As byes began in Week 5, so did real consideration of division standings and hot seats for both players and coaches. Coaches are where we’ll start off for this week’s observations, though my thoughts on those points will be incomplete for now.
- A great deal has been made over the last several days of coaching decisions across the league. While some were rightly panned, others were criticized heavily with little justification. My Thursday article will be about coaching decisions, including several from the last few days.
- The woes of the Cowboys are well-documented. But it’s not like lack of talent is their primary issue. And it’s hard to even say for sure that their problems are schematic. As far as I can tell, their biggest concern thus far is chemistry. Plenty of their players have been playing quite well, but they’ve struggled consistently to have those players on the same plage and playing well at the same time. This applies to both sides of the ball.
- Not to place all of the blame on one player when handing Tampa Bay their first win was a collective team screw-up by the Cowboys, but I have to mention the DaRon Bland play. Bland has always been a player who is liable to get torched, but creates a lot of takeaways to make up for it. The latter ability is the reason for his big contract. Quite frankly, with the possible exception of offensive linemen and kickers, there’s no excuse for an NFL player to drop that ball. Much less one who’s paid big money for his interceptions.
- This week was a great reminder that football is a team game with three phases, where many non-premier positions get underrated all the time by teams and fans alike. While the London game was a comedy of errors from both teams, what almost lost the Jaguars that game was a long snapper injury. We take them for granted constantly, but it goes to show how much even a long snapper who plays a few plays a game can shift the entire thing.
- While specific decisions will be talked about in the aforementioned Thursday article, Nick Sirianni may be feeling his seat heat up at this point. The Eagles expect to be contenders, and have proven to be impatient (complimentary) if they think their coach isn’t up to snuff, even when that coach has led them to a Lombardi Trophy.
- While it’s fun, especially if you play fantasy football, to see the video game numbers put up by Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, this season has reminded us that Joe Burrow is at his best when he can spread the ball around to everyone. That was especially true this week, when his four touchdowns went to four different players, only one of whom (Chase) was a wide receiver.
- Speaking of quarterbacks who are playing their best again, two consecutive weeks of great play after great play have me feeling much more confidently that Drake Maye is back.
- Maye’s resurgence came this week at the expense of the Raiders, who have now dropped two straight with the Bills and Rams coming up the next two weeks. If they’re falling off like many assumed they would, we have to question how soon Fernando Mendoza’s first start will come after he got his first regular season snaps on Sunday.
- Despite winning big over the Eagles with Case Keenum at the helm, it’s clear that the Bears need Caleb Williams back, badly. They can make some noise in the playoffs, courtesy of Williams, but they’ll also need him in order to get there at all playing in a tough conference and division.
- The Packers have put back-to-back wins together, which is of course encouraging for them. However, both of those wins have come against teams playing their backup quarterbacks due to injury, and now they’ll be tested by one of the league’s best in Dak Prescott.
- I know I come back to this every week, but I have to reiterate the performance of Brian Flores, who’s been in the news today already. Even while the offense has had ups and downs from injury and not having a true franchise QB, his defense has delivered five wins to start the season and his exotic blitzes have terrorized the litany of young signal-callers he’s also faced.
- The most recent victims of those blitz packages were Tyler Shough and the Saints, who are now 1-4. While that doesn’t entirely drop them out of contention in a division where the leader has only one more victory than they do, what seemed to be a promising season is now very much in danger.
- While the embarrassing ending to overtime for the Commanders deserves blame everywhere, Dan Quinn has to take the brunt of it. He’ll take even more heat because they blew a big lead they’d built over the Giants. Quinn already has one rather famous blown lead in a Super Bowl, and the inability to close reared its head many more times for the rest of his tenure as head coach of the Falcons after the 28-3 debacle.
- While that game serves mostly as fodder for humor, it’s also a good representation of the state of the NFC East. The Giants lead the division at 3-1-1, but it seems fairly obvious that they won’t be able to maintain that sort of pace with the major holes on their roster. Nothing about the Commanders has inspired any sort of confidence, with or without Jayden Daniels. And the Eagles and Cowboys, possessors of the two more talented rosters in the division that made them both popular picks to win it, have faltered repeatedly. The Cowboys dropped a home game to a previously winless team on Thursday night while the Eagles couldn’t get out of their own way in London. Both coaches are going to be discussed at length in Thursday’s article, and both fanbases are already calling for heads to roll in mid-October.
- Obviously playing against the Titans skews these things a bit, but DeMeco Ryans taking back defensive play calling seems through one game to be going very well. This defense could be headed back toward what we all expected it to be.
- The change in offensive play calling in Denver, however, didn’t change the quality or look of the unit at all. This Broncos offense is still concerning, and there are more doubts every week about what we can expect from Bo Nix.
- It’s incredibly rare for a team with a coach like Jim Harbaugh and a quarterback like Justin Herbert to be legitimately bad, but these Chargers are, from top to bottom. Not just unlucky. Bad. The Broncos didn’t look good at all on Sunday and still beat them. At 0-5, their season is done, which is still a shock.
- At 1-4 and having recently traded Marvin Harrison, Jr., the Cardinals are out the picture already, as was pretty much expected. As such, they’re running out of reasons to keep starting Jacoby Brissett over Carson Beck.
- 49ers-Seahawks was one of the best games of the year thus far, but the call at the end was ridiculous. Players make toe-tap catches with the ball over the boundary in the air all the time. By this interpretation, none of those should count. Until the player touches out of bounds, the ball is live, wherever it may go in relation to the line to gain, the goal line, etc..
- Any win the Ravens can get without Lamar Jackson is a blessing for them, so this was a big win that keeps them in a strong position to take over the AFC North when Jackson returns.
- While the sample size is small and Sunday night’s game ended with yet another injury, the play we’ve seen from Michael Penix, Jr. is the best we’ve seen in his time as a pro. With the sometimes erratic nature of QB development, that may not mean anything. But it will be fun to monitor his progress if he can stay on the field for an extended stretch of games.
- Obviously the Bills-Rams game will come up on Thursday, but the one thing that has to be said is this: the special teams issues from the Rams are serious and don’t seem to be going away. The predictions many (including myself) made about them winning another title hinged upon fixing that, and they clearly haven’t. The window of having their key pieces together is small with the aging of several stars, and this could be the undoing of all they’ve done to get this close.
I’ll have many more thoughts on Thursday, as I’m sure anyone who reads it will have in response to what I say.
