The NFL’s unbridled quest to dominate the calendar took a massive step forward on Wednesday, with two games featuring four AFC contenders, approximately 400 analysts (give or take), questionable-looking cake footballs and giant red jackets … and Beyoncé. A day later, we’re still thinking about that halftime show, but the football was important too: the Chiefs locked up the no. 1 seed in the AFC with their win over Pittsburgh, and Lamar Jackson burst back into the MVP race. Here are the takeaways from the NFL’s Christmas Day slate.
Lamar Jackson sprinted back into the MVP race
Back in Week 11, the MVP race shifted. On November 17, Lamar Jackson and the Ravens lost a mess of a game to the Steelers in Pittsburgh, while Buffalo handed Kansas City its first and only loss of the season. From that moment on, Bills quarterback Josh Allen became the MVP front-runner. I understand why that happened, because after Allen beat Patrick Mahomes, he followed it up by going Superman in the snow against the 49ers and producing huge performances against the Rams and Lions.
But on Christmas Day, Lamar Jackson re-entered the MVP conversation in a big way, reminding the rest of the NFL that he stands alone as the best athlete at the most important position in football.
Because Jackson improved so much as a passer over the last few seasons, we don’t get to see him open up his stride and run anymore, testing the limits of his speed. Jackson has just two runs where he hit at least 20 mph the last two years—and one of those was on Wednesday, on his 48-yard touchdown run that effectively slammed the door on the Texans in the third quarter. It came out of a formation that was reminiscent of the Greg Roman days in Baltimore, with tight ends Isaiah Likely and Mark Andrews, and fullback Patrick Ricard joining Jackson in the backfield. As soon as Jackson pulled the ball to keep it himself, you knew something special was coming. Likely, Andrews, and Ricard each executed their blocks and Jackson went untouched.
Later in the third quarter, Jackson passed Michael Vick as the all-time leading rusher among quarterbacks, accomplishing the feat in 41 fewer games (but over 100 more attempts). It’s worth emphasizing that Jackson won’t turn 28 until next month, leaving plenty of time for him to create an inconceivable distance between him and the dual-threat quarterbacks in generations to come.
But Jackson also has a convincing case to win his third MVP based only on his play as a dropback passer this season. He works through his progression and hunts for chunk plays as efficiently as any quarterback you’ll come across in this sport, and if the throw he wants isn’t there, he’ll dance around and extend outside of the pocket like the NFL is a flag football league.
Jackson is at a point where he is nearly unstoppable on a down-to-down basis, and that should put him in conversation with some of the best to ever play, not just the best to play this season. He has a unique gravity, demanding so much respect as a runner and passer that Baltimore’s opponents can’t even defend running back Derrick Henry the way they’d want to, as was the case Wednesday for the Texans, as Henry rushed for 147 yards and a touchdown. Henry is seeing a career low in rush rates against an eight-man box and a career high in yards per carry. He’s never run for so many yards before contact, and it’s because teams can’t fit every gap out of fear that Jackson will do to every defense what he did to Houston with his legs. If defenses do sell out to take both options away, the play-action pass is coming. Only Jared Goff has been more effective by expected points added on those throws this season than Jackson. Houston was out of answers for Jackson by the end of the first quarter, and if he keeps up this level of play there won’t be any more questions to ask about whether he can win on the biggest stage.
It’s a mistake to play overly aggressive defense against Kansas City
I’m not entirely sure what opposing defensive coaches are seeing on film when they prepare for the Chiefs, but I’m continually floored by the amount of man coverages that have been thrown at Patrick Mahomes over the last few weeks. Pittsburgh was at the tail end of a brutal stretch of three games in 11 days, and I want to give Steelers defensive coordinator Teryl Austin some grace under those circumstances—but the Steelers’ man-heavy game plan set themselves up for failure.
Just like in Kansas City’s win over the Texans last week, the Chiefs used motion and condensed formations against the Steelers to pick on mismatches and create traffic for defenders to run through. Tight end Travis Kelce arguably had his most productive day of the season, with 84 yards and a touchdown on 11 targets. His 2.63 yards per route was his second-highest mark of the season, and his connection with Mahomes is at its best when defenses try to play tight man coverage against him. He leads the team in yards against man coverage this year, and the Chiefs rank third in the NFL by success rate against man coverage.
Mahomes’s injured right ankle looks just fine, by the way. He didn’t scramble much on Wednesday, but he navigated the pocket by getting the ball out quickly (with an assist from right tackle Jawaan Taylor holding his ass off and getting away with it for most of the game). Mahomes’s 2.41-second average time to throw was his fastest this year, and this Chiefs offense doesn’t have to exchange explosiveness for efficiency when it’s facing the style of defense it’s designed to exploit.
I’m not ready to say that all is fixed for the Chiefs’ passing game quite yet, but it’s clear this offense is healthy and playing its best ball in December. The return of speedy receiver Hollywood Brown isn’t a panacea, but it makes explosive plays easy to come by. Rookie Xavier Worthy wasn’t ready for a large role within the offense, and it's easier to play to Worthy’s speed when he’s the third or fourth option. Veteran DeAndre Hopkins hasn’t been the bona fide perimeter threat the Chiefs needed when they traded for him earlier this season, but he still complements this skill position group well. In many ways, this Chiefs team reminds me of the 2018 Cleveland Cavaliers; they’ve surrounded Mahomes with just enough competence and are allowing GOATness to carry them over the finish line, just like LeBron James did for the Cavs.
After this win over Pittsburgh, all routes to Super Bowl 59 go through Arrowhead Stadium in the AFC. With the no. 1 seed locked up, Kansas City can choose to rest its starters against Denver in Week 18 and get a bye during the wild-card round before they attempt to defend their title. With the way the Chiefs offense has been improving, and the mistakes opposing defenses continue to use against them, we should get some tremendous theater this postseason.
Beyoncé is the greatest unifying force in pop culture—and the real MVP of Christmas Day football.
With all due respect to Lamar Jackson, he wasn’t the biggest star on Christmas Day. Beyoncé was the real MVP.
Growing up, my parents were the only ones in our network of family and friends with DirecTV (and thus, NFL Sunday Ticket), so our house became the Football House, the gathering spot for all of us to watch games and the accompanying pageantry of the NFL. I’ve witnessed all sorts of renditions of the national anthem and countless halftime shows with as diverse an audience as you’ll come across in one house. I’ve never experienced a quiet come over the entire home like it did during Beyoncé’s performance on Christmas Day. My mother turned her back on me mid-conversation, my dad closed his laptop for the first time all day, children in that crowded living room were hushed, and I swear I didn’t hear anyone exhale until Beyoncé dismounted her horse after the introduction.
The intent of her halftime performance was to write a love letter to her hometown, and we got it in spades: early '80s Cadillacs with elbows; the nod to Mike Jones’s “Still Tippin’” in the transition from “16 Carriages” to “Blackbiird”; an appearance by Texas Southern’s marching band, and the floral decorations on carriages that paid respect to Houston’s Juneteenth parades. Feel how you want about Cowboy Carter and its place in Beyoncé’s wider discography, but the live renditions of these songs are incredible, and they resonated differently with the surrounding aesthetics.
With every performance, the gap between Beyoncé and her contemporaries grows and her distance from Michael Jackson as greatest live performer shrinks proportionally. Frankly, it’s not a fair fight in either direction—every bit of Beyoncé’s performances sell perfection and unattainability at a scale so grand it would be immersion-breaking for any other act. That she still carries a sense of connection to her core audience speaks to something she’s done better than any other star of this magnitude: reminding us of her upbringing as a regular easygoing East Texas girl with talent and a dream. It’s a distinctly American story, and still true, hundreds of millions of dollars and records sold later.
As a former athlete, current coach, NFL media member, and unabashed Beyoncé fan, it's remarkable to watch an icon pursue all-time greatness. Nearly all of the pop/R&B performers who broke out in the late '90s have long since transitioned into legacy acts. There’s no next Beyoncé, and there’s nothing left for her to accomplish in the music business besides a Grammy for Album of the Year. By all accounts, I should be ready for her to enter her legacy era, but in an age of sports that’s shown us LeBron James, Tom Brady, Serena Williams, Simone Biles, and Katie Ledecky refusing to loosen their grip toward the ends of their careers, I can admire a superstar in her mid-40s making it a point to prove that she’s better than everyone—at everything.
Last year, Taylor Swift’s presence at football games gave fathers and their daughters permission to interface with each other’s passions—and there was an ironic but endearing connection to be made between the sycophantic and parasocial relationships on both ends of that discussion. Beyoncé has been that unifying force since the early 2000s in Black music, and it's grown over the last decade. Every man I know has a Beyoncé song they sing without inhibition in private, and don’t let them convince you otherwise; I’m partial to “Me, Myself and I” and Destiny Child’s “Say My Name” remix, produced by Timbaland. Watching the men in our house bob their heads to her cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene,” and the women two-step to “Texas Hold 'Em” on Christmas punctuated that nobody brings people together like Bey.
The NFL and Netflix went overboard to make Christmas football happen
I can barely coordinate my colors, so don’t take any fashion advice from me. But Netflix’s victory jackets didn’t give St. Nick as much as a failed attempt at high fashion. Maybe they should reject modernity and embrace the tradition of an ugly sweater next time. Mahomes and Jackson would have looked way less ridiculous in silly reindeer and melting snowflakes than they did in those oversized coats. Also, if the footballs given to the star players from the winning team were going to be edible, how did Netflix not lean harder into an Is It Cake? crossover? Cracking open the cake with your bare hands made the red velvet dessert look half as appetizing as I’m sure it was. It would have been far more entertaining to make Travis Kelce guess which football was real and which was cake by slicing into it with a knife.
Overall, Netflix’s execution of the Christmas production was much more clunky than the video quality itself—which ended up being as pristine as streaming NFL Sunday Ticket on a given weekend. Nate Burleson and J.J. Watt were just vibin’ in the booth as Ian Eagle tried to deliver play-by-play calls to match the gravity of two brands as large as Kansas City and Pittsburgh facing off late in the season. I found the latter pairing of Noah Eagle and Greg Olsen was much better, even though the second game was a wire-to-wire beatdown.
The pregame studio set was quite crowded, with host Kay Adams and ESPN’s Mina Kimes and Manti Te’o and Robert Griffin III. At one point Drew Brees was there too, but he was long gone by dinner time. And there was yet another set on the field in Pittsburgh with Devin and Jason McCourty. Any ex-player analyst who wanted to work on Christmas seemingly had an option to do so on Netflix’s streaming platform. There’s got to be a way to reconfigure the mix of analysts if the Christmas Day games become the NFL’s big production blowout going forward, because nobody Netflix brought in had enough air space to do what they do best.
If there’s one thing that did work in all of this, it was siphoning energy away from basketball—which seems to be the NFL’s larger goal here. The NFL lured its fans (and Beyoncé’s fans) away from terrestrial viewing where NBA games were broadcast and onto Netflix on Christmas. There was some excellent basketball played throughout the day, but the NFL gave us Patrick Mahomes, Lamar Jackson, a national brand in the Steelers, and the greatest live performer of this era. LeBron James can say this is the NBA’s day, but if the NFL is going to go big like this, I’m not sure how the NBA can truly fight back against Big Football.
Of course, this means the NFL is going to continue down this path. We should get used to Christmas football, no matter what day of the week the holiday lands on—Fridays or Tuesdays are now probably on the table. With an 18-game regular season on the not-too-distant horizon, the NFL is putting itself in position to dominate the sports calendar from Labor Day to President’s Day weekend. I love football more than anyone I know, but it’s a struggle to see the league trade what was ritualistic for maximum revenue with such craven drive. If anyone was looking for proof that the ownership class in this league is run by second-generation billionaires and venture capitalists, it’s right in front of our face, masquerading as more chances to see our favorite teams play.
But, however begrudgingly, I know that I’m ready for some more football. See you again on Sunday.
