Every week this NFL season, we will break down the highs and lows—and everything in between—from the most recent slate of pro football. This week, we got an early slate so exciting that Scott Hanson had trouble keeping it together on NFL RedZone. Welcome to Winners and Losers.
Winners: Scott Hanson and the Witching Hour
As exciting as the finish in Washington may have been, it was nothing compared to what we got at the end of the early slate. Six of the eight games were decided by fewer than six points, with game-winning scores in the final 60 seconds of Patriots-Jets, Packers-Jaguars, Cardinals-Dolphins, and Browns-Ravens. That doesn’t include failed game-winning drives in Atlanta’s win over Tampa Bay and Houston’s victory over Indianapolis. Enter RedZone’s Scott Hanson, who sorted out the madness while attempting to not self-combust from excitement.
Hanson was on fire for a good 10 minutes straight. I don’t have data on this, but I’m positive he set a personal record for most guttural sounds made during a RedZone broadcast.
This all-time Witching Hour was provided by some unlikely sources, including three backup quarterbacks:
Jameis Winston’s 38-yard game-winner capped off a strong showing in his first start after Deshaun Watson’s season-ending Achilles injury.
After Jordan Love left the game with a groin injury, Malik Willis threw for 56 yards on five attempts and connected on a long pass to Jayden Reed to set up Green Bay’s game-winning field goal as time expired.
Jacoby Brissett also led a game-winning drive after Drake Maye took a helmet-to-helmet shot and exited the game. It was a good day for the backup QB brand and a great day for fans of seven hours of commercial-free football.
Loser: Jerry Jones
If there were any doubts about how cooked this Cowboys team is, they were silenced with a 30-24 loss to the 49ers on Sunday Night Football. The Cowboys did have a shot at mounting a game-winning drive late in the fourth quarter—and they may have pulled it off if KaVontae Turpin had been able to hold on to a deep pass from Dak Prescott—but this game was more one-sided than the final score suggests. The Dallas defense gave up 12 explosive plays to the 49ers offense. The Dallas offense managed just one explosive play before the fourth quarter. The passing game hasn’t found any answers against man coverage, which explains why Prescott is throwing more tight-window passes than any other quarterback in the league, per Next Gen Stats. The running game, led by the thoroughly washed Ezekiel Elliott, didn’t produce a single explosive play against a mediocre Niners run defense. After eight weeks of football, it’s hard to find anything to feel good about with this team.
Mike McCarthy looks like the most “definitely will be fired” coach in the league outside of Jacksonville. It would be easy to peg him as the loser after the loss to San Francisco, but his fate was probably already sealed. There isn’t much more he can lose. And Prescott, who’s buckling under the weight of McCarthy’s failing offense, is in a good position after setting records for guaranteed money on the extension he just signed. Even if the losses keep piling up on the field, Prescott’s bank account will keep stacking wins for the next few years. So that leaves Jerry “All-In” Jones to accept the L on the team’s behalf. All of the team’s current problems can be traced back to questionable offseason decisions. The front office, which is still technically led by Jones, decided that a passing game built entirely around one receiver was a good idea and that McCarthy was the offensive mind to lead it. It thought a backfield led by a 29-year-old Elliott—that’s basically 45 in running back years—would be enough. The team also banked the success of its defense on 68-year-old Mike Zimmer. Perhaps we should have seen this miserable 3-4 start coming.
With Washington and Philadelphia starting to pull away in the NFC East and a strong group of wild-card contenders forming, the postseason looks like a long shot for the Cowboys. They’re only two games back from the Eagles for the final wild-card spot, but they’ll need to leapfrog five teams over the second half to get there. That group includes the 49ers, who currently sit in 10th place and now own the tiebreaker over Dallas.
This latest loss to the 49ers felt a lot like the other notable losses Dallas has suffered in this increasingly one-sided rivalry. It’s one of many signs that the franchise is in decline. Will Jones continue to sit back as it sinks to the bottom of the standings?
Winner: Robert Saleh
Saleh got out at the right time. The Jets have lost five in a row after letting New England’s Jacoby Brissett lead a game-winning drive capped off by a fourth-and-goal run from the 1-yard line with just seconds remaining. Three of those losses have come after Saleh’s abrupt firing in early October, a move that owner Woody Johnson believed would provide a spark to what had been a 2-3 team at the time. That spark has burst into a full-on dumpster fire, and what had been a good Jets defense under Saleh’s watch has surrendered 62 points to Russell Wilson and Brissett over the past two weeks.
The efficiency numbers from Sunday’s game suggest the Jets were the better team. They outgained New England by 2 yards per play and had a higher expected points added average, success rate, and explosive play rate. Aaron Rodgers looked as good as he has since his last MVP season in 2021. He connected on a handful of downfield passes, and a few of them came off-platform. This was the passing game the Jets were hoping to see at the start of the season.
Firing Saleh hasn’t worked, but demoting Nathaniel Hackett from play calling duties and elevating Todd Downing has improved the offense over the past few weeks. The Jets have the third-best explosive play rate leaguewide since the change, and Downing has leaned into his quarterback’s preferences to make that happen. New York has done away with its under-center offense almost completely. Its shotgun rate stands at 92 percent over the past three weeks, which leads the NFL, per TruMedia.
Non-scrimmage plays ultimately led to the loss for the Jets on Sunday. Greg Zuerlein missed an extra point and a 44-yard field goal. New York took a delay of game before a two-point conversion attempt that would have extended the lead to seven ahead of New England’s game-winning drive. And interim coach Jeff Ulbrich settled for a 29-yard field goal on fourth-and-less-than-a-yard in the third quarter. The Jets left a good chunk of points on the field in a game decided by just two.
The offense is starting to show signs of life after one of its most complete performances of the season, but that makes this loss all the more frustrating. The Jets are closer to the first pick than they are to a wild-card spot. At 2-6, their playoff probability has plummeted to 12 percent, according to The Athletic’s prediction model. The concern about the offense has been replaced by concern about the defense. And this losing streak has Rodgers talking like a Batman villain.
We still have 10 more weeks of this to go, but after firing the coach, trading for Davante Adams, and convincing Haason Reddick to finally show up, the Jets have run out of new cards to play. Mathematically, New York is still alive in the playoff race, but it’s never been more over.
Loser: Matt Eberflus
Before we get to bashing that play call, let’s first bask in the glory of Jayden Daniels’s walk-off Hail Mary touchdown in Washington’s 18-15 win over Chicago, as called by the local radio team:
That’s a crappy way to lose a football game if you’re a Bears fan, but an invigorating way to win one for a fan base that has been waiting for a reason to collectively lose its shit for over a decade. Northwest Stadium hadn’t had a pop that big since Robert Griffin III.
Bears head coach Matt Eberflus (along with first-year offensive coordinator Shane Waldron) deserves a big share of the credit for making the moment possible. We can start with the Hail Mary. Let’s acknowledge that hindsight makes it easy to poke holes in Chicago’s strategic choices down the stretch, but when you give a game away like this, criticism is warranted. Eberflus, who calls the defensive plays, opted for a mush rush instead of a more aggressive approach. Chicago had just three players “rushing” the passer, but it was more of a contain technique rather than a rush designed to collapse the pocket. Eberflus also used a spy on the play, an odd strategy to commit a body to defend against a Daniels scramble when Washington needed to go over 50 yards to score. If the goal was to prevent Daniels from moving around and extending the play, it did not work.
Chicago’s catch-point defense was another sign of inadequate coaching. There should have been a man plastered to every eligible receiver downfield, but Noah Brown was left unmarked. And Bears cornerback Tyrique Stevenson turned him into a hero by failing to bat the ball down, instead tipping the ball right into Brown’s arms for the game-winner. Stevenson was also too busy taunting Commanders fans to see the ball get snapped.
It was a brutal end to a bad day for Stevenson. He got cooked by Terry McLaurin on a deep ball in the first half, was called for unnecessary roughness, and also got a mean “you ain’t shit” hurled at him by Washington’s star receiver.
Somehow, Stevenson is just a side villain in Chicago’s horror story. The big bad was the Bears coaching staff—though I’m not sure who deserves more blame: Waldron for coming up with the idea to hand the ball off to a backup center in a high-leverage situation, or Eberflus for OK’ing that terrible idea.
Who looked at this week’s game plan and said, “This needs more Doug Kramer Jr.”? I seriously need to know.
Waldron and Eberflus nearly got away with it, thanks to some clutch play by Caleb Williams. The no. 1 pick had some bright moments in the second half after a slow start. The rookie’s play from the pocket had Tony Romo ooh’ing and ahh’ing in the booth. And Daniels, the no. 2 pick, was equally impressive playing through a rib injury, which started affecting his throwing power in the second half—but didn’t stop him from completing the final bomb. Even in a low-scoring game, both rookie quarterbacks shined.
Winner: Dan Campbell’s Lions
The Lions cooked up the second 50 burger of the season in a dominant win over the Titans on Sunday. It was the 73rd time a team had scored 50 points since the turn of the century, and it may have been the strangest one to date. Jared Goff finished the game with 52 net passing yards. The offense generated just two explosive plays. It was the first time a team scored 50 while averaging fewer than 3 yards per dropback this century. The previous low was 5.3, per TruMedia. No team has scored 50 points with fewer than three explosive plays, so Detroit also set a new mark there.
It wasn’t a good day for Goff’s MVP campaign, but it was an impressive showing for the rest of the Lions team. Detroit’s run game continued to roll, going for 164 yards on 24 attempts with a success rate of 54 percent. Jahmyr Gibbs hit over 22 mph on a 70-yard touchdown run, per Next Gen Stats. David Montgomery threw a touchdown pass. And the offense scored on all five of its red zone possessions.
Many of those red zone trips were set up by the Lions defense and special teams. Two Mason Rudolph interceptions and a Calvin Ridley fumble set the offense up with short fields. Khalil Dorsey returned a kickoff for 72 yards, and Kalif Raymond had two big punt returns, including this 90-yard touchdown.
Goff has been excellent for the past few weeks, but this game shows how deep this team really is. So deep it’s difficult to pick out one player as the most valuable. It’s the culture Campbell has instilled in the locker room and the talent Brad Holmes has assembled on the depth chart that has Detroit atop the NFC North standings heading into next week’s clash with the 6-2 Packers.
“It was a really cool game,” Raymond said. “Just to be playing such a team game, it’s so fun. Special teams, defense [getting] takeaways, the offense pushing it in. It’s just really fun to be part of a football team like that.”
It wasn’t Goff’s best day, but he did continue his streak of high-completion-percentage games. Goff has completed 84 percent of his passes since Week 4. That not only leads the league but is also 14 percentage points clear of second place, per TruMedia. Offensive coordinator Ben Johnson has created the ultimate point-and-shoot offense, and Goff might be the best point-and-shoot quarterback in the game right now.
Loser: Anthony Richardson
Sunday was a rough one for Anthony Richardson believers like myself. The fourth pick in the 2023 draft completed just 31 percent of his 32 attempts—there are 24 NBA teams hitting 3-pointers at a higher rate—asked out of the game after gassing himself on a scramble, and threw the worst interception of Week 8, which gifted Houston seven points in a game decided by three.
It felt like CBS cut to Joe Flacco a dozen times in the final two minutes of the first half. Bill Cowher called for the Colts to bench Richardson for the veteran backup during the halftime show. But, based on Shane Steichen’s post-game support of his young QB, it doesn’t sound like Indy’s head coach considered making a change.
Flacco is the better quarterback of the two, but Steichen knows the team’s future is tied to the development of Richardson. And he knows the 22-year-old needs to play to develop.
If Steichen was going to yank Richardson, it would have happened at the break on Sunday. Richardson was 2-of-15 with an interception going into halftime. He did improve over the final two quarters—averaging 0.12 EPA per dropback and rushing for 35 yards in the second half—but not by much. He completed just 47.1 percent of his passes compared to his 13.3 percent completion rate in the first half. We’re well past the point of this being a problem.
Richardon’s pitiful completion rate on Sunday was somewhat misleading. Per Next Gen Stats, his expected completion percentage was 56.9 for the game. He was under pressure on 47 percent of his dropbacks, so many of his throws were made under duress, and the Colts receivers did him no favors at the catch point.
Richardson completed only 10 passes but got up to 175 yards thanks to an absurdly high average depth of target of 15.3 yards. He also chipped in on the ground game with four runs of more than 10 yards, so this was more of a boom-or-bust performance than a total stinker, as his completion numbers imply. We can cope through this, Richardson believers. But not for much longer.
Loser: The Cincinnati Bengals
The Bengals and Eagles looked like two teams headed in different directions coming into Week 8. Cincinnati had won three of its past four, its quarterback was playing MVP-level ball, and the schedule didn’t look too daunting. Philadelphia was sporting a 4-2 record, but the vibes didn’t reflect that, with the offense still looking disjointed and Jalen Hurts coming off of one of his worst games of the season in Week 7. After a 37-17 win for Philly on Sunday, the two teams have switched roles. The Eagles are 5-2 and have won their past two by an average of 22.5 points. The Bengals have nearly squandered their margin for error in the playoff race after dropping a winnable home game. They’re now 3-5, and their playoff probability has dropped below 50 percent, per The Athletic’s prediction model.
Time is running out on this season, which could be the last with the three-pronged passing attack of Joe Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase, and Tee Higgins in Cincinnati. Their remaining schedule is the 12th easiest by opponent winning percentage, but a tricky stretch before the bye could knock the Bengals out of the running before it softens up. Road games against the Ravens and Chargers, two teams ahead of Cincinnati in the wild-card standings, follow a must-win home game against the Raiders next week.
Defense continues to be the Bengals’ main issue. The defense ranks 20th in EPA allowed, 24th in yards allowed per play, and 28th in defensive success rate after giving up 37 points to the Eagles. Hurts averaged nearly 12 yards per attempt and wasn’t sacked once in Sunday’s game. The run defense, which was coming off its best performance to date in the win over Cleveland last week, regressed and gave up 161 yards and three touchdowns on Sunday.
Philadelphia’s run defense had no problems shutting down what’s been a punchless Cincinnati run game. The Bengals finished with 58 rushing yards on 20 attempts with a success rate of just 11.8 percent. It was the second-worst run performance of the season by success rate, per TruMedia.
Bengals coach Zac Taylor has been unable to build a consistently productive run game throughout his time as coach, which has put a tremendous amount of pressure on Burrow in the passing game. Cincinnati’s franchise quarterback has handled that pressure well over the past month or so, but it’s only a matter of time before the entire pass game collapses under the weight of a bad defense and the absence of a run game.
With an unremarkable race for a wild-card spot—the unintimidating Broncos and Chargers currently hold the last two spots—the Bengals can’t be counted out. Burrow seems confident the team can make a run, calling a 7-2 finish “doable” after Sunday’s loss, but something has to change quickly for this team to make it back to the postseason after missing out last season.
