Ten NFL Takes - Week Five

 

Take number one: Deshaun Watson is broken. Whether you want to believe he “quit” on his team on 4^th down near the end of the first half or it was just a communications glitch in his helmet, he’s done. Draw your own conclusions as to why that is, but Kevin Stefanski’s stubborn refusal to bench him suggests one of two things, either he does not have the final say on who plays or he is trying to get fired, assuming his two coach-of-the-year awards will land him a gig somewhere else.

Take number two: Remember when Gary Kasparov was the world chess champion, IBM designed a computer chess program, and Kasparov “played” the computer? He won, but then there was a rematch and the computer won. That’s the New York Jets offense. They are the only team that relies entirely on their quarterback to get to the line of scrimmage, look at the defense, and call what he thinks is the best play against it. And yes, Aaron Rodgers is probably Kasparov-level good at doing that, but the defenses have become IBM-super computer sophisticated and too much for him to compute all the options in real time. It was assumed that so long as the Jet defense held teams to 20 points or fewer, they should be a playoff team. Well, in the last two games the defense gave up 10 and 17 and they lost both. The team is now 2-3 and trading for Devante Adams feels like the couple whose marriage is shaky and decide to have a kid to solve their problems. Really bad vibes right now.

Take number three: As a native Washingtonian who lived through the last quarter century of awful Commanders football, watching Jayden Daniels is a “pinch me” moment. I finally got to see a full game and he is all that and a bag of chips. Calm, in control of the offense, and his deep passes are a thing of beauty. Against a defense that ranked *number one* in the league last year, he never seemed rattled and picked them apart like a ten-year veteran. The stadium, which for so long had been half-full (and with a not insubstantial number of the visiting team’s fans) was loud, boisterous, and supportive throughout. If you look at the Commanders historically, they basically had about 80 years of mediocre to bad teams with a roughly 10 year period in the 1980s (and a fluke run to the Super Bowl in 1972-3) when they were one of the three best teams in the league. Fans tend to downplay the former and marinate in the latter, but with the stench of Snyder’s run as owner starting to abate and the potential for a return to D.C. in the offing with Daniels at the helm, things may be looking up again.

Take number four: How is it that the league tells us they care about player safety but somehow Josh Allen only missed like four plays after his head bounced off the turf at Reliant Stadium like a basketball and he appeared to be knocked unconscious? You can tell me all you want about helmet improvements and guardian caps, but the frequency with which players who appear severely injured somehow get back in the game is troubling. McDermott’s play calling at the end of the game was also a head scratcher and the Bills are now coming back down to Earth. If Allen was concussed or misses time, their season could go downhill fast.

Take number five: One of my favorite sports sayings, which I attribute to Tony Kornheiser, is that “the other team has coaches too.” I say that in regards to the Houston Texans, whose offense does not look nearly as explosive or dynamic as it did last year and you can’t blame it all on Joe Mixon’s injury because their running game was awful last year too. No, I think other teams have coaches and those coaches figured out how to scheme against Bobby Slowik and it’s now his job to counter their counter moves because this Texans team, while good, is not living up to its potential.

Take number six: Few things in football are more exciting than the 14-point flip. You know, Team A is near Team B’s goal line, about to punch it in for a score and then a fumble or interception happens, Team B takes it back for a touchdown and the whole game shifts. Now, imagine that happens twice on one Sunday. Gardner Minshew threw an awful interception that was returned the other way for a touchdown and a Giants running back fumbled at the goal line and Seattle took it back as well. Great stuff.

Take number seven: You know who I would not want to be today? Shane Steichen, who is in a classic no-win situation. His best option at quarterback is 39-year-old Joe Flacco, but last year his team drafted Anthony Richardson, a 21-year-old with fewer than 15 starts in college (by way of comparison, Jayden Daniels had 55) but raw athletic ability you rarely see in a signal caller. The problem is Richardson needs reps to get better but when he is on the field, the flashes of brilliance are few and the errors are many. If you stick with the old guy, you have a better chance of winning, but by doing so, you are tacitly admitting your young guy is not ready. On the other hand, if you give your young guy the reps he needs and the losses pile up with him behind center, you probably lose your job. Just a bad deal all around.

Take number eight: This Sunday marks the beginning of that weird, now two-week period where we pretend the Jacksonville Jaguars are somehow the “unofficial” team of London, England, like the two places are sister cities and the team is part of an exchange program, and I hate it. Making the Jaguars the “unofficial” team of Great Britain is cruel and unusual. I get that the league is almost pathologically motivated to squeeze every last penny of revenue it can out of the product, but you will never convince me those stadiums (sorry, pitches) in England are filled with Jaguars-loving Englishmen (and women) and not Americans who thought it would be a hoot to take a trip across the pond to watch an NFL game in another country. Fire all these games (and the ones in Germany, Brazil, and wherever else the league is going to do this) straight into the sun.

Take number nine: Speaking of ineptitude, we have seen this Bengals movie before. A Super Bowl contending team in the 1980s that slowly fell into irrelevance, a brief resurrection under Carson Palmer that never met its potential because he suffered a devastating knee injury, a few decent years with Andy Dalton that fizzled out because they would not re-sign their own players, and now this. I think we are going to look back at Cincinnati’s run in 2022 as the high water mark of the Joe Burrow era. The defense lost key contributors that have not been replaced, Tee Higgins will be leaving at the end of the year, and what they’ll be left with is a high priced quarterback/receiver combo without much else around them because Mike Brown is a notoriously cheap owner/GM who still runs his franchise like it’s the 1970s. They lost on Sunday to not one, but two guys who are cheat codes at their positions and a bad hold on a game winning field goal after some bizarre decision making by their head coach in overtime. At 1-4, their chances of making the playoffs are slim and their roster will be worse, not better, next year.

Take number ten: Non-football take. The tension generated in playoff baseball games is off the charts good. Now that each league lets in seven teams, the regular season is a boring, unnecessary six month slog, but when you have 45,000 people in a stadium living and dying on every pitch late in a one-run game, there are not many things better in sports.