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, the Chargers survived a near Chargering, the Bills ended the Chiefs’ bid for an undefeated season, and Doug Pederson coached what should be his final game for the Jaguars. Welcome to Winners and Losers.
Loser: Chargering
The Chargers ending up on the right side of this win probability chart from rbsdm.com is the clearest sign that Jim Harbaugh has changed the culture in Los Angeles.
This franchise is no stranger to the type of wacky-ass game we got on Sunday Night Football. And squandering a three-touchdown lead to the Bengals in the second half would hardly be a blip in the team’s long history of gut-punch losses. But the Chargers not being the team that missed two field goals and gave up the game-winning touchdown with seconds remaining will take some getting used to, though.
In many ways, the game played out like so many from the Chargers’ past. Justin Herbert got off to a near-perfect start in the first half, only to go cold in the second. The defense, which has played well all season and had Joe Burrow in hell over the first 30 minutes, looked powerless to stop the Bengals’ passing game once the quarterback found a rhythm—and Cincinnati’s loaded receiving corps started making plays for him. After falling behind 27-6 early in the third quarter, Burrow led three consecutive touchdown drives. If not for two missed field goals by Evan McPherson, the Bengals would have scored on five of their first six possessions of the second half.
Even late in the fourth quarter, it looked as if Cincinnati would overcome the shanked kicks anyway. Los Angeles punted the ball back to the Bengals with 1:26 remaining and the score tied at 27-27. But Burrow threw three incompletions, narrowly missing Ja’Marr Chase on a deep pass that would have put Cincinnati in field goal range on first down, failing to connect on a short pass to running back Chase Brown on second down, and throwing short of an open Tee Higgins on third down.
That provided Herbert and the Chargers one more shot at winning the game in regulation. With only 45 seconds left and Los Angeles pinned back at its 16-yard line after a punt, it would have made sense for Harbaugh to play for overtime. Herbert had nearly thrown a pick-six on the previous possession and fumbled on a scramble earlier in the half. A conservative approach would have been more than justified. But Harbaugh put the game in his 26-year-old quarterback’s hands, and Herbert made two of his best throws of the night—both to rookie Ladd McConkey—to set up J.K. Dobbins’s game-winning 29-yard touchdown run.
Even then, with the Chargers leading and only 18 seconds left on the clock, it felt like the win hadn’t been secured. The threat of Chargering never really disappears. Dobbins scoring on his long run instead of going down short of the end zone to set up a last-second field goal—and milking more of the clock—gave the Bengals some hope. And after Burrow was able to get Cincinnati into range for a Hail Mary, it felt like we were headed for the most Chargers loss of all time. Instead, Burrow’s heave fell short of the end zone, and Higgins could not haul in the pass. The Chargers survived.
Harbaugh now has Los Angeles sitting at 7-3, and currently in the fifth seed in the AFC playoff race. The team is closing out tightly contested games against good opponents. The defense is playing physical, hard-nosed ball. The run game is grinding out wins, and Herbert is playing the best football of his career. This looks nothing like the team Brandon Staley coached for the previous three seasons. It’s been a truly stunning turnaround job by Harbaugh and his staff. This was supposed to be a rough first step in a long rebuild. But anyone familiar with Harbaugh’s coaching career should know that the man doesn’t do rebuilds. Anywhere he goes, wins follow—even with the NFL’s most cursed franchise.
Winner: The ’72 Dolphins
The Chiefs’ devil magic, which had been powering their undefeated start to this season, finally ran out in Buffalo. Kansas City lost its first game, meaning the 1972 Dolphins can pop champagne. They’ll go at least one more year as the only undefeated champions in league history. For what it’s worth, Patrick Mahomes didn’t sound too broken up by Kansas City missing out on a chance to join that Miami team. “The undefeated thing was cool,” he said after the 30-21 loss to the Bills, “but that’s not our ultimate goal.”
Kansas City’s ultimate goal is winning a third straight Super Bowl, but this Chiefs team, in its current form, doesn’t look capable of making that sort of history either. The Chiefs remain on track to win home-field advantage in the AFC playoffs and have an easy schedule down the stretch. But playing at Arrowhead throughout January won’t be enough if the offense doesn’t sort out its problems before then. Mahomes still hasn’t consistently found his deep ball. The Chiefs have the third-lowest explosive play rate on the season, per TruMedia, and it looks like Mahomes is starting to force the issue. He tied his season high on Sunday by attempting four passes of 20 or more air yards but hit on just one of them. Mahomes would have had another one if rookie wide receiver Xavier Worthy could’ve found the sideline, but the throw made it harder for him than it needed to be.
The game essentially ended with Mahomes throwing an interception on a forced deep ball late in the fourth quarter. It was his second pick of the game and his 11th on the season. The first pick came on his very first dropback of the game, when he climbed the pocket to escape pressure and looked to make a play out of structure. Instead, he floated a wobbler over the head of tight end Noah Gray that hit Buffalo safety Taylor Rapp right in the chest.
The interception total is concerning—he’s only three picks away from tying his season high, set last season—but Mahomes is playing good football. He’s still producing 99th-percentile tape every week—we’re just seeing one or two more mistakes now that the entire playmaking burden has fallen on his shoulders. Quarterback play is way down the list of Kansas City’s problems. The receiving corps is at the top of the list. DeAndre Hopkins has been a fine addition, but the Chiefs’ roster was already good on chain-moving pass catchers who’ve lost a step or two, with Travis Kelce and JuJu Smith-Schuster in the fridge at home. The Chiefs needed a field stretcher. Unless Marquise Brown returns for the postseason, which the team hasn’t ruled out as a possibility, it’ll need Worthy to make a giant leap in a small amount of time. Rashee Rice, who is out for the season, was able to make that leap a year ago and broke out in the playoffs, but he showed more promise as a downfield receiver at this point last year than Worthy has at the same point in his rookie season.
Steve Spagnuolo’s defense had been carrying the offense through the first 10 weeks of the season, but that approach is starting to show some cracks. After giving up 366 yards of offense to the Bills on Sunday, Kansas City’s defense now ranks outside the top 10 in expected points added and success rate. The Chiefs still do a good job of preventing points—Buffalo on Sunday was the first team to score 30 on them since 2022—but offenses are moving the ball on them, and they couldn’t get Josh Allen and the Bills off the field late in the fourth quarter when they needed a stop to give Mahomes a shot to win it.
The game-clinching play for Buffalo, a 26-yard fourth-down run by Allen, was the sort of play that has typically gone Kansas City’s way these past few seasons. The Chiefs defense always seems to make the stop, and Mahomes always leads the game-winning drive. This time, Allen wasn’t going to let that happen—even if he had to make a last-second change to the play. After the game, the Bills quarterback told CBS they had a man-coverage beater called, but the Chiefs dropped into zone coverage. Allen recognized it immediately and took off against the dropping defense.
It was an MVP-caliber moment that will help Allen make up ground on Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson in the race for the award. And it is the fourth time Allen has beaten Mahomes in the regular season, making Allen the only quarterback in the league who can make that claim. Even if Allen isn’t the best quarterback in the game, he can play like it on any given weekend.
With the win, Buffalo pulled within a game of Kansas City in the race for home-field advantage, but it will need a lot of help to close the gap completely. Though it might ultimately not make much of a difference in the final standings and playoff seedings, this win proved that the Chiefs are beatable, and the Bills are still on the short list of teams that can do it consistently.
Loser: John Harbaugh
This is the face of a coach who just watched his team commit 12 penalties, turn the ball over three times, miss two field goals, and botch a game-tying two-point conversion attempt in an 18-16 loss to its biggest rival.
There is no life behind Harbaugh’s eyes. His tolerance for painful, inexplicable losses has been built up over years of games that have played out exactly like Sunday’s loss to the Steelers. There were missed field goals by Justin Tucker (whose days as a great kicker appear to be over), drops by the receivers, missed throws by Lamar Jackson, fumbles, too many penalties, and a ridiculously unfortunate interception. We were a poorly timed Mark Andrews drop on third down away from hitting weird Ravens loss bingo.
This is already the third loss of the season that fits the mold. Baltimore gave away a Week 2 game against a bad Las Vegas team and couldn’t protect a late lead in Week 8 against a miserable Cleveland team. Of course, the Ravens have also blown games against good teams, as Jackson lamented after the game.
Indeed, these were familiar mistakes. The Ravens came into Sunday’s game as the NFL’s most penalized team and then committed another dozen against Pittsburgh. The pass defense had been busting coverages and giving up explosive plays all season before allowing Russell Wilson to complete a few of his trademark moon balls. Harbaugh deserves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his coaching. He’s a good coach … I think. But I don’t think the Ravens have been particularly well-coached this season.
The Ravens’ loss dropped them all the way down to the 6-seed line in the AFC standings and gave Pittsburgh sole possession of first place in the AFC North by 1.5 games. The division race is far from over. The Steelers still have to travel to Baltimore in Week 16 and have challenging games against the Eagles, Chiefs, and Bengals (twice) left on their schedule. The rematch in Baltimore very well could determine the division champion, and the Ravens should be a favorite in that one. But it won’t matter if they don’t play cleaner ball in the upcoming weeks, and it falls on Harbaugh to ensure that happens.
Loser: Doug Pederson
After his Jaguars got off to a 0-4 start to this season, Pederson was asked whether he was concerned about his job security. “That’s kind of a strange question,” Pederson said at the time, as if he hadn’t considered the possibility of losing his job as his seat grew hotter by the week. Two months later, that possibility feels more like an inevitability. Hours after NFL Media’s Ian Rapoport reported that “change could be coming” to Jacksonville if the Jags were embarrassed in Detroit, the Jags went out and got embarrassed in Detroit. I’d say the Jaguars quit on Sunday, but that implies Pederson’s team tried to begin with. The Lions scored touchdowns on their first seven possessions and set a franchise record with 645 yards of total offense in a 52-6 win. Mac Jones, starting his second game for Jacksonville in place of an injured Trevor Lawrence, managed only 138 passing yards and threw a pick. The Jaguars offense has scored just 13 points since Jones took over in Week 10. But somehow the defense was even worse on Sunday. It allowed Detroit’s offense to run, pass, and lateral its way up and down the field. The 46-point defeat was a new low for a franchise that’s had plenty of bad losses.
Lawrence’s injury was the nail in Pederson’s coaching coffin, and not solely because it would be harder to win games without Lawrence. It also exposed how rotten the core of Pederson’s offense (and team, really) has become over the past two years. The best offenses make things easier for the quarterback. Pederson’s has provided Lawrence, and now Jones, with almost no margin for error. The inefficient run game puts the quarterback in more obvious passing situations. The structure of the passing game rarely creates the opportunity for explosive plays, so scoring usually requires painstakingly long drives where one missed throw or one negative play often leads to a punt. Lawrence is good enough to make it work sometimes. A limited quarterback like Jones has almost no shot, as we’ve seen over the past two weeks.
The juxtaposition of Ben Johnson’s Detroit offense and the slop Pederson was serving certainly didn’t help matters for the embattled Jags coach. Johnson figures to be one of the leading candidates for any head coach opening in the offseason, and after watching how easy Johnson has made things for Jared Goff—with the help of the NFL’s best offensive line, of course—Jacksonville owner Shahid Khan has to be wondering how Lawrence would look in a similar setup. Lawrence apologists like myself would like to see it, at least.
While it’s easy to pin all of Jacksonville’s problems on Pederson’s outdated offense, the roster isn’t any good either. This has been an organizational failure. As an anonymous team source told Rapoport, “It’s everyone’s fault. Everyone plays a part in it.” That includes general manager Trent Baalke, who managed to survive the Urban Meyer era and has been given plenty of time, money to spend in free agency, and draft capital necessary to put a winning team around Lawrence. The team peaked in 2022 with a 9-8 record and a win in the wild-card round. Rapoport included Baalke in the “change” that could be coming after an embarrassing loss to the Lions, so Pederson isn’t the only one running out of time in Jacksonville.
Winner: Sean Payton
As a loud (and so far wrong) Sean Payton critic throughout the offseason, I will give myself an L here. The Broncos are a well-coached football team, and first-round pick QB Bo Nix has looked anywhere from serviceable to very good over the past month or so. Sunday’s win over the Falcons was Denver’s best offensive performance in years. The Broncos scored 38 points and Nix had four touchdown passes compared to just five incompletions. The rookie was impressive in his own right, but Payton’s play calling was the star of the show. A decent chunk of Nix’s production, including two of his touchdowns, came on quick, easy passes.
Nix’s average depth of target was just 3.6 yards per attempt. According to Next Gen Stats, Nix’s expected completion percentage for the game was 78 percent. That trailed only Washington’s Jayden Daniels this week. To Nix’s credit, he completed 85 percent of his passes, and when asked to throw deeper he made some genuinely impressive throws over the middle of the field. I still have some concerns about the rookie’s pocket presence, footwork, and accuracy, but he’s proven early on to be a good distributor who can create offense with his legs. If Payton can shore up some of Nix’s technical issues—which good coaching should take care of over time—Nix will make his coach look like a genius for defying the consensus draft boards and taking a chance on him in the first round. If that happens, Payton is going to talk an unbearable amount of shit while taking his well-earned victory lap.
Winner: Geno Smith
For the first 57 minutes, it looked like the Seahawks-49ers game would end like every other game Smith has started in this lopsided rivalry. Including their January 2023 wild-card playoff matchup, Seattle had lost six consecutive games to San Francisco, and Smith was the starting quarterback for five of them. With 2:38 left in Sunday’s game, Smith had just 167 passing yards with no touchdowns and an interception. Yet Seattle trailed by only four points, giving Smith a chance. He couldn’t erase all of his bad history against the Niners with one drive, but he could drastically improve the vibes for a Seattle team that has been fading since its 3-0 start to the season—and create the opposite effect for the team that’s tormented him for the past few years.
Smith responded with one of the best drives of his career. Outside of a missed throw to DK Metcalf, Smith was basically perfect. He made throws to the perimeter. He made throws over the middle. When receivers didn’t get open, he took off on big scrambles, including the game-winning score with 12 seconds remaining.
This was the kind of drive that can win over a fan base that’s still understandably unconvinced that Smith is the long-term answer at quarterback. Smith’s impressive numbers somehow undersell how much he has meant to the team this year as it’s worked through injuries and an inconsistent start for Mike Macdonald’s defense.
The win keeps Seattle’s playoff hopes alive, and if the team can beat Arizona at home next week, it could be in first place in the NFC West before Thanksgiving. That would be a quick and stunning turnaround for a team that was written off after losing five of its previous six games heading into Week 11. Of course, though, that’s never stopped Geno before.
Loser: Matt Eberflus
Chicago head coach Matt Eberflus has perfected the art of turning sure wins into devastating losses. Three weeks after the Bears lost on a Hail Mary against Washington, they gave away another game on the final play. This time, it was a blocked field goal attempt by Cairo Santos as time expired in a 20-19 loss to the Packers.
Maybe it’s harsh to blame Eberflus for that, but he could have made things easier for Santos and chose not to. Caleb Williams got Chicago to the Green Bay 30-yard line with 48 seconds on the clock with one timeout remaining. The Bears were content to let the clock run until Green Bay called a timeout with 35 seconds left. After a run by Roschon Johnson for a measly 2 yards, Eberflus let the clock run down to three seconds to set up the doomed attempt. Packers players told ESPN’s Kalyn Kahler they had noticed on film that Santos was kicking with a low trajectory—and even they expected the Bears to try to gain more yards to make the kick shorter. I’d be more willing to cut Eberflus some slack if he hadn’t seen the Jaguars block a Santos kick from a similar range in a Week 6 win over Jacksonville.
It was another brutal loss for Bears fans to stomach, but seeing Williams bounce back after a tough week should help a bit. Interim offensive coordinator Thomas Brown, who took over play calling duties after Shane Waldron was fired earlier this week, didn’t make significant changes to the structure of the offense, but the small tweaks seem to work—for at least one Sunday. Brown got Williams more involved in the run game, he designed efficient touches for DJ Moore, and largely kept the Packers’ pass rush off his rookie quarterback. Williams’s average time to throw was 2.97 seconds, slightly slower than last week, but significantly faster than he was delivering the ball in losses to Washington and Arizona. When he wasn’t getting the ball out of his hands quickly, he was hitting the ejector-seat button in a more timely manner. He came into the week leading the NFL with an average time to scramble of 6.44 seconds, per Pro Football Focus. That number will come down after Williams was more decisive against Green Bay. The day should have ended with a game-winning drive for Williams, who made a few clutch plays down the stretch to put Chicago in position to win.
Those plays, and Williams’s encouraging game, were ultimately wasted as Chicago fell to 4-6 on the season. Had the Bears just been able to defend the Hail Mary against Washington and make the kick against Green Bay on Sunday, they’d be sitting at 6-4 and in line for a wild-card spot. Eberflus hasn’t made too many egregious mistakes that have led to the devastating losses this season, but he’s made just enough small mistakes to give away the wins.
Winner: Anthony Richardson
Rejoice, football fans. Anthony Richardson’s monster performance for the Colts in a 28-27 win over the Jets ensures that we won’t be subjected to Joe Flacco’s quarterbacking anytime soon. Sunday marked the best game of Richardson’s young career. The second-year QB completed 66.7 percent of his passes, averaged 0.24 EPA per dropback, and finished with a success rate of 47 percent. All of those numbers were season highs for Richardson. He also scored twice on the ground, including this bulldozing run for the game-winning touchdown.
Richardson’s return from his odd benching gave the Colts’ run game a boost, as expected. His success through the air was a little more surprising. Richardson finished 9-of-13 on passes of 10 or more air yards. Those nine completions went for 185 yards, including a beautiful ball to Alec Pierce down the sideline to provide a spark on the go-ahead drive before Richardson capped it off with the TD run.
Accuracy has been an issue for Richardson since he arrived in the NFL, but it wasn’t an issue on Sunday, when the best parts of his game were able to shine. He has the talent to develop into a star quarterback. That’s easy to see when you turn on the film. It’s the off-the-field work we don’t see that could ultimately determine whether this game is a sign of things to come for the Colts quarterback or just another flash of his unharnessed ability. Both Rapoport and Adam Schefter reported Sunday that the benching had to do with concerns about Richardson’s “punctuality” and “preparation.”
After the game, Richardson said he wanted to show his teammates that his “preparation is still there,” which lends credence to those reports. If losing his job to Flacco was the wake-up call he needed, I suppose us having to sit through those two games was worth it for this more watchable version of Richardson.
