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Football season kicked off last night. I missed the game, at work all night, but I'm excited for my Philadelphia Eagles to kick off in Brazil tonight.
How're my fellow sports fans on the motte feeling about their teams this season? Any degens placing longshot parlays this week?
I'm thinking that by week 8, most predictions in this Eagles team are going to look pretty stupid. Last season they were the best team in the sport for half a season and the worst team in the sport for half a season. The spine of the team is pretty much the same. They swapped out OC and DC but kept the same head coach. They've added several young defensive backs and a few veteran linebackers, lost their most dangerous edge rusher and a team legend; they swapped out a Hall of Fame center but they had an in house heir so they just needed a new right guard, and signed a star running back they're hoping isn't old. At the end of the day the most important question is at quarterback, has the league figured out Jalen Hurts? If he collapses under blitzing every time, the rest is academic. Their outcomes seem likely to again be binary, but a lot of power rankings hedge by placing them in the middle. I wouldn't bet the o/u of 10.5 wins either way comfortably, but one could probably make money betting tail odds of over 12.5 wins and under 6.5 wins. This is either a team with a ridiculous unguardable number of offensive weapons or a team with no answer to extra pressure.
Reading the responses to this post makes me think The Motte should have a weekly NFL thread.
I'd probably enjoy it.
Done: https://www.themotte.org/post/1164/weekly-nfl-thread-week-2
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College football is probably the only American sport I still follow (I suppose international soccer involves the Yanks?), and I'm not sure how to feel this season. Vanderbilt is an academic school in a group full of football powerhouses, but this year we seem to be somewhat not-incompetent? I'm waiting for reality to catch up, but it's not implausible that we have our best season in the past decade.
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I was at the UNM Lobos football opener, first game for their new coach.
A sudden windstorm blew a camera off the stadium roof and almost injured spectators in the crowd below, but one data cable held firm and didn’t snap. Someone on the second story pulled it inside safely.
We were ahead of the other team for all but thirty seconds of the game. Too bad it was the final thirty seconds. On the way out of the stadium, we heard some hate-watchers saying they knew it all along that the new coach was never going to cut it, and he should just quit now.
So, business as usual for the Lobos.
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Things are looking up for the Texans, which is always when shit goes South and we completely capsize.
I mean the good news is that the AFC South blows, so the Texans have a clear shot to win the division with only mediocre play, and then, who knows.
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Professional football prognosticators seem to be more fickle than normal lately. The Eagles had a bad end to the season but I'm not going to throw them under the bus and say that a season and a half (plus the improved season before that) was all a lucky fluke just because of a half-dozen games. The Gnats are terrible. The Commanders get hyped every year but never seem to go anywhere. That leaves the Eagles and the Cowboys, and the Cowboys will probably choke. At the very least, they don't deserve to win anything. For some reason their fans hate Dak. Everyone keeps saying Zeke is washed, but he's still better than the guy backing him up. They have a good defense, but Micah Parsons is unhappy. I don't know what to make of this. The Eagles have as good a chance as they do.
I'm going to ping @Walterodim so I can consolidate my responses here. I have Josh Allen as my dynasty league QB so I'm totally biased, and I've always liked the Bills. I have a theory about QBs like Allen and Mahomes; when you combine guys this good with really good coaching, it doesn't matter who the receivers are. In a sense this is the ideal play because they can't just shadow your top guy all day. Tom Brady won all of his Super Bowls in such a system — everyone forgets this, but the only wideout to ever make the Pro Bowl on a Patriots Super Bowl team was Troy Brown in 2001 (and that was his only Pro Bowl). Randy Moss and Wes Welker had better careers, but neither won a Super Bowl. The Bills' defensive injuries are more of a concern but it seems like they always have a ton of defensive injuries. Speaking of the Patriots, they're in a rebuild and are expecting to be so bad that they're easing Drake Maye into the QB role even though he's obviously better than Brissett. The Dolphins are the kind of team with an "explosive" offense that wins games by hanging a ton of points on shitty teams. But they can't beat anyone good. Their defense relies on the offense keeping them off the field. As for the Jets, it's all hype. The offense assumes a 76-year-old Aaron Rogers will be back in hall-of-fame condition after being injured for a year. I predict he gets injured again and we get to see Tyrod Taylor. Their defense boils down to "we have Sauce Gardner", and they can't stop the run. Breece Hall is good, but so was Travis Henry. Bills win this division easily.
Pinging @Hoffmeister25. The only thing the Chargers have going for them is that they're clearly better than the Raiders and Broncos, so they should coast to an easy second place finish. If two things are certain it's that Jim Harbaugh will run the ball, and J.K. Dobbins will get injured, so be ready to see a lot of the Gus Bus. The Jags briefly looked like they had their act together, but that remains to be seen. The Texans should easily win this division, but their only two years removed from being the second worst team in the league, and as a Jags fan you should know what that means. Hell, as a Chargers fan you should know what early hype combined with limited success can lead to. Granted, the Texans looked more put-together last year than the Jags or the Chargers ever did, but I'm not about to crown them kings of the division, either. The Colts could also pose a problem, but I'm not a fan of overhyped QBs like Anthony Richardson and Michael Pittman, Jr. always underperforms expectations in fantasy, so I'm rooting to see Joe Fluke-O lose another wild card game. The Titans are an interesting story. They deserve to lose for tearing down a stadium that isn't that old to build a taxpayer-funded dome in a city with mild weather. They also have a history of disrespecting the Terrible Towel, and their best season in the past 20 years was with Kerry Collins at quarterback. Honestly, this division could go in any direction.
And now for my Steelers. Over the offseason, they took the bold step of replacing the frustration of a mediocre quarterback with the frustration of two mediocre quarterbacks. As they can't help but repeat in every broadcast, Mike Tomlin has never had a losing season. Every year some edgy sportswriter picks them to go 5–12 or some bullshit without realizing that that isn't possible. No matter how dire things seem, if there's one thing the Steelers are capable of it's battling back from a terrible season to have a chance to make the playoffs with a Steelers win AND a Jaguars loss, AND a Chargers loss, AND a Browns–Bengals tie, only for every leg of this impossible parlay to happen except the part where the Steelers beat the 2–14 Texans. Or, alternatively, they make the playoffs but are so outclassed they lose 45–15. After experiencing two Super Bowl wins I have resigned myself to this fate. But the sportswriters are still idiots; this team is better in every dimension than they were last year, but they're predicted to do worse. Some of this has to do with the brutal schedule, but they have one of the best defenses in the league and everyone forgets that last year they were 7–4 after Thanksgiving despite not scoring any points and would have easily cruised into the playoffs if it weren't for three fabulous weeks of Mitch Trubisky. The idea that Russell Wilson and Justin Fields can be written off entirely after a combined three minutes of preseason play is absurd. Seriously, there's absolutely no correlation between the preseason and regular season so commentators just need to stop acting like there is.
The division is interesting. The Ravens are clearly the best team, but the Steelers should have no problem beating them twice so long as Lamar stays healthy. I used to like Joe Burrow but I lost all respect for him when he showed up to the Super Bowl in that horrible suit (and had to wear it to the press conference since he forgot to bring anything else). Supposedly he's oblivious to fashion so he lets Ja'Marr Chase pick his clothes for him. Most people know that there are certain clothes that white guys can't pull off. Unfortunately, "most people" does not include stylish black guys, who tend to uncritically assume that their approach works for everybody. When Ryan Fitzpatrick showed up at a press conference wearing DeSean Jackson's clothes everybody in the press laughed because they knew it was obviously a joke. No one laughs about Burrow's sartorial choices because they know he's oblivious and it would just hurt his feelings. Anyway, they have a questionable running game and their defense might be worse than the Chargers. These are the kinds of teams the Steelers beat easily since they can't stay competitive unless they score 500 points. The Browns are always the Browns. I'll admit that they have a good defense. But DeSean Watson is terrible enough that they signed ALL the quarterbacks. Nick Chubb won't be his old self coming off of injury and will be worse than Jerome Ford was in his last game before Chubb came back, but not so much worse that they can make Ford the starter. These defensive battles are tossups so the Steelers should split this with them. You can throw darts at a board for the rest of the games because some bullshit always happens.
Prediction: They enter divisional play in last place with a 3–6 record against a shit schedule and everyone starts talking about how the schedule is so tough (all divisional plus Eagles and Chiefs) that there's no way they can possibly come back and Tomlin needs to go, etc. This whole affair involves repeated benchings of both Wilson and Fields and at least one disastrous Kyle Allen start. And then they sign Ryan Tannehill because he knows the "Arthur Smith offense" and they win 7 of their last 8 thorough some combination of the following: Injuries to opposing QBs who aren't Lamar Jackson, fluke plays, missed field goals, questionable penalties, TJ Watt fumble recoveries for TD, Minkah pick-6s, the Eagles starting Kenny Pickett, and at least one Calvin Austin jet sweep. They will then lose to the Browns in the first round of the playoffs in a game so badly played it's nearly unwatchable.
Replacing three mediocre quarterbacks.
Trubisky was well below mediocre.
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I have a lot of affection for the Steelers as a franchise. Always play hard, never a team that pisses me off, does it the right way.
Also, false alarm, the eagles are undefeated, despite their best efforts. Saquon is doin' it for the keystone state. Never in doubt.
They are, but good God, if Hurts is going to play like that then you guys better get used to the idea of Kenny Pickett starting.
Why would they start Kenny Pickett? Hurts threw a third as many touchdown passes last night as Kenny Pickett threw in 12 games in last year. They would have no chance of getting anywhere in particular with Pickett, no matter how poorly Hurts plays there is no point in putting in Pickett if Hurts is healthy. They're at the point in the carousel where if Hurts plays poorly, Sirianni is next on the chopping block, and only then after another bad season will Hurts be cut loose, probably as part of a down-to-the-studs rebuild with no more than a half dozen players on this team seeing the next competitive Eagles season.
After the Donovan McNabb experience, if I were a black quarterback signing a big contract, I'd require a secret written agreement from the team that they will never, under any circumstances, sign a white backup QB. All my backups must be black. I've never seen any black QB other than Mahomes who didn't get talk radio "questions" about replacing him with the white backup after a mediocre game. It's inevitable.
I wasn't suggesting they'd ever consider benching Hurts for Pickett. The way he was playing made it look like he was eventually going to get injured.
Edit - If you think having a black QB is bad, try having a black coach. Tomlin haters not only call for his firing on an annual basis, regardless of what the team does, but also refuse to give him credit for his successes which include winning a Super Bowl. This is discounted because it was allegedly done "with Cowher's players", as though there's no GM or front office involved. Never mind that the team was 8–8 Cowher's last year. Never mind that literally every coach who won a Stanley Cup with the Penguins had less time with the team than Tomlin. This is logically contradictory with the other criticism they have, which is that the teams with Bell and AB should have done more. Isn't that admitting that the guy can put a team together? So either he's a bad team assembler or he's a bad game day coach. I could excuse this as just general sports fan stupidity but, in person, they always have to bring up that he was only hired so Dan Rooney could "walk the walk" when it came to his rule. The only conclusion I can draw from this is that they think the Steelers would have been better had they hired the other leading candidate, Russ Grimm, who, as far as I know, was never considered for a head coaching position after that.
The other thing they like to bring up is that winning seasons don't matter if you don't go anywhere in the playoffs. They may have a point, but I suspect this is influenced by how long it's been since we've seen a truly dreadful season. If we were to start going 6–11 every year they'd long for the days when Tomlin was coach and there was at least a reason to watch. A couple years ago I actually did an analysis where I looked at every NFL head coach since Tomlin was hired and, giving the other guy the benefit of the doubt, graded every one as either better, the same, or clearly worse. 7 were arguably better, 10 were about the same, and 80 were unarguably worse. Some of those guys were obvious mistakes, but most of them were guys with good resumes who fans were excited about. Suggesting Tomlin should be fired after a winning season is one of the stupidest sports takes out there, and at least half of the people making the argument don't even pretend that it isn't because he's black.
One final dumb criticism that's always brought up is his lack of a coaching tree, as though this matters. The only one of his assistants this even applies to is Matt Canada — he inherited Bruce Arians and Dick LeBeau, Todd Haley had been a head coach previously, Keith Butler retired (and was in the organization longer than Tomlin), and Randy Fichtner would have stayed with the team if they hadn't been mesmerized by Canada. And if Arthur Smith coaches elsewhere he won't count as part of Tomlin's tree, either. It's a dumb argument anyway.
My fault for misunderstanding! Hurts is either going to make it or he isn't, injury and talent wise. Trying to play him at half his power level is mostly pointless, though the brotherly shove play might be gone after the shambles last night which might save him a few hits.
Tomlin is serially underrated across the game. I'm not sure why. No other coach comes close on steady Eddie record, there has never been an unwatchable Steelers season under Tomlin. Maybe this will be the year but I doubt it. In the NBA where the regular season itself is mostly unwatchable anyway, I understand the championship or bust mentality. But I'd sooner have an NFL team that plays good entertaining football 17 games a season every year than a rebuild, most of which completely fail anyway.
Just good enough is a dangerous trap in the NFL. For the record I love Tomlin, but you can see why people might be upset when you have teams like the Eagles that do repeated tear down and rebuilds, especially given how hard it is to land a good QB in general but when you are mildly above average in particular.
Many fans (maybe foolishly) would choose ups and downs instead of consistency.
I guess the shame of it is that you don't get to pick which team you root for, for the most part, so you're stuck with the style of whatever team you like.
In the NFL I actually watch a lot of regular season games with my family, and I'd sooner pick a competitive if unspectacular team every year over unwatchable year after year while hoping for the future. MLB I understand tanking because it takes years of playing lots of young players for some of them to hit and start to build a core, there's value in playing the kids live. The star centric nature of basketball makes it, for most teams, an unfortunate necessity in the NBA.
But in the NFL, there's a confluence of short careers, limited and uneven development of players in the league, complicated salary cap rules, and the randomness inherent in player selection. Yes, you need to tank if you want to draft a Joe Burrow. But sometimes you go all in to get #1 overall and you get nothing. The Jets have spent the last six seasons starting a second overall and a third overall pick, they've never had a winning record in that time.
Good teams with good coaches and GMs and systems might have missed picks, down years, and problems, but they're able to reset quickly without years of losing by making good selections in later rounds and developing players well. Glancing over the QB rankings at TheRinger for a quick reference, out of the top 20: Hurts, Purdy, Love, Smith, Prescott could all have been drafted by basically any team in their draft year. I'd sooner bet on a good organization developing a fresh player than I'd bet on a bad organization turning things around. For every CJ Stroud there's a Bryce Young. And sometimes you tank for the top pick and end up with a Baker Mayfield or a Trevor Lawrence, whose best seasons have looked like the ones Tomlin's detractors are complaining about.
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Nitpick here - none of the advanced metrics liked them even with the strong W-L record. They kept showing up at like 10th in DVOA and Aaron Schatz had to keep explaining that they're just not all that good on a play-to-play basis. As a massive Bills homer, I will also note that they needed absolutely absurd officiating to fluke their way to that win. I'm not an unbiased source and remain very salty :-|
On the topic of my beloved Bills, they're pretty clearly talent depleted due to a combination of some bad injury luck and poor contract choices. After Josh Allen, the next three biggest cap hits this year are Stefon Diggs (no longer on the team), Matt Milano (torn bicep, out till December), and Von Miller (old, injured, washed). You're just not going to have a talented and deep roster when you screw up like that. Even so, I'm excited to watch the young offensive core - James Cook, Dalton Kincaid, Khalil Shakir, and Keon Coleman are all at least enticing players with upside. Curtis Samuel is probably going to be useful in a limited role. Some of the defensive losses are overblown in the media (Poyer and Hyde were old and didn't look great last year, Tre White only played 3 games anyway), but there are enough talent gaps to have real concerns about them staying above water. I did bet them to win the AFC East because I think the Jets hype is just plain stupid and I ultimately trust the McDermott/Allen alliance much more than any other team in the division. Realistically though, they're not going to be on the same level as the teams we watched last night.
I was at that Bills Eagles game. I picked it to see Allen play. The Eagles kept coming up with one desperate play when they needed it. After on SEPTA heading home a bills fan told me he just wanted the bills to WIN the game of the year for once. After that one every power ranking i followed had the Eagles at one, and it was all downhill from there.
I want to see Josh Allen win a super bowl so bad. Maybe more than I want to see the Eagles win another.
Oh man, that's pretty cool. Wild game to be at. I was visiting my family back home, in a bar with quite a few people that shared my displeasure!
But anyway - my inclination is to think the Eagles arrow tilts back up this year. I'm unclear why the Matt Patricia experience happened to yet another team, but simply moving forward with actual competent coordinators should be a tremendous difference. If I was going to be pessimistic, it would largely about Kelce, because I'm a long-time center enthusiast. Usually the huge problems there are from mid-season changes though, so I'll be surprised if there's actually a disaster. You're absolutely right that there needs to be some sort of consistent answer to blitzes, but I tend to think they'll sort out some sort of plausible counter.
Update: Eagles are going 0-17.
Least emotionally-unstable Birds fan.
Update: never mind, Jalen Hurts is bad at football
Listen the worst part about modern rechargeable electronics is the lack of batteries to throw.
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That game was so rainy. My wife is hoping she'll finally go to a dry game this year.
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My NFL loyalties are split, in a complicated dance, between the Chargers and Jaguars. (The 2022 AFC Wild Card game was one of the strangest sports watching experiences of my life.) Both teams are in a somewhat similar position, and my excitement for the upcoming season is about the same for either team.
In terms of QB, the Chargers have the obvious advantage; Justin Herbert is a more experienced, more proven, more well-rounded, and significantly less turnover-prone than Trevor Lawrence. The Chargers also have the clear advantage on the offensive line, with maybe the best young tackle tandem in the AFC. The Jaguars’ offensive line, while they’ve hopefully patched the disastrous liability at center, is still a bottom-6 O-line, which risks yet another year of Lawrence scrambling for his life and unable to manifest his sky-high potential. The Jaguars do, though, have a very impressive group of offensive weapons around Lawrence, and if the O-line play is even league-average I expect a very effective passing offense. The Chargers’ passing game, on the other hand, is a giant question mark. Having lost veteran pass-catchers Keenan Allen and Mike Williams in the off-season, Herbert will be offloading passes to… Josh Palmer? Rookie Ladd McConkey? First-round-bust-in-the-making Quentin Johnston? With the addition of Jim Harbaugh as head coach - a move which increased my confidence in this team by about 5000% - and Greg Roman at OC, I expect the Bolts to run the ball approximately 900 times a game; they even directly imported the RB duo from the Ravens’ last few seasons.
Both teams suffer from the same fundamental flaw, though, which is that they stand almost no chance of being the best team in their respective divisions. The Chiefs are the undisputed best team in the AFC, and nothing I saw from them last night caused me to question this. The odds of the Chargers making it out of that division intact, let alone out of the AFC playoffs, are nonexistent. The Jaguars do not have to compete within their division with a buzzsaw quite as comprehensively unstoppable as KC, but they will be facing the seemingly ascendant Texans - freshly bolstered by the additions of Stefon Diggs, Joe Mixon, and the expected stratospheric second-year leap by CJ Stroud (the centerpiece of my fantasy football team, which is projected to win my league) who have all of the pieces to challenge for the upper echelon of offenses in the entire league. I just don’t think the Jags can measure up against that, especially not with our piss-poor defensive backfield.
I expect an encouraging leap from both teams in the regular season, dashed hopes in the early round of the playoffs, and a spectacular triumph for my fantasy team.
How did you end up with those teams? Do you think the jags will ever pull off moving to London like they've wanted to for years?
I was raised a San Diego Chargers fan, but in college I started to drift away from the fandom; the team was bad, enthusiasm for them in the city was waning, and frankly I was just a young contrarian who wanted to forge my own path and pick a team for myself instead of just inheriting an unchosen fandom. Then when the Chargers moved to LA I fully severed myself from them. I needed a team, and a lot of things about the Jags attracted me: underdog/hipster appeal, cool uniforms, the uniqueness of being the only Jaguars fan I know, no history of success I needed to acquaint myself with or pretend to be emotionally invested in, etc.
I dove into the fandom feet-first, and within a few years I was riding high on the 2017 Sacksonville team that made it all the way to the AFCCG (and should have gone to the Super Bowl - Myles Jack wasn’t down, and that wasn’t a PI by AJ Bouye). Then everything fell apart from there; the Sacksonville defense immediately imploded, Jalen Ramsey gave in to his inner diva, the Nick Foles experiment exploded on the runway, the Minshew Magic meme seasons stopped being funny very quickly, and the Urban Meyer trainwreck especially seemed to prove just how awfully-run this franchise is.
Right around that same time, the sting of the Chargers abandoning San Diego started to fade, my diehard Chargers fan buddy started haranguing me to come back home to the team, and a lot of things about the Chargers were trending upward. (Justin Herbert, in particular, is just a very appealing guy to root for.) Simultaneously, I started regretting abandoning the team I was raised with, and as I began planning to move out of San Diego, the prospect of bringing my hometown team fandom (sorry, they will always be the San Diego Chargers, and nobody in Los Angeles will ever organically care about them) with me wherever I go started to become very appealing. Plus it will give me something to share and discuss with my mom, who never wavered in her fandom. So, now I’m sort of caught between two fandoms, uneasily hoping that I don’t have to witness the two of them directly competing for anything meaningful anytime soon.
Oh god, this again. The team is not moving to London, and it is not leaving Jacksonville. Shad Khan has poured obscene amounts of money into the city, the stadium renovation, the entertainment complex around the venue, etc. I think that maybe early on when he bought the team he genuinely hoped to move it to the UK, but in the intervening years all evidence points to him making peace with the fact that the move will never happen, and embracing making Jacksonville a more attractive destination for both players and fans. I’ll be shocked if the team ever plays more than four games a year in the UK, for the reasons I’ve listed, and for pure logistical reasons as well.
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