2019 Midseason Review Part 1

Every team has played at least half its games now, so it’s a good time to scan across the league to see where everyone is at. As I’ve done in years past, I’m dividing the league into tiers, starting today with the lower 16 teams who are more or less already out of the playoffs.

The Living Dead

These teams are all still very much in the playoff race (mostly because they play in the AFC). But even if they do put something together for a second half run, it isn’t going to gain them anything. They’ll finish in the middle of the pack, or they’ll scrape together a playoff appearance and a first round loss.

Oakland Raiders (4-4)

If there is one team I could see actually making something of themselves from this group, it’s probably Oakland. Their offense has surprisingly come together in their second year under Jon Gruden, with Josh Jacobs powering them on the ground and Derek Carr playing the best football of his career. They’re still light on weapons on the outside, which limits their ability to keep up in a shootout, but as long as their defense can hold up a little, they have a shot against most opponents.

Defense holding up might be a little too much to ask however. There simply isn’t much going for them on that side of the ball, with the talent stripped away by a couple years of new management and very little to show of their high selections in last year’s draft. They might be able to win a few more games down the stretch on the strength of their offense, but they don’t have the firepower to keep up with the top teams in the league, who will have no trouble rolling over this limp Raiders defense.

Pittsburgh Steelers (4-4)

For years now the Steelers have been defined by their stars on offense, all while scrambling to assemble a defense to support them. Their last seven first round selections have all been on the defensive side of the ball, and in 2019 it is finally paying off, right as all the talent has vanished from their offense. There is no Antonio Brown, no Le’Veon Bell, and no Ben Roethlisberger, and the Steelers are once again a team defined by their strong defense, while their offense remains lifeless.

But their defense is something special. They are loaded with former first round picks on that side of the ball, and some duds like Mark Barron and Artie Burns aside, that talent is overwhelming for most opponents to handle. Cameron Heyward remains maybe the defensive lineman I would least want to block in the league, physically overwhelming and with an attitude to match. TJ Watt has become a true star pass rusher, and Devin Bush has flashed consistently in the middle. But the biggest story of this defense is safety Minkah Fitzpatrick, who already looks well worth the first round pick they traded to acquire him. He has four interceptions, including a 96 yard touchdown in their most recent game, and he’s brought a playmaking force back to this defense that they’ve been lacking since the heyday of Troy Polamalu.

Jacksonville Jaguars (4-5)

The Gardner Minshew era was exciting, but apparently it is done for now, after an ill timed poor performance against the Texans coincided with a return to health for Nick Foles. Truthfully, it doesn’t matter. This offense doesn’t have much going for it, with a young receiving corps that isn’t consistent enough to carry an offense and a running game built around a subpar offensive line. With Jalen Ramsey gone on the back end, their defense doesn’t have the firepower to win them games like it did two years ago, and no matter who they have at quarterback the Jaguars will have to settle for being mediocre.

I’m not sure what the future holds for this team. They’re committed to Foles, but I never saw any upside there. And when Ramsey forced their hands to trade him away, that more or less brought to an end their hope of riding a dominant defense and a below average offense. They still have some good pieces on defense, but they are going to need better balance going forward. Which means they need more than Foles can provide on offense, a lesson they will hopefully learn over the remainder of this season.

Tennessee Titans (4-5)

I had some harsh words for the Titans before the season started, and I was right in everything I said. This team is absolutely incapable of being interesting in any way. They can’t be interesting good, or interesting bad. They just hover around the middle, surprise everyone by appearing in the “playoff hunt” graphics they start showing at the end of the November, and then slip away without a fuss. I’m not going to waste any more time writing, or thinking, about them this year.

It Could Be Worse

These teams sit with losing records, and it would take a miraculous turnaround for them to make the postseason. But we all knew they were never going anywhere to begin with, and there are still some positives they can take out of what they’ve accomplished to this point in the season.

Arizona Cardinals (3-5-1)

The Cardinals haven’t been lighting the league on fire like some people might have hoped when they united the most exciting quarterback and the most exciting play caller from the college ranks, but they’re showing enough life to suggest there is something to build on here. Kyler Murray makes a few excellent plays every week, their young receivers have settled into the system, and their veteran defensive stars are keeping that side of the ball afloat around a bunch of otherwise unproven talent.

They still have a lot of work to do to fix this roster. Their offensive line is a disaster yet again, though not enough to completely ruin their offense like it did a season ago. Chandler Jones and Patrick Peterson are both great, but neither is really aligned with the timeline of the rest of this franchise. They need to nail another couple of drafts to really pull themselves together, finding talent on defense to go along with what they’re developing on offense. But before you get the second pieces, you have to get the first pieces, and they might have done that.

Denver Broncos (3-6)

Denver isn’t going anywhere, but I don’t think anyone expected that they would. This franchise has been spinning their wheels ever since Peyton Manning rode off into the sunset, and it looked like they were in for another year or two of that when they decided to make Joe Flacco the next in the long line of quarterbacks who were not remotely close to the solution to their problems.

The best thing that’s happened to Denver in years is that Flacco got hurt. He is gone for the season, which means they have seven more games to figure out if they have anything in either Drew Lock or Brandon Allen. The answer is probably no, but answering these questions will at least lead them into the offseason with something resembling a plan, and if they finally find a way to detach themselves from GM John Elway this year, they can start their rebuild for real.

Detroit Lions (3-4-1)

Detroit got off to a surprisingly hot start to the season, so I can understand why there would be some frustration abou their recent struggles. In the packed NFC, they’re more or less outside of the playoff race by this point. But they were never really contenders to begin with, a brief flare of defensive success aside. They’re good enough to win three or four more games, maybe pull off an exciting upset or two, and then go home at the end of December.

So why should the Lions feel positive? Because Mathew Stafford is playing the best football of his career, and he’s showing that there is something more to his game than the bland mediocrity he’s put forth the past few seasons. The Lions are committed to Stafford for another two seasons after this one, and the signs of life he’s shown are hope that they might not be doomed for the next two years, even if they are for this one.

New York Giants (2-7)

The Giants are bad, but they aren’t bad in quite the way I expected. I thought they would spend more time clinging to the memories of Eli Manning in a bland, irrelevant offense that stifled the few exciting skill players they have. Instead they handed things over to Daniel Jones starting in Week 3, and he has actually not been a disaster. He turns the ball over like crazy, and he routinely makes terrible decisions, but he’s at least willing to take some shots in ways I didn’t expect, a rare joy in an era of countless overly cautious young quarterbacks.

I’m still not convinced Jones will be an above average starter in this league, but if he does work out, there’s something resembling a plan here. The offensive line has come together to form at least a middle of the pack unit. Saquon Barkley remains a unique playmaker when healthy. Evan Engram, Dalvin Tomlinson, and Lorenzo Carter give them a few pieces who could be contributors on a playoff team, if they can nail their top draft picks for the next couple years and replace the stars they cast aside this past offseason.

How the Hell Did We End Up Here?

These teams had high expectations coming into the season. Now, they’re just trying to put out the fires. For one reason, or for many reasons, these teams have fallen apart as the first half of the season has unfolded, and they now sit in a perilous position, with little hope of getting back into the picture for the rest of the year and issues that could linger into 2019.

Cleveland Browns (2-6)

We should have seen this coming. After all, they are the Browns. A strong finish to one season doesn’t always carry over to the next year, and the Browns pinned everything on continuing the momentum from 2018. They promoted Freddie Kitchens to head coach based off a short successful stint as offensive coordinator, never mind that he had never held a position higher than quarterback coach before. And so far their offense has been a mess in 2019, unable to utilize the weapons they thought would raise them to an elite unit.

Most of the blame is going to Kitchens, and it’s unclear whether or not he’ll be back next year. But one person who will be back is Baker Mayfield, and he deserves a sizeable share of the blame for their failures in 2019. He’s been inaccurate, reckless with the football, and uncomfortable in the pocket, basically every single one of the issues he showed for the majority of last season before the hot stretch to close it out. And increasingly that is what the optimism coming out of his rookie season looks like a product of, one lonely hot streak by an otherwise mediocre quarterback. He still has plenty of time to turn his career around—plenty of time to turn this season around, even—but this is not the quarterback most people expected to see in 2019.

Chicago Bears (3-5-1)

It is so hard to win as a defense-first football team in the NFL. The Bears pulled it off last year, but it has predictably regressed in 2019, in all the usual ways. After leading the league with 36 takeaways a year ago they have only 11 through nine games in 2019, thoroughly middle of the pack. Part of this is also due to the absence of some key players, notably defensive tackle Akiem Hicks.

The defense could never be expected to repeat its performance from 2018, but the hope was that the offense would step forward to pick up the slack. Simply put, that has not happened. There are multiple causes here as well—they haven’t integrated promising rookie David Montgomery as well as they should have, and the play calling has been a confusing mix of bland and overly cute—but in recent weeks it has become clear that the biggest issue is Mitchell Trubisky. They needed him to take a step forward, to find some consistency in the high peaks of his up and down sophomore campaign. Instead he has gone the opposite direction, transforming into a walking catastrophe and taking the entire offense down with him.

Tampa Bay Buccaneers (2-6)

There was maybe a little hope that the pairing of Jameis Winston and Bruce Arians would be a match made in heaven. Sadly, that hasn’t happened, and the Buccaneers remain a complete mess. Winston’s turnovers are a  problem that will never go away, and I expect that they will move on from him once this season is done, forcing them to start from scratch in 2020.

At the same time, the biggest problem remains their defense. It has improved since last season, which isn’t a great accomplishment, considering what a horror show they were a year ago. Maybe they can build on this momentum over the second half of 2019, get Devin White more playing time so he’s ready to be the centerpiece of what they build on that side of the ball starting next year. But I doubt this is a one offseason turnaround project, especially if they are starting over at the most important position next year.

Atlanta Falcons (1-7)

I picked this team before the season to win the Super Bowl. Clearly that isn’t going to happen. There are excuses that can be made for their poor record, reasons that we could have seen before the season for why they might struggle. But there is no excuse for being this bad, particularly on the defensive side of the ball. They have too many good players—and too much money—on that side to be the worst defense in football (at least among teams that are trying), and the blame has to go squarely on the shoulders of Dan Quinn.

Quinn is done as the coach in Atlanta, and the only question that remains is whether they see any point in firing him before the actual end of the season. If they do I assume they’ll promote offensive coordinator Dirk Koetter, fresh off an astonishingly forgettable three year tenure as the head coach of the Buccaneers. Normally I would be in favor of casting aside a failed coach as soon as possible, but the Falcons might actually benefit from keeping him around through the rest of the season. Because as bad as this team has been, there is still a lot of talent here, and I would hate if an improved stretch over the second half of the season deluded them into bringing Koetter back as the coach next season, rather than starting from scratch like they should.

Just Put Them Out of Their Misery

These teams suck. They suck at football, and they suck as entertainment products too. Some had high expectations and have fallen apart over the first half of the season. Others were never really going anywhere, and have somehow even disappointed through that lens.

Miami Dolphins (1-7)

The Dolphins are terrible, but at least they can take solace from the fact that they’re trying to be terrible. They’ve imploded this roster as thoroughly as I have ever seen, and no matter how bad the rest of the season gets—and it will get very, very bad—the fans can take solace from the fact that there is some purpose behind this.

I have some skepticism about the plan they are trying to execute, and the paucity of talent on their roster is the biggest reason why. There is nothing to even remotely look forward to with the players that are going to be on the field the rest of the year. Xavien Howard and Preston Williams were the lone bright spots of the first half of the season, and they are both on IR. But at least there are a lot of good players to get excited about in college, so the Dolphins fans should just content themselves watching that.

Cincinnati Bengals (0-8)

The lone remaining winless team, and yet somehow not that dour of a situation. Yes, they are off to a tough start in the first year post-Marvin Lewis. But there is a breath of fresh air around their ineptitude, hope that after a year or two of abject misery they can build something out of it.

The talent to do this is still a long way away, but they’re starting to figure out how to get there. They benched Andy Dalton, ending what was both an era of miserable mediocrity and the most successful stretch of this franchise in the past three decades. Ryan Finley won’t do anything for them, but with any luck they’ll have a shiny new toy on the field to start 2020. If they can convince AJ Green to come back and find a way to patch up their offensive line, they’ll have a decent setup for whoever it is they do bring in, and a chance to turn things around quicker than most of the other teams at the bottom of this list.

Washington Redskins (1-8)

Dwayne Haskins’s first start wasn’t a disaster, which was probably the best the Redskins could hope for considering the early stretch of his career was actively sabotaged by Jay Gruden. I like Gruden as an offensive schemer and play caller, but the way he managed this season was borderline criminal, putting his own job security over the best interests of the franchise (and of course, it ended with him getting fired anyway).

I’d like to think that his departure is a breath of fresh air, but we’ve seen this story before in Washington. The problem is at the very top, with owner Daniel Snyder and president Bruce Allen. As long as the two of them are there—and neither is going anywhere—this team will keep living out new versions of the same story. That’s left them hanging on for dear life as 2019 runs its course, and it will put them in the same position when 2020 finally rolls around.

New York Jets (1-7)

The Jets are appalling. There is no justification, no excuse for a team to be this bad, this horrendously mismanaged. The decision to hire Adam Gase was obviously a bad call from the start, but I don’t think anyone expected it to be this epic of a disaster. Both on and off the field this team has been an embarrassment so far in 2019, and nothing they do over the second half of the season can change that.

The only thing they can do is try to make it through the season without permanently damaging their young quarterback. Sam Darnold has shown flashes of elite ability, breaking up long stretches of abject ineptitude. Gase has only made things worse, and I don’t think it would be an overreaction for the team to get a restraining order against him. He needs to be fired today, and the team needs to start over from scratch this offseason, to whatever extent that’s possible after the resources they sunk into acquiring Darnold and the high priced free agents they signed this offseason.