The Other Week 17

We’ve reached Week 17 of the NFL season, and there is a great deal still at stake. Three playoff spots are still available, with six teams left fighting to keep their seasons going this weekend. Home field advantage is up for grabs in the AFC, while only one team so far has clinched a first round bye.

There will be a lot of attention paid to the games that will fit the final pieces of the playoff puzzle into place. This post is not about these games. This is about the other games, the ones no one has a great deal of interest in (and that the NFL, in their vast wisdom, grouped together in the early window, essentially killing viewership for that period). But there are people out there--people such as me--who can’t imagine doing anything else while there is football on. We are going to be watching, so we should probably find some justification for that, shouldn’t we?

Carolina Panthers @ New Orleans Saints

The Saints have clinched the top spot in the NFC, and they will likely rest a lot of their players for this final game. Even if they roll the starters out for the early stages, I expect we’ll see a number of their stars finish the game in baseball caps on the sideline. Chief among these stars is MVP candidate Drew Brees, which means that we may finally see the return of Teddy Time.

I’m not going to pretend to be impartial here. Even after leaving Minnesota, Teddy Bridgewater may be my favorite player in the NFL. His first two years showed a great deal of promise, and things were only looking up before his devastating knee injury in the preseason in 2016. It’s been three years since his last consistent time in a regular season NFL game, and now he’ll have a chance in an ideal situation to show what he is capable of.

Bridgewater is a free agent at the end of the year, and after a strong preseason he is likely to be the hottest commodity on the market. He is going to sign somewhere he has a chance to compete for a starting job, which means this is his last regular season game in a Saints uniform. Hopefully Sean Payton will give him a chance to open things up and show what he can do, and hopefully this will just be a brief glimpse of the sort of magic we will see regularly in his next stop for years to come.

Atlanta Falcons @ Tampa Bay Buccaneers

There is no player in the league right now that is more frustrating to me as an analyst than Jameis Winston. In a league that has trended towards ultra-conservative quarterback play, he is a throwback, a player who produces big plays for both the offense and the defense in nearly equal measure. When it comes to moving the ball down the field, he is one of the best quarterbacks in the league. When it comes to keeping the ball out of the defense’s hands, he routinely makes egregious errors.

The interceptions get a lot of attention. They stand out on the stat sheet, and they are the number one criticism pointed to by people who want to get rid of Winston for off the field reasons. After four years in the league, it is probably too much to expect him to erase these mistakes. This is the player he is going to be for the rest of his career.

The question we should be asking is, do we really want him to stop making these mistakes? As the league has trended towards an overemphasis on statistics such as touchdown-to-interception ratio, I’ve found myself wondering if this might be forcing quarterbacks into a style that inhibits actually moving the football. I think that has been an issue at times this year for Aaron Rodgers, who put together an incredible streak of avoiding turnovers while killing drives by taking sacks and hurling the ball out of bounds.

So far I haven’t come up with a good way to quantify this, so for now we’ll just have to settle for the eye test. And Winston is a perfect case study for this puzzle. With every completion he makes, ask yourself how close it was to a turnover, and how much he gained by fitting it successfully through that window. And when he inevitably makes a mistake, ask yourself how much upside the play would have had, and what they truly lost by handing the ball to the other team.

Dallas Cowboys @ New York Giants

The Cowboys are one of the few playoff teams locked into a position in the playoffs. They are going to be the fourth seed in the NFC, and they don’t have anything to play for this weekend. The Giants were mathematically eliminated only a couple weeks ago, but their season has been more or less dead on arrival after a 1-7 start.

There is one major question the Giants still have to answer, and that’s what their plan is going into the offseason at the quarterback position. Eli Manning has been an utter disaster this year, and it should be clear to anyone watching that he cannot play quarterback in the NFL anymore. He misses routine passes and gives up in the face of any pressure, killing his offense week in and week out despite being surrounded by one of the better supporting casts in the league.

There is a very clear path forward for the Giants this offseason. They cut Manning loose, and they invest in someone younger and more capable at the most important position. This isn’t a great year to be in need of a quarterback—Bridgewater is likely the only starter with real upside who will be on the free agent market, and getting their guy in a thin draft class will likely require them trading next year’s first round pick as well to move up. They could also try to find a one year stopgap like Joe Flacco. But trotting out Manning for another season should not be an acceptable approach.

It shouldn’t be, but it might end up happening again. The ownership of this team is justifiably enamored with Manning on a personal level, and it will be hard for them to force him out the door if he doesn’t agree to retire with dignity. If he puts together an even remotely competent performance in this final game, this last impression might be enough to drag this sad saga on for another year.

Green Bay Packers @ Detroit Lions

These are two teams at a major crossroads. Both have been successful over the past few years—to very different degrees, admittedly—and both are now faced with rosters that have been stripped mostly bare by years of mismanagement. The Packers have the advantage of having a Hall of Fame quarterback, but Aaron Rodgers is wrapping up a very disappointing season that we may look back on as the first stage of his eventual decline. Matthew Stafford has also had a career worst year, but neither team is going to make a change at quarterback this offseason. If there are changes that will come, they will be at the head coaching positions, and this game gives both Joe Philbin and Matt Patricia one last opportunity to state their cases.

The Packers kicked things off when they fired Mike McCarthy a few weeks ago, and they will already be taking a look around the market when the season ends. But there are reports out there that they—and in particular, Rodgers—would like to Philbin around for next year. I personally can’t think of a worse decision for the franchise. This sort of move would basically just be an extension of the McCarthy era, when they should be trying something radical and drastic to get the most out of Rodgers’s final years. But a strong performance by the offense in this game could tip the scales in his favor, and lead to yet another lost year for the Packers.

The Lions are in a much more treacherous situation. Normally I think it’s unreasonable to talk about dismissing a coach after only a single season, but the stories that have come out about Patricia suggest that this could be something they want to erase as quickly as possible. It isn’t just the product on the field that is concerning. Patricia has been unpleasant on a personal level to everyone involved in the organization, and he’s been habitually late to meetings and press conferences. He seems like he doesn’t have the temperament to be an NFL head coach, and if that’s the case they need to get him as far from the organization as possible.

I never really understood the Patricia hire to begin with. The defenses he ran in New England were not good, and the only real credentials anyone seems to point to are his connections to Bill Belichick, which hardly seem meaningful considering the track record such coaches have had. I don’t think the Lions are quite in a situation where they need to cast Patricia aside, but if they decided to do so I wouldn’t have anything particularly harsh to say about the decision.

Miami Dolphins @ Buffalo Bills

I’ve spent a lot of time in the previous sections talking about quarterbacks, and even though there might be something interesting to watch with Josh Allen and Ryan Tannehill, I’m mostly over it. I’ve seen enough of Tannehill to last a lifetime, and it’s clear now that Allen is not remotely ready to play in the NFL, especially with the talent that’s been put around him. Next year might be a different story, but for now there’s really no point in watching him.

Instead let’s take a look at the players who will be facing down the quarterbacks all afternoon. Each of these teams boasts one of the best young cornerbacks in the game, and against these mediocre receiving corps they should be in position to absolutely dominate. Tre’Davious White has been a dominant defender since the Bills drafted him in the first round in 2017, and he’s been a crucial part of what has quietly been one of the best defenses in football this season.

On the other side, the Dolphins have a similar emerging star in Xavien Howard. Howard has come on a bit more slowly since being drafted in the second round in 2016, but over the past season and a half he has been as dominant as any cornerback in the NFL. Unfortunately, he has missed the past three games with a knee injury, and there’s a decent chance he sits out again on Sunday. So even I am going to have trouble paying much attention to this game, and in all likelihood anything that happens here will be forgotten by the time the meaningful games in the afternoon roll around.