Welcome to NFL Under Review, a weekly column where I sound off on misguided narratives, inexplicable coaching decisions, and other topics around the NFL with an eye on what’s to come. With the playoffs and hiring cycle underway, this week I’m looking at one offense that needs to improve in the divisional round, one quarterback who should be on the move in free agency, and three of the more intriguing coaching situations in the NFL.
The Eagles’ passing game has to get better (I think).
The Eagles are a hard team to talk about right now. On the one hand, they almost never lose. They followed up a 14-3 regular season with a 22-10 win over the Packers in the wild-card round and are favorites in their divisional-round matchup against the Rams. On the other, there have been many weeks this season when I’ve watched their passing game and thought: How are they winning with this? It happened again on Sunday afternoon when they managed just 121 net passing yards against Green Bay.
This wasn’t a one-game thing, either. The Eagles finished the regular season ranked 14th in passing DVOA—their lowest ranking for any season since Jalen Hurts became the starter in 2021. They run a low volume of passing concepts. They major in predictability and lack creativity. And it feels like the aggressiveness has been coached out of Hurts. In previous seasons, if he thought wide receiver A.J. Brown had a chance to win a one-on-one matchup, Hurts would take a downfield shot. But after a rash of turnovers in the early part of the season, Hurts has seemingly prioritized avoiding mistakes over everything else. Against a Packers defense that was playing without its best cornerback in Jaire Alexander, Hurts attempted just one pass that traveled more than 20 yards downfield. And when you consider that, historically, he doesn’t like to target the middle of the field, you have to wonder: What’s left to try? The combination of stale scheme and conservative quarterback play has been tough to watch.
And yet …
I know what you’re saying right now: But isn’t it working? THEY ARE WITHIN TWO GAMES OF GETTING TO THE SUPER BOWL! And you could be right. That’s what makes this team so interesting. They are walking a delicate line by playing this way. Don’t believe me? After recording a recent episode of The Ringer’s Philly Special, I found myself wondering whether we had spent too much time talking about the struggles of the passing game given that the team had won. So I looked up the past 10 years of postseason games to try to put Hurts’s performance in context. Out of a sample of 224 games, Hurts’s wild-card performance ranked tied for 205th in dropback success rate—a metric that measures how often a passing play produces a positive outcome for the offense. There have been only 15 examples in the past 10 seasons of a quarterback having a worse success rate in a playoff game, and guess what? All 15 of those quarterbacks lost! In case you’re not following: That Eagles game Sunday featured the least efficient passing performance by a quarterback whose team won a playoff game in the past 10 years!
So … my conclusion? Yeah, it’s OK to be concerned. The Eagles have the best defense in the NFL. They have a great offensive line. They have a deep roster of skill-position players like Brown, Saquon Barkley, DeVonta Smith, and Dallas Goedert. Seasons with a collection of talent like this don’t come around often, and the roster will look different next season. We can debate who is to blame for the struggles of the passing game—Hurts, offensive coordinator Kellen Moore, head coach Nick Sirianni, or a combination of all of them—but we can all agree that a passing game this bland is inexcusable given how good the supporting cast is.
Maybe the Eagles will keep winning, even with a passing game that’s up and down, and everyone will laugh about how they never solved their problems, but it didn’t matter because the other aspects of the team were so good. Or maybe the passing game will improve, and they’ll prove to be the best team in football. Both of those things are certainly in play.
But there’s another possible outcome too: one in which they fail to win the Super Bowl, or even get there, and everyone admits that the limiting factor was right in front of them all along.
It’s time for the Vikings to say goodbye to Sam Darnold.
I’m not trying to pile on. Darnold was one of the feel-good stories of this season. Even the emotionally unavailable, like me, must have felt something watching Darnold’s teammates mob him after the Vikings’ win over the Packers in Week 17. But I expect that the Vikings will take a deep breath following their early playoff exit and realize that it’s time to move forward with their original plan and hand the keys over to 2024 first-round pick J.J. McCarthy.
This isn’t just about how the season ended, although obviously that has to be a factor. The Week 18 game against the Lions had huge stakes; the Vikings would either get the 1-seed and the bye or have to go on the road in the first round. And in that massive game, Darnold delivered a 5th-percentile performance based on expected points added per pass play. He was terrible. But many people [raises hand] saw that as one bad game and expected him to bounce back in the playoffs. That did not happen. Against the Rams on Monday night, Darnold delivered a 7th-percentile game based on EPA per pass play. His two worst games of the season came when the lights were the brightest. And these performances weren’t just kind of bad. Statistically, they were among the worst games any quarterback played all season.
If we zoom out for a bigger sample, the numbers tell us that the Vikings didn’t have a great passing attack in the regular season. It was slightly above average, ranking 12th in DVOA. Back in Week 14, I wrote that the Vikings couldn’t make the same mistake with Darnold that the Giants made with Daniel Jones. Specifically, they couldn’t go overboard and pay him big money based on a one-season sample given how much he had struggled previously in his career. Darnold then went on a heater and made me rethink my stance, but then he turned in two clunkers in January.
The truth is that Darnold exceeded any expectations that a reasonable person could have had for him this season. From 2018 to 2023, 39 quarterbacks attempted at least 1,000 passes. Among that sample, Darnold ranked dead last in EPA per pass play. There were moments and games in which he looked competent in that span, but he had literally never played a full season in which he performed anywhere even close to average. What he accomplished in 2024 was a major upset. Now he can go somewhere else and see whether he can build on this season.
For the Vikings, it’s time to move on. McCarthy is on a rookie deal. They have excellent pass catching options and a good offensive play caller in Kevin O’Connell (although he too didn’t have his best moments down the stretch). And they can take a flier on a veteran quarterback for insurance. In other words, they can look for the next version of Darnold—someone who can provide competency at a relatively low cost. There was a scenario here where Darnold could have made the Vikings’ decision a lot harder. Had he played well in the postseason and taken the Vikings to the Super Bowl (or even the NFC championship game), Minnesota would have had to consider moving forward with him. But that didn’t play out, and now the decision is clear: It’s time to move on with the original plan.
Mike Vrabel has two huge items on his to-do list.
Patriots fans are pumped. And they should be. Drake Maye had an impressive debut season. Among 31 qualifying rookie seasons over the past 10 years, Maye’s 2024 performance ranked fourth in dropback success rate. That’s especially encouraging considering that Maye should never again be surrounded by such a lackluster supporting cast. The Patriots are now pairing Maye with an experienced head coach in Mike Vrabel, and on paper, that looks like a strong foundation.
But Vrabel has two big moves he still has to make that will likely determine how successful he’ll be in New England:
- Find an offensive coordinator that can maximize Maye’s potential.
- Demand a front-office setup that actually makes sense.
The Patriots’ path to sustained winning is mostly straightforward: Put the right pieces in place to maximize Maye’s potential. So, if you’re Vrabel, how do you do that? One, you have to find an offensive schemer/play caller who gives the team an edge. I like the CEO-style, culture-building head coach archetype as much as the next person. But with that setup, you have to nail the offensive coordinator hire. Vrabel’s best seasons in Tennessee came with Arthur Smith as his offensive coordinator. Smith’s offenses with Ryan Tannehill, Derrick Henry, and A.J. Brown were among the best in the NFL. Then Smith left for the Falcons, the team traded Brown away, Tannehill suffered injuries, and everything came crashing down. The Titans finished 13-21 in Vrabel’s last two seasons. So I’m keeping an eye on whom Vrabel goes with in New England. Will he just hire an old buddy like Josh McDaniels? Or is he committed to searching far and wide for the best possible candidate who can maximize Maye’s talents? The answer will tell us a lot about what to expect during Vrabel’s tenure.
The Patriots don’t just need to gain an edge with coaching; they also have big roster holes to fill. The priority of this offseason has to be building up the offensive line and the pass catching group. But the first question is: Who’s determining how to do that? Reportedly, vice president of player personnel Eliot Wolf is staying on—for now. But Vrabel is also bringing in his guy, Ryan Cowden. The names don’t even matter that much here. You have the old personnel guy with no real ties to the new coach staying on. You have a new guy with ties to the new coach joining. And the new coach is directing the whole operation. Oh, by the way, you also have a rabbit-eared ownership group that wants to make sure it comes out of this whole thing looking good.
See what I’m getting at here? NFL front offices are often filled with drama and power struggles and backstabbing. That type of thing seemed to be an issue with Vrabel in Tennessee. He (and the Patriots) need to get things sorted out in New England so that everyone is pulling in the same direction when it comes to making optimal roster decisions.
But the vibes are high for now, and rightfully so. Now Vrabel just needs to nail the offensive coordinator hire, and the Patriots need to settle on a front-office setup that makes sense to get back on the winning track.
I want a change of scenery for Mike Tomlin.
I know it’s not going to happen. This week, the longtime Steelers coach was asked about another team potentially trading for him and told reporters that his message would be: “Save your time.” The discourse around Tomlin can be exhausting. Steelers fans are allowed to point out that Tomlin hasn’t won a playoff game since the 2016 season. That’s a long time! Especially for a franchise (and a fan base) with such a rich history of winning. Then again, people like me are allowed to point out that the playoff drought isn’t really all on Tomlin. Most coaches wouldn’t have gotten the Steelers to sniff the playoffs in a bunch of those years given their shaky quarterback play.
Tomlin just completed his 18th year with the Steelers. And by all accounts, he’s returning to Pittsburgh for year 19. Despite the early playoff exit, Tomlin got the 2024 Steelers to once again overachieve. They went from Justin Fields to Russell Wilson at quarterback. They had issues on their offensive line. They lacked talent and depth at wide receiver. And by the end of the season, their defense was trending in the wrong direction. They managed to win 10 games, yet the way the season ended couldn’t have made it any clearer that there is a wide gap between them and the actual contenders in the AFC.
So what now? The Steelers’ QB plan last offseason was perfectly reasonable. They took low-cost fliers on Wilson and Fields. The ideal scenario for any team is to end up with someone like Patrick Mahomes or Lamar Jackson or Josh Allen. But those guys are hard to find. So in the meantime, you take multiple bites at the proverbial apple and hope to find competency. That’s what the Steelers did last offseason, at a very low cost, and I suspect that’s what they’ll do again this offseason. From an organizational perspective, it’s a reasonable plan.
But I can’t help but think about whether Tomlin would be better served by finding something new. Eighteen years is a long time. Maybe take a year off and return to the sideline in 2026? Or if he doesn’t feel like he needs that, I wonder whether the idea of going to another team that has a long-term quarterback plan in place would appeal to him. What about a franchise that could use some stability, like the Bears? Flex your leadership muscles, help them build a culture, show Caleb Williams what it takes to win. Wouldn’t that be fun? I feel like Tomlin would be energized in a situation like that, and the Chicago fan base would fall in love with him. It’d be the complete opposite of the staleness that currently describes his situation in Pittsburgh.
Again, I know it’s not going to happen, but hey, a man can dream. Instead, Tomlin will presumably stay put, the Steelers will continue with their patient build and throw some darts at the quarterback board in the offseason, and we’ll likely be looking at a nine- or 10-win team that gets bounced in the first round of the playoffs again next year. I guess it just has to be that way, but I look forward to a time when Tomlin considers another option.
Jerry Jones is getting exactly what he wants.
The biggest trick that Jerry Jones has ever pulled was convincing people that he prioritizes winning over anything else. If you believe he’s actually trying to win a Super Bowl, then you have to look at a bunch of his decisions and see sheer incompetence.
Take the Mike McCarthy situation, for example. Jones has literally had months to decide what to do with McCarthy, whose contract expired this week. If Jones cared about making decisions that optimized winning, he would have had a plan well before the final 48 hours of McCarthy’s contract. He would have decided McCarthy’s fate weeks ago. If Jones knew he was going to let McCarthy walk, he would have acted swiftly right after the season and gotten a head start on finding a replacement.
But that’s not what Jones did. He waited and waited and waited. Just like he waited on Dak Prescott’s contract extension and CeeDee Lamb’s contract extension. Just like he’s probably going to wait on Micah Parsons’s new deal. This has to be because Jones likes the attention and the headlines and the publicity. He likes that people are wondering whether Deion Sanders might want to work for him. He likes that there are conversations about whether Bill Belichick would leave the University of North Carolina to take over the Cowboys. Jones views the Cowboys as an entertainment product. There are other NFL franchises that try to do everything possible to build a winning team and get it right. There are organizations that try but get it wrong. And then there are the Cowboys. NFL Network’s Jane Slater reported that Jones wanted McCarthy to reduce the size of his coaching staff and that Jones isn’t keen on paying for top coaches. Does that sound like an owner whose top priority is winning? Of course not. But you knew that already.
Let me be clear: This isn’t about losing McCarthy. Jones arrived at the right place. He just took the wrong road to get there. So now what? Jones will embark on a coaching search. He’ll prioritize finding someone he’s comfortable with and someone who is willing to operate under his terms and at his price over getting the best possible candidate. There are only 32 NFL jobs, and it’s possible Jones will land a great coach. But we’re talking about an organization that has now gone 29 straight years without getting out of the divisional round. If Jones actually builds a winner, it’ll be by accident.
