribly To Pass On SNF.

Youth’s a stuff will not endure. So says The Bard of Avon in “Twelfth Night,” a play about the comedies that can ensue from floods of mistaken identities. There’s little to be taken too seriously in this Shakespeare play, at least compared to some of the guy’s tragedies and histories, but if he’d wanted to write a tragedy about how one can mistake one thing for another, he’d have good reason to write a play about the 2025 Washington Commanders. This team’s fans thought they were getting an even better, even healthier Jayden Daniels. They thought that the addition of Von Miller would provide some extra spice to the pass rush, not additional dead weight. They thought that locking up Terry McLaurin with a new contract would end their headaches with the talented but demanding wide receiver, not simply be one of many chapters in a long and laborious book of troubles. Perhaps at the summit of this mountain of thwarted expectations is the discrepancy between what this team thought it purchased and the bill of goods it actually received in Deebo Samuel – a Swiss army knife Tasmanian Devil when the ball is in his hands was what was advertised, but a difficult-to-integrate and certifiably non-X-factor-level WR2 in a sea of other WR2s is what they’ve been saddled with. All of this could have been stomached, if not enjoyed, by Washington if they could have gotten solid second-year play week in and week out from the solar prince, the commander of Commanders, Jayden Daniels, but injuries hampered the slight-of-build passer before their home blowout torture session versus Seattle and, in the cruelest twist of fate yet endured by any team this season, during the game, but after the competitive drama had ceased. I’m not going to give all the blame to Dan Quinn for letting Daniels stay in the game down 38-7; I am going to fault him, and Daniels, for not modifying the game plan to be ultra-safe and in no way hazardous to the young QB’s health with the game totally out of reach. Instead, Daniels’ arm buckled underneath him on a scramble, and his season might be on ice because of it. Even if he could return, should he? Would he? This team is going nowhere, with or without him, and it’s looking more and more like the heights to which these Icarian Commanders flew in 2024 cannot be surpassed any time soon. Daniels’ future is still bright, but it’s on hiatus for now. A shame, what befell the capital city’s football team – for the team’s fans, and for fans of good football period.

Season Score: 2.778

Miami Dolphins:

The Firings, And The Fire Sale, Have Both Begun In Earnest. It Was Fun While It Lasted, Chris Grier Dolphins.

Like one trapped beneath the surface needing air, Miami’s two wins are all the crueler for their intermittent respites from the dull and excruciating waterboarding exercise that this season has been – momentary impositions of fiendish mercy, negligible allowances of oxygen to one drowning, temporary removals of the red-hot pincer only to worsen its eventual reapplication. The gradations of uncompetitiveness this team has travelled through this season is loathsome and multichrome. They’ve lost in blowout fashion to teams like the Colts, the Browns, and most recently on TNF against the starving and salivating Ravens. They’ve lost close games to the likes of the Chargers, the Bills, and the Patriots. And they’ve won two thoroughly purposeless victories against the likes of the bottom-feeder Jets and the Kirk Cousins-manned Falcons, who might lose to Oklahoma State if they played on a neutral site. But what’s most troubling about this team, and what proves why all the protagonists, deuteragonists, tritagonists, antagonists, and any other character involved in the docusoap circus that is the 2025 Miami Dolphins season need a fresh start with brand new scenery, is the clear conception that this team can do only one thing: beat teams worse than them by playing a very, very heavily schematized and orchestrated brand of speed-merchant football. Even against the likes of the Jets, this team needed a couple different windfalls of good fortune – think Braelon Allen’s fumble at the one-yard line and a brainless playcall from the Jets offense on an early fourth down – to get “into” their game flow. It hasn’t happened at all in their seven losses, and they’ve been ushered quickly out of competitive contention and into yet another loss about as fast as any team in the NFL, Titans and Saints included, in those seven dropped games. It has gotten so bad that the playcalling has begun to enter hitherto unthought-of dimensions of nonsensicality, emblematized no better in this game than on the 4th and 2 from the Baltimore 13-yard line in which Tua Tagovailoa threw a slot fade route to Devon Achane, who was single-covered by All-Pro safety Kyle Hamilton. What are we even doing anymore? Stephen Ross asked himself the same question and, though in want of an answer for that specifically, decided that to get nearer the solution to the quandary it was necessary to remove Chris Grier from his position of responsibility as GM. Accordingly the interim GM, Champ Kelly, salvaged a small morsel for the future ahead of Tuesday’s trade deadline, shipping away pass rusher Jaelan Phillips to Philadelphia for a third-round pick in next year’s draft. Everyone else is still stuck here. Miami’s a fun city to live in, but the Dolphins stopped being a fun team to play for a while ago now. Whoever comes in here next – coach, quarterback, general manager, et cetera – needs to find some way of ensuring their stability and competitive level can match the attractiveness of the city that has enticed so many free agents and draft picks over the years. McDaniel might last out the season before they throw him out by his capris, and who knows how long Tua remains, but the writing is on the wall in big aqua and orange splotches: rebuild forthcoming, inquire within.

Season Score: 1.778

Cincinnati Bengals:

Cincy Isn’t The HYH’s Second-Ever Zero-Star Loser. They Came Awfully Close, Though – They’re Dead Meat.

What’s your favorite trauma plot? A Little Life, the modern literary landmark examining many different forms of subtle or outward suffering? Trainspotting, a decidedly dingy and mundane treatment of drug abuse and how it affects the development of adulthood and responsibility? Nightmare Alley, a bleak and unseemly delving into the horror of criminality and its intersection with madness, addiction and exploitation? Or, perhaps, is it simply this: the post-2022 Bengals defense, which combines so many different kinds of traumatizing phenomena that to list them out would be tantamount to torture porn? (Mine’s the latter, narrowly beating out the horrid pathos of the short film “Nuggets.”) Though if you’ve seen that short film, called “Nuggets” but in its subtle, minimalist, and unspeakably powerful way touching on far more sinister materiel than foodstuffs, you will see parallels, similarities and resemblances between the striving kiwi’ upwards soars and downwards crashes and the Bengals’ tremulous up-and-down fortunes in the course of single games – games which always, since late January 2023, seem to end on a down-beat. That’s because the Bengals defense is an omnishambles. It’s a shambolic, shambling, unambiguously embarrassing mess which should be ashamed itself of the shame it helped heap on Lou Anarumo, who has been doing his damnedest to prove how wrong the Cincinnati administrative apparatus was for pinning last season’s woes on him and in one breath sending him packing and keeping Zac Taylor, whose fatuous gameplans have shown themselves to be hopeless in now three and a half seasons without Joe Burrow. The Bengals, once more, are swirling in the maelstrom of dashed dreams. What’s worse this year around, of course, is that they’ve had to run through a whole bunch of stomach-churning moguls on the ski run of destiny just to get to a point where they can be disappointed this badly – winning razor-close Week 1, losing Joe Burrow Week 2 then coming back to beat Jacksonville with Jake Browning in the same game, undergoing several maulings at the hands of the league’s savagest defenses, trading for Joe Flacco, coming this close against Green Bay, then finally seeing all the Burrow-less pieces fall together into jigsaw harmony against ancient enemies Pittsburgh – only to have their hopes hollowed-out with consecutive dissections by the Jets and Bears. Zac Taylor’s seat is scalding hot at the moment – after all, if you sell Duke Tobin and Mike Brown on the idea that firing your defensive coordinator from 2024 will solve your problems, only to see the defense get worse, you don’t only make yourself look like a poor decision-maker – you kinda make yourself out to be a liar and a snake-oil salesman, too. The trade deadline came and went without any significant additions for this team – indeed they shipped linebacker Logan Wilson away to Dallas – and by all indications, this team’s season is effectively over. No one wants to see a team put up hellacious offensive numbers in instances of total fruitlessness, but at least it makes for entertaining TV. One ponders whether we’ll see Joe Burrow paired with a new head coach come 2026; it feels like it needs to happen, but this is Cincinnati, and nothing ever makes sense about this team.

Season Score: 1.778