Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Thu 2024-11-28 12:30PM Chicago Bears @ Detroit Lions
Thu 2024-11-28 4:30PM New York Giants @ Dallas Cowboys
Thu 2024-11-28 8:20PM Miami Dolphins @ Green Bay Packers
Fri 2024-11-29 3:00PM Las Vegas Raiders @ Kansas City Chiefs
Sun 2024-12-01 1:00PM Indianapolis Colts @ New England Patriots
Sun 2024-12-01 1:00PM Arizona Cardinals @ Minnesota Vikings
Sun 2024-12-01 1:00PM Houston Texans @ Jacksonville Jaguars
Sun 2024-12-01 1:00PM Tennessee Titans @ Washington Commanders
Sun 2024-12-01 1:00PM Pittsburgh Steelers @ Cincinnati Bengals
Sun 2024-12-01 1:00PM Los Angeles Chargers @ Atlanta Falcons
Sun 2024-12-01 1:00PM Seattle Seahawks @ New York Jets
Sun 2024-12-01 4:05PM Los Angeles Rams @ New Orleans Saints
Sun 2024-12-01 4:05PM Tampa Bay Buccaneers @ Carolina Panthers
Sun 2024-12-01 4:25PM Philadelphia Eagles @ Baltimore Ravens
Sun 2024-12-01 8:20PM San Francisco 49ers @ Buffalo Bills
Mon 2024-12-02 8:15PM Cleveland Browns @ Denver Broncos
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Notes -
Week 14 thread is live: https://www.themotte.org/post/1278/weekly-nfl-thread-week-14
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The biggest brawl of the week just happened in the Jags-Texans game.
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Tremendous week for the Eagles. With any luck they have the NFC East sewn up after beating the Rams, with the Redskins dropping a sloppy game to a scrappy Dallas team.
Saquon is the truth. You can't stop Barkley you can only hope to contain him. Next week is going to be key for his MVP and OPOY narrative, if he has a great game and the defense stuffs Lamar and Henry, then Saquon will emerge in a two horse race with Josh Allen. He'll still probably lose to Allen, non-QBs rarely win, but he'll have a puncher's chance down the stretch.
Hurts and the rest of the offense looked OK at best. I was hoping to see Hurts spread the ball around more, but he stuck to AJ Brown and Dallas Goedert. He just never has the processing speed to run through his other receiving options. If he could, he'd be unstoppable. He'll need to find it against a weak Ravens pass defense next week if they're going to outshoot Lamar.
The Eagles' D finally managed to beat a competent QB in an unassailably well executed way. Stafford looked good, but didn't have enough. Unfortunately, they lost Brandon Graham to a season ending triceps injury. That leaves the team dangerously thin at Edge, relying on Josh Sweat, second year development project Nolan Smith, and developmental rookie Jalyx Hunt. All three will need to step up if the team is going to make any noise down the stretch.
Luckily for the Eagles, the Redskins fell apart against a shorthanded Dallas team. Three up in the loss column with six to play puts them in a position where if they just beat the Panthers, Giants, and Cowboys at home, then the skins need to win out in order to get a tie. The dallas game was hilarious, I listened to the radio broadcast doing chores, and I turned it off after the kick return touchdown figuring the game was over. Missing two more touchdowns and a field goal that were still left in the game. Daniels is Good, and will be trouble for the rest of his rookie contract for the Eagles. Dallas is bad, but still has enough star power that if they all decide to pull the wagon together they can make it tough for any team. Hopefully by Christmas they are so far out of it that they have little motivation to play spoiler in Philly, and if you put your arm on their throat they'll fold.
Elsewhere in the NFL: Can Pat Mahomes keep getting away with it? Is Russell Wilson cooked? How much tanking is too much tanking in New Jersey?
He's looked good the past several weeks, but the rushing defenses the Eagles have been playing against are dogshit. The last time they played a team ranked in the top 20 they were 2–2 and everyone was talking about whether the bye week would be a good time to fire Sirianni. I am, of course, only mentioning this so I can say that I think the Steelers defense has a decent shot of stopping him. The Eagles have an RPO-heavy offense, and the Steelers have done a good job of against the RPO. If they blitz at Barkley with Highsmith off the strong side they'll make Hurts beat them himself. Derrick Henry only had 65 yards against the Steelers, half of which came on one play.
Yeah, probably.
No reason to think so. He looked fine in the second half of the Browns game, and the Ravens game was bound to be close since they've been playing the exact same game since Jackson entered the league.
I was wondering about this but I couldn't get a good answer. Was there some kind of cap reason that made it more advantageous for the Giants to bench Jones than release him? It's a moot point now, but nakedly benching your best quarterback for cap reasons should trigger some kind of penalty for blatant cap manipulation. Kind of like how an arbitrator flat-out rejected the deal Ilya Kovalchuk signed with the Devils back in 2010. There was a trend at the time to circumvent the salary cap by signing long, front-loaded deals. The league eventually put an end to the practice, but the Kovalchuk deal was so blatant that it was rejected outright (though the deal he ended up signing was only slightly less ridiculous).
It was to avoid the possibility of his injury guarantees kicking in on his contract. If he got hurt (on the metlife turf for that matter) he'd be owed more money. It'll never happen, but I think the league needs to work out some "for the sake of being classy" CBA rules in the future that will allow teams to get cap relief in spots where the alternative strategies indicated harm the public image of the NFL. Danny Dimes, Russell Wilson, Tua Taigovailoa, Deshaun Watson. We have these conversations where it would all feel so much nicer if the salary cap weren't involved, but the salary cap is such an important part of the team building process that one can't afford to ignore it.
I'm deeply ambivalent on the topic of tanking. On the one hand I prefer cyclical contention to the brutal oligarchy of the European leagues, where it's understood that the only way a team really goes from worst to first is if it gets purchased by some evil billionaire. I love to watch a homegrown team turn it around. On the other, I see so many teams tank and never really get out of it. Even a team like the Process Sixers, that achieved drafting a perennial MVP candidate, ultimately never got over the hump and built a real stable likeable team with a winning culture. Losing for the sake of losing is often a cul-de-sac.
This is why I will never stop stumping for the idea of redistributing draft picks based on bottom 5-10 teams at the trade deadline, which then turns into a new league table where the best team out of that group gets the #1 pick, and so on and so forth. Incentivize winning, even after the a team is out of the playoff race. Today there are only a couple teams outside the bottom ten who aren't looking at any shot at the playoffs, maybe Dallas and Indy and Chicago feel a little left out. Replace #TankForTravis with #WinForTravis. Strictly speaking, it wouldn't be impossible for Jacksonville or the Giants to outplay the Bengals down the stretch, especially if they were incentivized to actually try.
I'm excited for the Eagles-Steelers, they're likely to get stumped by Pittsburgh. But the more important games are against the Ravens, who seem to have a bit of choker to them. Beat the Ravens, and all they have to do the rest of the season is beat the teams they're supposed to beat.
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Re: Daniel Jones cap manipulation, if they benched him for the season and released him next year with a post-June 1st designation they would be able to manipulate his dead cap situation; this is what the Broncos did with Russ, and why they didn't release him until the new league year started in March instead of when they benched him late last year. The downside to that is they would have to carry his full cap hit as if he wasn't released until June 1st*, so it might hamper their free agency plans to do it that way, but it would mean they can split his dead cap over 2025 and 2026 instead of just in 2025. His dead cap isn't insurmountable, though, so it isn't that big a deal to carry it all next year. (For comparison's sake, Russ was designated a post-June 1 cut by the Broncos; this didn't impact their FA since his dead cap this year was exactly the same as a post-June 1 cut as it would have been if he was on the roster, but by cutting him as a post-June 1st in March instead of releasing him in December his dead cap is spread over this year and next instead of taking a full $85MM dead cap hit this year, which would have made it almost impossible to field a competitive team).
The manipulation is that by benching him it makes him drastically less likely to get seriously hurt and activate the injury guarantee, which would guarantee him an additional $23MM next year. This is why they benched him in the first place (and why Russ was benched, and why the Raiders benched Derek Carr in 2022); they didn't want to be stuck paying him even more next year when they want to move on from him. Moving to Tommy Devito instead of Drew Lock, who was the No. 2 all year, makes it even more suspicious that this was not a move based on winning more football games, and the Giants' locker room mostly seems to agree with me (they sure played like it this weekend).
'* - this used to be the case; as far as I know it still is, although they've been changing some of these cap rules in the past couple years so I'm not 100% certain.
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Ravens vs. Eagles this Sunday will be a slug fest.
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How much of Barkley success do you want to give him vs his situation?
Between him and McCaffrey...
I mean, it's a team sport, everyone looks better when give them better teammates.
Both those guys did a lot of good work on not particularly good teams, stick them on a strong team.
idk, both are fun guys to watch when they get it going, I'm glad they both found good situations.
I'm not sure it changes the narrative around how to value RBs as much as people might suggest. (as much crap as the Giants are getting for it, I still think that was a fairly reasonable decision).
Whatever the difference is between how Saquon is doing this season and how Swift did last season, and Miles Sanders the year before that. Literally the exact same team on offense, Saquon is the only major change. Jason Kelce was swapped for Mekhi Becton on the O-Line, but the line might actually be better on net than last year, not because Becton is better than Kelce necessarily, but because Jurgens is a better center than he is a guard, and even though Kelce-Jurgens at C is a slight downgrade, Jurgens-Becton at RG is a huge upgrade. Beyond that there's a new WR3 if they're playing 11 and Calcaterra has surpassed Stoll at TE2 if they're playing 12, and every now and then they trot out BVS in 21 which they never did in '23 with Swift, but those are marginal changes.
Saquon is a massive upgrade over Swift or Sanders. Swift had a good season, Saquon is having a transcendant season.
And the argument goes for everyone who is in competition for MVP. It's a team sport. QB's need to throw the ball to someone who catches it, and they need to get protection from an O-Line, and they need a running back to keep the defense on their toes. A good QB with a quick release makes an O-Line look good, an indecisive QB can make a good O-Line give up sacks all the time.
Ultimately by my normal standards if the season ended today, I'd want to see Josh Allen get MVP. But if they don't give it to Allen, I'd say Saquon has as good a claim as any other player when you look at how the team improved from his play. Mahomes isn't actually playing that well, Goff isn't that inspiring, Lamar has thrown up some real skunks in big games and isn't doing enough to get it consecutive years. After that I'm just not seeing it. But that's if the season ended today, there's still time.
There's something to be said for it being easier to get an average RB than an average QB, but it gets a little circular at a certain point.
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In the same vein I'm finding it harder and harder to approximate the value of these good RBs. On a really good offense they are clearly force multipliers, dynamic runners and catchers that add points to every game. The convention wisdom is that they aren't worth a lot of salary because they're replaceable, and even on bad teams they do very little. I'm more skeptical of this these days, seeing the big drop off in effectiveness on the Raiders and Giants offense after losing Jacobs and Barkley. The flipside of this is a good blocking and offensive team that has a bad RB who is carried by his environment. Najee Harris maybe? Not a lot of examples come to mind.
The Raiders and Giants were bad with Barkley and Jacobs, they're still bad without them.
"The flipside of this is a good blocking and offensive team that has a bad RB who is carried by his environment. Najee Harris maybe? Not a lot of examples come to mind."
'bad RB' is sort of an odd category, the list of low resource acquires, considerable success, and then replaced by another guy with considerable success, just within the various branches of the Shanahan coaching tree is long (start with Terrell Davis), (even this year the 49ers have gotten 700 yards at 5.1 yards a carry out of Jordan Mason), and fairly central to skeptical valuation of RBs.
While the Giants and Raiders were both not great with their star running backs last year (although both had seen average-to-good offenses built around them in the not-so-distant past), both have seen significantly worse results since letting them go.
The Giants with a healthy Saquon (2018, 2022) were an extremely mid offense, averaging the exact midpoint in the league (16.5) in points (16, 15) and yards (17, 18). The Giants with an unhealthy Barkley (2020, 2021, 2023) were one of the worst offenses in the league in both points scored (31, 31, 30) and yards (31, 31, 29). Without Barkley this year they've scored the fewest points in the league and are trending in the wrong direction.
The Raiders are less obvious since Carr's departure had more of an effect, but this is the worst year they've had offensively since drafting Jacobs (even comparing the past two Carr-less years, they've clearly regressed offensively this year), and have had noticeably worse RB play even compared to Jacobs' poor last season in black and silver. He actually led the team in AV (football-reference's attempt to make a WAR for football) in 2022, for whatever that's worth (not a ton, in my opinion).
Even a very good running back will heavily rely on their offensive line, and a bad offensive line will make even the best ones have mediocre results, but the position in general has been overly devalued if you ask me - a good running back can still be the focal point of a successful offense.
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