Well That Was Weird

The 2022 regular season has come and gone, and as you may have noticed, I had very little to say during it. After nearly ten years of running this blog, I decided to step back this year, and it’s a decision I have not regretted, for two main reasons. First of all, it gave me a lot more time to do other stuff, like play Horizon Forbidden West and Pokemon Violet (both excellent games). And second, it kept me from making an absolute fool of myself in one of the weirdest football seasons I can remember.

There are no records of the takes I’ve had over the course of this season, which is good because most of those takes have proven disastrously incorrect. So for obvious reasons I’m not going to get too deep into playoff predictions. (I think Philadelphia is clearly the most complete team, but the big three in the AFC could give them a challenge if their quarterbacks catch fire.) Instead I’m going to focus my eye backwards, looking at the weirdest parts of the season we just saw.

 

The Year of the Dud

In recent years it’s become pretty easy for analysts to default to just measuring teams by their quarterback. The position remains the most important of any in sports, and we just saw two decades go by in which almost every year it felt like a sure thing that we could count on seeing Tom Brady, Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers, Ben Roethlisberger, and usually Drew Brees in the postseason. A big-name quarterback isn’t enough to give a team a title on his own, but he was usually enough to make them above-average on offense.

The league has been trending away from that for a few seasons, but 2022 was a massive leap forward. This isn’t to say that the quarterback position no longer matters, just that we saw a lot of star quarterbacks who always felt like sure things fall flat on their faces. The cause of this is an overall elevation of quarterback play across the league. I don’t know if we’ve ever seen this much young talent at the position—players like Tua Tagovailoa, Jalen Hurts, Justin Herbert, Trevor Lawrence, Joe Burrow—who have the ability to thrive in the right circumstances, but maybe not the ability to carry offenses on their own. Right now there are only one or two quarterbacks playing at an all-time great level: Patrick Mahomes, who should run away with MVP, and maybe Josh Allen. Outside of that there are a lot of solid quarterbacks playing around the same level who are differentiated primarily by their supporting casts.

The result of this is that some of the biggest names in the league fell flat on their faces in 2022. The clearest place to start with this is with the defending Super Bowl champions. After years toiling with mediocre supporting pieces in Detroit, Matthew Stafford finally had a team worthy of him last year, and he rode this and some lucky bounces to a championship. There were reasons to be worried about the Rams coming into the season—natural regression, aging stars, the retirement of Andrew Whitworth—but I don’t think any of us expected it to be this bad. Stafford looked cooked from opening night, throwing weak passes behind an offensive line he couldn’t trust to keep him clean. He ended up playing only nine games due to injuries, had his worst ANY/A since his rookie season, and the Rams ended the year with a record of 5-12.

The Rams were a team that was always destined to fall back to earth at some point, though the speed with which it happened was jarring. There were other teams that were expected to take a leap forward with a new quarterback, and their failure to do so leaves them in very bad situations.

To some extent you can try to wipe away this season for Cleveland, since they only had six games from Deshaun Watson due to his suspension. But even when Watson came back, there were plenty of red flags. He hadn’t played since 2020, and it was clear he was rusty when he first returned, showing steady improvement over the final month of the season. But he still had a habit of holding the ball too long and making poor decisions when he did let it go, on an offense that is built with the assumption that he will be extraordinary.

The issues with the Browns go deeper than the quarterback. Jacoby Brissett was not bad during the eleven games he started (better than Watson in his six games, if we’re being honest), and the real reason for this team’s collapse was their defense. This was a unit that was expected to take a leap forward on the backs of talented stars like Myles Garrett and Denzel Ward along with developing youngsters Greg Newsome and Jeremiah Owusu-Koromoah. But the young talent didn’t emerge, and they were forced to make a change at defensive coordinator. If they can’t figure something out next year, they will once again find themselves asking everything from a player who hasn’t been great in two or three years.

There are fewer excuses to be found in Denver. Russell Wilson came in, took the team over, and they immediately plunged into the abyss of the NFL. This happened despite a defense playing like one of the best in the league, and despite an offense that, on paper, had plenty of tools to work with. The problem in Denver was Wilson, but after signing him to an extension there is really nothing they can do about that until 2026.

Denver’s only hope over the next couple years is that with a new coaching staff things will turn around. And while I certainly don’t think Nathanial Hackett did a good job, it’s not clear what a new coach will be able to bring to the table.

For years the common perception around Wilson in Seattle was that the coaching staff was holding him back by running a limited, unaggressive offense, but this year was a sharp rejection of that. Geno Smith put together a solid year with the Seahawks, while Wilson experienced many of the same limitations he had under Pete Carroll. He struggles throwing the ball over the middle of the field, and now that his athleticism has started to wane, he’s no longer capable of consistently making the huge plays down the field while scrambling. It isn’t outside the realm of possibility that he can bounce back next year, but I think there’s also a real chance he is simply cooked, and if that’s the case the Broncos are as good as dead for the next three or four years.

It feels almost wrong to include these last two quarterbacks, since unlike Stafford, Watson, and Wilson, Aaron Rodgers and Tom Brady were not actually terrible this year. It was only compared to the standards established by their own careers that they appeared to fall off, but with teams built around the expectation they would receive Hall of Fame quarterback play, even simply above-average is enough to devastate them.

To some extent Brady brought this on himself. It isn’t clear exactly what happened during the offseason, but it seems likely that he had some hand in convincing Bruce Arians to retire, which was followed by the elevation of defensive coordinator Todd Bowles. And I’m not sure if I can think of a worse coaching transition in recent memory. Bowles spent the year acting like he was back with the Jets, having to cover for his quarterback and hope that the defense can keep things low-scoring. They stuck to a running game that simply didn’t work, and the only time their offense ran effectively was in the two-minute drill, when they turned everything over to Brady.

Brady was probably the least of Tampa Bay’s problems this year, but he still wasn’t the player we’re used to seeing. He missed some passes that have always come easy to him, and until the very end of the season he struggled to push the ball down the field. Physically he seemed mostly fine, except that he no longer has the quickness in the pocket to erase pressure from an offensive line that was heavily banged up in front of him. Thanks to playing in the NFC South, the Buccaneers still managed to slip into the postseason, but unless they make some major changes to their offense overnight, they are going to fall far short of their talent level.

Rodgers also had, statistically, a year that would be excellent for any other quarterback. And the Packers did make a late push for the playoffs, with the story emerging that he was growing more comfortable with the young weapons around him, particularly Christian Watson. This angle is a bit overblown. Green Bay’s offense was middling over the first half of the year, and they barely improved at all over the second. Most of the changes came on the defensive side, where they made some adjustments to the depth chart in the secondary and began playing much more aggressively in coverage.

It's hard to know where Rodgers will go from here. He has toyed with retirement or with forcing his way out of Green Bay for a few years now, and I think it’s better if we don’t try to figure out what’s going on inside his head. This year certainly wasn’t up to his standards—it was the first time he threw double-digit interceptions since 2010—but it isn’t far off from some of the rough patches he hit from 2017-2019. He bounced back from those to win two more MVPs, and it’s tough to rule out him doing something similar now, even though he will be turning 40 this year.

 

It Really Doesn’t Matter Who Plays Quarterback for the 49ers

The biggest question coming into the season was whether Trey Lance could step in and elevate this offense to a level it was unable to reach with Jimmy Garoppolo under center. That question remains unanswered, as Lance lasted less than two games before being lost for the season. At that point a lot of people mentally wrote the 49ers off, seeing them as the same team that made the playoffs a year ago but didn’t have the offensive firepower to make a real push.

But then a funny thing happened. Garoppolo took over the offense again—after offseason attempts to trade him away ended with him agreeing to a massively reduced contract to stay as a backup—and he performed his role perfectly in the offense. There were still ways he limited their attack, particularly stretching the field vertically, but he cleaned up the turnover issues that have plagued him through his career, and he took the 49ers to a 7-3 record in the ten games after he took over.

It looked like the 49ers had dodged the biggest obstacle any team can face, the loss of their quarterback. Until Garoppolo himself went down. And surely at this point they were screwed. No team has a third string option who is capable of playing at a high level in the NFL, and the 49ers looked particularly grim there, with a rookie seventh-round pick who was considered a developmental backup at best prior to the draft.

Of course, Brock Purdy came in and proceeded to win each of his first five starts. Every week I came in expecting him to lay an egg, and every week their offense seemed to hit a new high. Obviously he isn’t the only reason for their success—the 49ers defense is the best in the league. Christian McCaffrey has been everything they wanted as a midseason acquisition, Brandon Aiyuk has emerged as one of the best number two receivers in the league, and Kyle Shanahan would be my selection for Coach of the Year—but Purdy is doing more than just slotting into the offense. He may not be doing anything to elevate the talent around him, but he is certainly not doing anything to detract from it either.

So can this continue into the playoffs? My gut says no, but my gut has been wrong about this team at every step of the season. Rookie quarterbacks have historically struggled in the postseason, and Purdy certainly hasn’t faced a murderer’s row of opposing defenses through his first five starts. But the NFC isn’t exactly loaded with elite defenses—Philadelphia and Dallas are the only two that scare me, and the 49ers likely only have to go through one of them. As long as things stay on schedule, and as long as he keeps doing what he’s been doing, I’m not sure there’s any reason to expect this 49ers run to stop.

 

The Colts Make a Mess Out of Everything

There were worse teams in the league than the Colts this year, and teams that were bigger disappointments, but I don’t think any other franchise comes close to matching Indianapolis in terms of pure comedy value. Their struggles this year weren’t necessarily impossible to see coming, but the way they continued to dig even deeper at the bottom of their hole each week was impressive to watch, a sign of a team truly committed to dysfunction.

I could have included Matt Ryan in the section above on quarterback duds, but truth be told there wasn’t any real surprise in his mediocrity. Maybe some people had hopes that he’d bounce back after being freed from the grimness of Atlanta, but no one was really shocked when it turned out that wasn’t the case.

Indianapolis has spent years trying desperately to patch the hole at quarterback, with increasingly disappointing results. All the while their roster has degraded until the solid team that Philip Rivers led to the playoffs was basically gone. There was nothing here for Ryan to work with, and he gave nothing back.

This was clear pretty much from the very first week of the season, and it would have been easy for the Colts to drift into the doldrums of the NFL’s lower-middle class. But they had a different plan. The series of events that followed seem mostly driven by owner Jim Irsay, who has always been a bit erratic and would likely have a reputation among the worst in the league if he hadn’t lucked into two generational quarterback prospects that at least kept the team respectable. And with Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck no longer within shouting distance, he was free to give in to his wildest impulses.

It started in week 8 with the benching of Ryan. Making a change at quarterback is hardly a new strategy, and Ryan wasn’t playing well enough to make this a nonsensical move, but it was clear even at the time that there were far worse issues on this team. And backup Sam Ehlinger has never been a particularly exciting prospect, so a move that was clearly pushed from the top-down by ownership filled almost no one with optimism.

And then the firings started. First to go was offensive coordinator Pep Hamilton, a respected and veteran coordinator who will likely stroll into another job next year. He was let go only a week after Ehlinger was named the starter, and then a week later head coach Frank Reich was fired as well.

Where this truly reached comedy was with the hiring of Jeff Saturday. Bringing in someone from outside the organization in the middle of a season is basically unheard of in the NFL, and selecting someone with no prior coaching experience at either the college or professional level is somehow even more bizarre. This made no sense at the time, and it makes even less sense two months later, as we’ve watched Saturday be consistently flummoxed by even the most basic parts of coaching.

Naturally Saturday’s first move was to reinstate Ryan as the starter, which offered something resembling stability for five more weeks before they tossed him aside again, this time for Nick Foles. All this really revealed was that even a washed up Ryan was still comfortably the best option on their roster

This isn’t even touching all the other nonsense that happened with this team. An opening-week tie to a Texans team that was clearly tanking. Another near-tie on prime time against the Broncos. A 33-point quarter allowed to the Cowboys, and then a 33-point blown lead against the Vikings, both once again in front of a national audience. And it wrapped up the only way possible, with a complete collapse allowing a touchdown on 4^th and 20 versus the abysmal Texans.

I have no idea what is next for the Colts, and I’m not sure anyone does. It would be insane to keep Saturday on as coach, but it was insane to hire him in the first place. They could make an aggressive push for a rookie quarterback after years of plugging in uninspiring veterans, or they could take a run at someone like Derek Carr or Jimmy Garoppolo. Right now, though, it looks like Irsay is calling all the shots, and that should leave us all excited to see what might be next.

 

A Pro Bowl for Geno

I’ve been a quiet fan of Geno Smith for a long time. He wasn’t necessarily good during his time with the Jets, but he did enough that I thought he deserved another chance to show what he was capable of. I kept an eye on him for nearly a decade as he bounced between backup roles in New York, Los Angeles, and finally Seattle, and when it was announced that he would have a chance to win the starting role in a competition with Drew Lock this offseason, I felt pretty confident the job would be Geno’s.

“Better than Drew Lock” is about the faintest praise you can give to an NFL quarterback, and even I will admit that I did not see this season’s performance coming. Smith has quieted off from an electric start to the season as the Seahawks limped down the stretch to slide into the last playoff spot in the NFC, but on the whole his numbers for the season still paint an impressive picture. He led the league with 69.2% completion and threw for 4282 yards and 30 touchdowns against only 11 interceptions. He also added 366 yards on the ground, a playmaking element that showed up often in the most critical moments of games.

Smith earned a Pro Bowl spot, and he was definitely deserving of it in a weak NFC quarterback group. It also might be the most unlikely Pro Bowl berth ever. Smith is just the second quarterback to ever make his Pro Bowl debut in his tenth season or later, joining only Rich Gannon.

Smith is also a free agent after this year, and he will be an interesting prospect on the open market, as no one can really be sure what they will get from him going forward. If he plays like he did in the first half of the season, he’s a star quarterback worthy of a huge investment. If he plays like he did over the second half, he’s a solid gap starter for a team with no better option. It’s a fascinating dilemma, and I’m excited to watch the remainder of his career play out.

 

The Vikings Keep Getting Away With It

There are a lot of very good, very complicated football analytics out there in the world, but there are also some very simple ones. And among the simplest is the notion that team performance in close games is mostly random. A team that has won a bunch of single-score contests is likely due for some rough patches ahead, while teams that win by blowouts are much more likely to sustain their good records.

This is an argument that pops up every year around October. There are always one or two teams that get off to hot starts thanks to a number of close wins, and for a few weeks everyone argues about whether or not their good record is fraudulent. Most of the time they do regress, winning around half of their close games the remainder of the way and ending up on the fringe of playoff contention.

This year the team that caught everyone’s eye was Minnesota. I first recall hearing rumblings around this at about week 6, when they were 5-1 thanks to four straight single-score victories. They had one of the best records in the league, but many commentators were calling them frauds, due to revert back to more of an average performance down the stretch.

I’m usually on the side of these commentators, and even though I am a Vikings fan, I found myself agreeing with them once again. I’ve seen this story plenty of times before, and I expected a rough second-half of the season that would be a major letdown after this hot start.

Not only did the Vikings not regress in close games, they seemed committed each week to proving just how far they could take this streak. By the end of the season 11 of their 13 victories came in one-score games, while all four defeats were by double-digit margins. This meant that despite having one of the five best records in the league, they actually allowed more points in the regular season than they scored. They are the first team to win 13 games with a negative point differential. In fact they are the first team to win 13 games with a point differential worse than +60. By basically every measure other than wins and losses the Vikings are an average team. And yet they are headed into the playoffs as the third seed in the NFC.

When a pattern persists for so long, eventually you do have to try to find some explanation. And there are certain rationalizations you can point to. There is some evidence that very good quarterbacks or coaches can perform better than average in close games, though Kirk Cousins has shown no sign of this through his career, entering the season with a record of 31-30-2 in single-score contests. Perhaps Kevin O’Connell is the deciding factor, though there are no specific actions of his we can point to that proved decisive in any of these games.

O’Connell has had an up-and-down first year as Minnesota’s head coach, but one place he has undoubtedly improved things is by establishing a relationship with his starting quarterback that Mike Zimmer never had. O’Connell has complete trust in his quarterback, and at times that seems to have made a major difference for this team.

By many numbers this was the worst season Cousins has had since arriving with the Vikings—it was his lowest season with Minnesota by passer rating, QBR, and ANY/A, and he also set career highs with 14 interceptions and 46 sacks. But when you look a little closer, you see that this was largely due to a stylistic change. After years of developing a reputation as an occasionally passive passer, Cousins broke out this year as one of the most aggressive quarterbacks in the league. He pushed the ball into tight windows, and he repeatedly demonstrated faith in Justin Jefferson to win contested catches in situations when in the past he would have just checked the ball down.

One of the more underrated skills a quarterback can have is the ability to modulate aggression. A quarterback should err on the side of caution when leading, and he should take more chances when his team has fallen behind. The latter is something a lot of quarterbacks struggle with, including some of the best in the league who remain reluctant to drive balls into tight windows even when the situation demands they attempt it.

This year Cousins seems to have figured out how to turn the dial on his aggression. Five of his interceptions came in the second half when the Vikings were trailing by multiple scores, situations where an incomplete pass or a sack is just as devastating for the chances of victory as a turnover. The effect of this aggression is easy to see. If it works out, a team can pull off remarkable comebacks, like the Vikings did against Indianapolis. If it doesn’t work, a middle-sized margin can explode into an embarrassing defeat, as it did in the four games the Vikings lost this year. But ultimately once you’re behind it doesn’t matter if you run out the clock and lose by 7 or if you let the other team run up the score and beat you by 20. A loss is a loss as far as the records are concerned.

Does this dialing up of aggression explain Minnesota’s absurd 11-0 record? Of course not. There are other rationalizations we can try to pile on top of this, but in the end there is no doubting that some element of this team’s success this year has been sheer dumb luck. And normally I’d be willing to write that luck off going forward, expecting them to stumble now that they are facing real competition of the sort that has embarrassed them repeatedly this year. But I was wrong about a lot in 2022, and maybe, just maybe, that streak will continue on into 2023.