Welcome to NFL Under Review, a weekly column where I will sound off on misguided narratives, inexplicable coaching decisions, and other topics around the NFL. Each Tuesday throughout the season, you’ll get my takes on the biggest stories in the league, with an eye on what’s to come. This week, we’re looking at the Giants’ decision to (finally) bench Daniel Jones, Sean Payton’s excellent coaching job, Sean McDermott’s solid late-game decision-making, and why I don’t think it’s a foregone conclusion that the Cowboys move on from Mike McCarthy after this season.
I’m not convinced this is it for Mike McCarthy.
The Dallas Cowboys lost a football game Monday night. As far as recent, lopsided, embarrassing Cowboys losses go, this one barely registers. Oh sure, a piece of metal fell from the roof before the game, and the Cowboys lost 34-10, and Texans fans took over AT&T Stadium. But hey, the Cowboys were starting Cooper Rush at quarterback and were big underdogs and were kind of competitive for three quarters. That’s got to count for something, right? At 3-7, the Cowboys’ 2024 season is dead. But we knew that already. What we don’t know is their plan for 2025 and beyond.
Mike McCarthy is in the final year of his contract. Most people assumed that if this season didn’t go well, Jerry Jones would make a change at head coach. But I’m not so sure about that. For Jones, the priority doesn’t actually seem to be building a Super Bowl contender. Sure, that’d be nice. But really, it’s about Jones enjoying his experience as the owner of the Dallas freakin’ Cowboys. That means employing a coach who understands the setup. Someone who isn’t going to challenge him. Someone who isn’t going to ask for influence on personnel decisions. Someone who is going to be OK with Jones holding media scrums after every game and saying weird things during his weekly radio appearances. Head coach of the Cowboys is not a job for everyone, and it very well might not be a job that attracts the top candidates on the market.
Which brings us back to McCarthy. Returning really doesn’t feel that far-fetched. Remember, we have precedent here. Jones stuck with Jason Garrett for 152 games over 10 seasons, even though Garrett produced only two playoff wins. Why? Not because Jones thought Garrett was the best man for the job, but because he was seemingly comfortable with Garrett as his head coach. Jones could easily rationalize bringing McCarthy back. He could explain that only the Chiefs won more regular-season games than the Cowboys from 2021 to 2023. That the team was hit with the injury bug and got unlucky in 2024. That McCarthy is still the best man for the job and just needs some more time to work with Dak Prescott to get them over the hump. Admit it, you can totally see this happening, can’t you? Listen, I’m not saying it’s definitely going to play out this way, but when you hear the McCarthy discourse in the weeks and months ahead, just remember: In Dallas, it’s not about winning. It’s about Jerry. That’s the one thing that’s not going to change.
Sean Payton still has his fastball.
It brings me no joy to tell you this. I’m sure you find Payton smug. Maybe even arrogant. Maybe even a little (a lot?) annoying. He seems to think he’s god’s gift to football, and he will tell you that he thinks he’s god’s gift to football. So unless you are a Denver Broncos fan, you were probably hoping that his second run as an NFL head coach was going to fail in spectacular fashion. And for a while, it seemed like that’s where this thing was headed. Last season was a mess, and then Payton spent the 12th pick in the draft on an over-aged quarterback in Bo Nix. All the pieces were in place for disaster. It was just a matter of time before we could point and laugh and hit Payton with, “I guess you’re not as brilliant as you think!”
But here’s the problem: Payton actually is an excellent coach. And he’s proving it once again. On Sunday, the man was in his bag. The Broncos went up and down the field with ease, scoring touchdowns on four of their first five possessions en route to a 38-6 victory over the Falcons. Everything that Payton dialed up seemed to work. Nix looked like he had been operating this offense for a decade. He was in full command, ripping throws to the middle of the field and completing 28-of-33 passes for 307 yards and four touchdowns. Based on expected points added (EPA) per drive, this was by far the Broncos’ best offensive performance of the season, and their second-best offensive performance out of the 142 games the team has played since Peyton Manning retired.
I generally evaluate coaches by the “more with less” principle. Can they get a team to outperform the individual talent on the roster? Would a better coach be able to do more? Would a worse coach do less? By any objective measure, Payton (with an assist from defensive coordinator Vance Joseph!) is passing this test. The Broncos’ preseason win total was 5.5. At 6-5, the over has already hit. The defense has led the way, but the offense is now up to 19th in efficiency. That might not seem like some kind of amazing accomplishment, but given the lack of blue-chip talent across the roster and the fact that Payton is breaking in a rookie quarterback, it’s hard to make the case that this group is leaving any meat on the bone.
The most important thing is Nix’s improvement. He looks like a different guy than we saw early in the season. Simply put, player development is part of good coaching. I’m not telling you that the Broncos are a Super Bowl contender, but they are 100 percent exceeding expectations. And Payton deserves the credit—even if you’d never admit it to his face.
Take the points? The Bills didn’t, and it helped them beat the Chiefs.
Help me out. I’m looking for Take the Points Guy (TTPG). You know who I mean. Any time a team fails to convert a fourth down in the red zone, he shows up, telling you how stupid the coach was for the decision, how analytics is ruining football, how those little charts and models don’t take into account the opponent or the game situation or the weather. (Note: they do in fact take all of those things into account.) Normally I like to engage in a little back-and-forth with TTPG. But he was nowhere to be found on Sunday evening during the Bills’ win over the Chiefs. I just hope everything’s OK with him and his family.
You see, the Bills faced a crucial fourth-and-2 at the Kansas City 26-yard line with 2:17 left in a game they were leading 23-21. Head coach Sean McDermott could have sent Tyler Bass out for a field goal attempt. Had Bass made it, the Bills would have gone up 26-21 and forced the Chiefs to drive the length of the field for a touchdown in a short amount of time. But that decision would have put the game in Patrick Mahomes’s hands, which, as the Bills know better than anyone, is never a good idea. So McDermott decided to go for it, putting the ball in the hands of his best player, Josh Allen. The initial play call didn’t work, but Allen went into creation mode when the play broke down and scored on an epic 26-yard touchdown run. His score put the Bills up 30-21 and ended any hope the Chiefs had for a comeback.
You know what the discourse would have been had that fourth-down decision not worked out, don’t you? McDermott blew it! Why’d he outsmart himself? Kick the field goal and put the pressure on the Chiefs! TAKE THE POINTS! But when the aggressive decision works out, we largely ignore it. When the aggressive decision fails, we rip the coach and blame analytics. Here’s the thing: coaches know this. And while they want to win games, they also don’t want to get slammed by the media and their fans and maybe even the team’s owner or the front office. So they often go with the traditional “low-risk” decision. McDermott, however, didn’t do that in a huge moment. He went for the win, and it paid off. But even if it didn’t pay off, it still would have been the correct decision.
Unfortunately for head coaches, they don’t get to know the result before they have to make their choice. Hold on a sec. I just found TTPG. Oh, he says he knew that this was the right time to go for it. It was a no-brainer. Couldn’t have been any more obvious. It’s funny—every time I talk to him after the fact, he always knew what the right decision was. The guy’s got an impeccable track record. These are often 50-50 decisions, but he’s literally never been wrong. An NFL team might want to look into hiring him.
Anyway, congrats to the Bills. Their process was sound, they weren’t afraid to fail, and they were rewarded.
The Chiefs have an explosive play problem.
Happy “What’s wrong with the Chiefs?” Week to all who celebrate. It’s happening a little later this year than usual. (I think that has something to do with the lunar calendar?) Sure, some people tried to get ahead of it in October and even September, but given that the team started out 9-0, the movement didn’t pick up a lot of followers. In Week 11, though, the Chiefs finally lost a game, 30-21 to the Bills in Buffalo. It was just the fifth time in 124 games with Mahomes as the starter that they lost by more than eight points—just a 4 percent occurrence! So now we get to have the discussion.
Let’s first establish some context. The Chiefs are not a juggernaut, but at 9-1, they still have the best record in the AFC and are tied with the Lions for the best record in the NFL. They are fifth in DVOA. They are second in Super Bowl odds (to the Lions) and first in the AFC. They are on the short list of favorites to hoist the Lombardi.
Having said that, the Chiefs have flaws, and they are not as dominant as they’ve been in previous seasons. The Chiefs are 10th in point differential at plus-49, and they are an NFL-best 7-0 in games decided by seven points or fewer. So what are the areas where they might not be quite as strong as they were in the past? The defense isn’t the issue. Last season, the Chiefs finished seventh in defensive DVOA—their best ranking of the Mahomes era. This season, they are also seventh. What about special teams? Yup, that’s a good one. They’ve seen a dropoff there. The Chiefs are 18th in special teams DVOA this season. They were sixth last season.
And then we get to everyone’s favorite topic: the Chiefs offense. They rank eighth in DVOA, second in success rate, and seventh in EPA per drive. Those three metrics tell us different things. DVOA, for example, takes into account the strength of the defenses they’re going up against. Success rate tells us how often the Chiefs produce a positive play, but it gives less weight to things like turnovers and explosive plays. In other words, a 4-yard completion on third-and-10 is treated the same as an interception. Both are deemed unsuccessful plays. And finally, EPA takes things like turnovers and explosive plays into account, but it doesn’t factor for the strength of the opponents.
The most interesting thing to me about the Chiefs is that their success rate through 11 weeks (47.3 percent) is nearly identical to their average success rate with Mahomes from 2018 to 2023 (47.6 percent). On any given snap, their likelihood to produce a positive play is pretty much the same as it’s always been. If you’re a Chiefs fan, that’s good news. This offense isn’t broken. This season, only the Lions are more likely to produce a positive play on any given snap.
Now, the bad news. The Chiefs’ explosive play rate is a disaster. The Chiefs are producing an explosive play on just 8.4 percent of their snaps. That ranks tied for 29th—ahead of only the Raiders and the Giants. If we look at just explosive pass plays, they rank 24th. And on run plays, they rank 32nd. No team is less likely than the Chiefs to produce an explosive play on the ground. Last year, the Chiefs ranked 16th in explosive play rate—21st on pass plays and ninth on run plays. The other issue plaguing this offense is turnovers. The Chiefs rank 24th in EPA lost on turnovers.
The bottom line is that the Chiefs offense still works on a down-to-down basis. But because of the lack of explosives and the turnovers, they are losing in high-leverage spots, and their margin for error has shrunk. Is this going to continue the rest of the way? It doesn’t have to. Maybe getting Isiah Pacheco back will lead to more big gains on the ground. Maybe rookie wide receiver Xavier Worthy will get more opportunities downfield. Maybe Mahomes’s chemistry with DeAndre Hopkins will continue to improve. And if none of those things happen, guess what? They can still get to the Super Bowl playing this methodical style. That’s the luxury of having Mahomes. So I see the flaws. I acknowledge the flaws. But my overall panic level is low.
The Giants Botched the Daniel Jones Situation.
It’s generally not a good thing when you receive a message about an NFL team and you’re not sure if it’s real or not. That was me on Monday afternoon when I first got the news that the Giants were turning to Tommy Cutlets (Tommy DeVito) as their new starting quarterback. That doesn’t make sense, I thought. Didn’t they sign Drew Lock to a $5 million deal to be QB2 in the offseason? Then I remembered that this is the Giants we’re talking about. Nonsensical moves have become the norm with them. Just look at the decision they made to extend Daniel Jones in the first place.
I try to avoid hindsight bias. That’s not what this is—I swear. Back in March of 2023, I was one of many who thought that signing Jones to a four-year, $160 million contract (with $81 million guaranteed) was a mistake. Jones had one year of competency at that point. The Giants admitted as much when they declined his fifth-year option the previous offseason. But after a fun 2022 season in which the Giants snuck into the playoffs and won a wild-card game, they couldn’t help themselves, even though they had a very simple alternative: the franchise tag. The Giants could have (and should have) tagged Jones. That would have meant a one-year commitment, a chance to see if he could build on the 2022 showing, and then they could make a long-term decision. If 2023 looked more like his first three seasons than 2022 (spoiler: it did!), you move on. The Giants’ explanation at the time was that the tag would have limited them in building out the rest of the roster because of salary cap implications. How’d that work out? Did they build a juggernaut around Jones? I didn’t think so.
So instead, the Giants went through the whole charade. Jones played poorly in 2023. The Giants did a whole Hard Knocks season in which cameras documented how they tried (and failed) to land a quarterback in the 2024 draft. Seahawks GM John Schneider did a hilarious radio interview in which he mentioned that Lock was leaving Seattle for the Giants in part because he’d get to compete for the starting job. Yet after all that, Week 1 rolled around and there was Jones as QB1. He lasted 10 games before getting benched (in which the Giants went 2-8), and now he’ll almost certainly never play for them again.
The Giants made a foolish financial decision by signing Jones to that extension in the first place. And now they don’t want to make a bad situation worse. If Jones were to play and get injured, $23 million of his contract for 2025 would become fully guaranteed. The Giants don’t want to take that risk, and given that he’s played poorly and they’re essentially out of playoff contention, they’re moving on. If it feels like the organization has changed its mind on Jones every season, well, that’s precisely what has happened.
The Giants do a great job marketing themselves as a buttoned-up, competent, classy organization. It’s really a remarkable PR job. They want you to go laugh at the Jets and leave them alone. But the truth is there hasn’t been a whole lot differentiating the two franchises over the last decade. The Jets have won 54 games in the last 10 seasons; that ranks 31st ahead of only the Jaguars. The Giants? They’ve won just two more games (56)—tied with the Browns for third fewest.
We’ll see what happens after the season and whether they make changes to the front office or coaching staff. The cupboard isn’t completely bare. Dexter Lawrence leads a defensive line that has talent. Andrew Thomas is an excellent left tackle when healthy. And it looks like the Giants hit on rookie wide receiver Malik Nabers. But once again, they’re going to have a quarterback problem. And given how the Giants handled the Jones situation, there’s little reason to think they’re going to have a good plan for coming up with a solution this time around.
