End of the Line

When I first started thinking about this piece on Sunday afternoon, the title was going to be “Saving the Season”. It was going to be about teams who entered the season with playoff hopes and then started 0-2, and then how victories in Week 3 kept their seasons alive. But then, as I was planning things out, something funny happened. The teams I was planning to write about didn’t actually win.

Minnesota, Houston, Atlanta, and Philadelphia all expected to be competitive in 2020. They all entered Week 3 still looking for their first victory. And they all led at halftime of their games this week, before faltering down the stretch. The Falcons collapsed in the fourth quarter, as has become their habit. The Texans didn’t score a single point after halftime and watched the Steelers run past them. The Vikings came up short against the Titans, and the Eagles watched a scoreless overtime drift past before settling for a tie with the Bengals.

These teams certainly aren’t all in the same boat, but there are definitely similarities to see. Three of the four made the playoffs a year ago, and three of the four were part of my preseason predicted playoff field (not the same three). These aren’t teams that entered the year with unreasonable expectations, like the Broncos or the Chargers. These aren’t teams that flashed a year ago and could be expected to regress, like the Bills or Titans (not that these teams have seen this regression yet).

These four are veteran teams that have been in the mix for five years now. They have consistency at quarterback and at head coach, and the cores of their rosters are mostly the same as the ones that have regularly made appearances in the postseason. Of them only Philadelphia managed to get a title out of their recent windows, but all four have had opportunities, and all four have spent the past couple years clawing to stretch their runs out as long as possible.

It’s easy to point to reasons for their rough starts to the season. All of these teams are dealing with age, with long-time stars like JJ Watt, Harrison Smith, Fletcher Cox, and Julio Jones all 31 years old. These players are aging, and they are expensive, and salary cap concerns have forced them to part ways with quality starters over the past few years.

Strength of schedule certainly hasn’t helped either. Houston somehow had to start the season playing Kansas City, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh, arguably the top three teams in the AFC. Minnesota has faced a pair of undefeated teams in Green Bay and Tennessee, while Atlanta has gotten Seattle and Chicago (not sure if the Bears are as good as their 3-0 record, but Atlanta’s other foe, Dallas, is probably better than 1-2). Philadelphia…well Philly is kind of a different story here.

But if you want to point at one reason why these teams have been struggling, you have to look at the draft. These four teams are in the position they’re in now because they were among the best-drafting teams in the league for the first half of the decade. The four players I listed above—two likely Hall of Famers and two more who should be—were all drafted by their respective teams in either 2011 or 2012. Toss in players like Whitney Mercilus, Benardrick McKinney, DeAndre Hopkins, Eric Kendricks, Anthony Barr, Xavier Rhodes, Stefon Diggs, Danielle Hunter, Jake Matthews, Devonta Freeman, Desmond Trufant, Lane Johnson, Zach Ertz, and Jason Kelce and you can see the cores that made these teams so successful over the past few years. 

Some of these players have moved on or aged past the point of being stars, but that’s natural in the NFL. Teams like the Steelers, Ravens, Patriots, Seahawks, and Packers have remained competitive because they’ve been able to find young players to replace their veteran stars. The same cannot be said for these four teams. There is more to the draft than just the first round, but here are their selections in the first round over the past five years.

 

Obviously some of these players still have time to write their legacies. Howard, Jefferson, and Ridley have flashed at times, while still not quite proving to be the stars these teams need to step up. (Wentz and Watson are obviously a different category, but we’ll get to them later.)

Players on rookie contracts are the best bargain in the league, but only if they’re able to contribute immediately and live up to expectations. On a couple of occasions these teams have punted on that entirely, trading first round picks for veteran sure things like Sam Bradford and Laremy Tunsil. The Texans and Eagles also gave away an additional draft pick to get their quarterbacks, which has stifled their ability to add more young talent.

None of these moves were bad in a vacuum, but they meant these teams had even less margin for error with the picks they made. And as they’ve whiffed on these major additions, they’ve left themselves in the positions they’re in now. No victories three weeks into the season, an uphill climb to reach the playoffs, and little reason to feel hope for the future.

Where do they go from here?

It’s very difficult to come back from an 0-3 start to the season, but I’m not ready to write all these teams off yet. Houston’s schedule gets a lot easier from here, and they’ve proven they can do this before, winning the division in 2018 despite starting 0-3. At 0-2-1 Philadelphia is only half a game back from the division lead in the NFC East, and that division is not going to get tougher as the year goes on. The odds are longer for Atlanta and Minnesota, but anything is possible. 

But if the 2020 season is lost for these teams, what are they going to do moving forward? They’ve fought and clawed to keep open their windows, and those windows seem pretty clearly to be shut now.

The first question is whether or not they are willing to accept this. Minnesota spent the offseason trying to play things both ways, giving extensions to their coach, quarterback, and GM while also trading away their best offensive player for a draft pick. Both Houston and Atlanta have kept mediocre coaches around a couple years too long for the sake of continuity. I wouldn’t put it past them to make the same mistakes this offseason in the hopes that 2020 was just a fluke. 

These teams need to rebuild, though the path forward isn’t the same for all of them. The two main questions when you head towards a rebuild are the quarterback and the coaching positions. Houston, at least, has no uncertainty here. Deshaun Watson is their quarterback for years to come. And Bill O’Brien should have been fired the day he decided to trade away Hopkins (he should have been fired about three years before that, but that’s beside the point). Houston unfortunately doesn’t have their first round pick next year, as part of the expensive haul they gave up to add Tunsil. This might convince them to push off the rebuild for another year, especially if they bounce back the rest of the season as I expect they will.

The other easy answer is in Atlanta. Dan Quinn is a middling coach who has done some good and some bad with the Falcons. As a supposed defensive guru he utterly failed to develop the young talent they acquired on that side of the ball. But he never got in the way of their offensive stars, which is more than you can say about many NFL coaches. I think it theoretically could be possible to build a new team around him. But at this point I don’t expect him to last the rest of the season, and I think there’s a decent chance Atlanta could get an upgrade. 

Getting an upgrade is what it ultimately comes down to. And that’s the tricky situation Minnesota finds themselves in. I have some problems with Mike Zimmer as a head coach. He leans too close to the old-school “run the football and play defense” mentality that doesn’t really work in the NFL anymore. He occasionally fumbles game management decisions, though every coach has some of that. But until this year he consistently called one of the best defenses in the NFL, he’s done a good job attracting talented coaches to his staff, and even in years when the team has struggled, they have never bottomed out. He’s somewhere around the tenth best coach in the league. There are certainly better people out there, but chances are good that if the Vikings decided to move on from him they would be making a downgrade at the position.

Everything I just said about Zimmer also applies to Kirk Cousins. He’s better than he’s played so far this year, but this year has shown what we have suspected all along, that he is not good enough to carry an offense without an elite supporting cast. And yet if the Vikings get rid of him, the odds that they actually get someone better are small. Just look at the last team that let Cousins walk, and how they look to be heading towards another hole at the position as Dwayne Haskins struggles to perform at even a competent level in the NFL.

There are two big differences between Zimmer and Cousins: age and salary. Zimmer certainly isn’t young, but there’s no reason to believe his skills as a coach are going to erode anytime soon. Cousins on the other hand is 32 years old, and the burden he puts on their salary cap only increases over the next two years. He’s guaranteed to be on the team a year from now, but in 2022 the Vikings will save $35 million by releasing him. There’s always a possibility of restructuring his deal, but if they head towards a rebuild I think it’s fair to say Cousins is not—and should not be—part of their long-term plan. 

For years now these teams have been drafting trying to fill the holes on their existing rosters. Now they have to start drafting for the roster they will have three years down the road. And if they continue their downward course through the season and they find themselves with the opportunity to select one of the top quarterbacks available this year, they should seriously consider pulling the trigger. I generally don’t think there’s much value in a quarterback “learning from the bench”, but these teams shouldn’t pass up on someone like Trevor Lawrence just to keep their veterans around for another year or two.

It’s harder with Matt Ryan than it is with Cousins. He’s been in Atlanta for more than a decade, and he is the best quarterback the franchise has ever had. And he is still playing at a very high level, on an offense that has talent to work with. I wouldn’t hold it against them if they tried to scrape something together for his final few years. But this is the same strategy the Chargers pulled with Philip Rivers before they decided to let him walk this past offseason. And while I’m not a fan of Justin Herbert, they at least have acknowledged that they are building their team for 2023 rather than 2020. It’s likely time for the Falcons to do the same.

The trickiest situation is in Philadelphia, and I’m not talking about the head coach. Doug Pederson is a fine coach, and I think his performance the Super Bowl year is enough to earn him a couple bad seasons of leeway. He may not be the coach at the end of the rebuild, but he deserves a chance to see the initial stages and to prove that he is capable of getting them back to the highest level. 

The problem is at quarterback. Because unlike these other three teams, quarterback has been the problem for Philadelphia this year. I’ve always thought Carson Wentz was a little overrated, and so far in 2020 he is really backing me up. He has been one of the worst quarterbacks in the league so far this year. He is averaging career-worst numbers in completion percentage, sack percentage, touchdown percentage, and yards per attempt. His best asset in past years was his ability to avoid turnovers, but he’s thrown two interceptions in each game this year. He’ll get better as the season goes along, because he can’t get worse. But his performance has raised real questions about whether the Eagles can count on him to be their long-term answer at quarterback.

The Eagles are obviously not going to move on from Wentz this offseason. He’s young, though not as young as you’d think, already 27 years old—the same age as Teddy Bridgewater, a year older than Jameis Winston and Marcus Mariota, and a full two years older than draft classmate Jared Goff. The Eagles have him locked up through 2024, and I don’t think there’s a reasonable financial case to get rid of him before 2023.

But what if they keep losing? What if Wentz continues to throw games away, and the Eagles collapse down the stretch and find their way to the top of the draft? Certainly they can try to trade the pick to a more desperate team, and use that bounty to restock their roster with talent. That’s the route they will almost certainly go if they do wind up in this position. But unless Wentz takes a step forward that he hasn’t shown to this point in his career, I think the question will linger over them as they try to build the next few years. Because this team could very easily be ready to compete again in two or three years, and I’m not convinced they have the quarterback they need to do so.