Let's chat about the National Football League. This week's schedule (all times Eastern):
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Cincinnati Bengals @ Carolina Panthers
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Denver Broncos @ New York Jets
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Jacksonville Jaguars @ Houston Texans
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Minnesota Vikings @ Green Bay Packers
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM New Orleans Saints @ Atlanta Falcons
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Philadelphia Eagles @ Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Pittsburgh Steelers @ Indianapolis Colts
Sun 2024-09-29 1:00PM Los Angeles Rams @ Chicago Bears
Sun 2024-09-29 4:05PM New England Patriots @ San Francisco 49ers
Sun 2024-09-29 4:05PM Washington Commanders @ Arizona Cardinals
Sun 2024-09-29 4:25PM Cleveland Browns @ Las Vegas Raiders
Sun 2024-09-29 4:25PM Kansas City Chiefs @ Los Angeles Chargers
Sun 2024-09-29 8:20PM Buffalo Bills @ Baltimore Ravens
Mon 2024-09-30 7:30PM Tennessee Titans @ Miami Dolphins
Mon 2024-09-30 8:15PM Seattle Seahawks @ Detroit Lions
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Notes -
The Eagles came away with a sloppy roller coaster of a win in New Orleans on Sunday, in which Jalen Carter and Saquon Barkley saved head coach Nick Sirianni's job. Watching it with my parents, even the dog could feel the tension. The victory itself might be pretty pyrrhic, with the team losing their star RT, starting RG, WR2 and WR3 with WR1 already on the DL.
I still find it highly likely that Nick won't survive the season. While the defense showed up in a big way on Sunday afternoon, the offense was suddenly nowhere to be found. While the weekly power rankings have the Eagles in the top 10, they have yet to show out convincingly in a win, or even in a loss. Each game has been riddled with errors, injuries, and at least one major portion of the team (Pass rush, pass coverage, special teams, passing offense) has disappeared for important portions of each game.
The Eagles made the Super Bowl two seasons ago on an excellent run where their offense lead by Hurts seemed without a clear counter and their pass rush was close to setting records. They then started off last season with a 10-1 record despite looking shaky in many of their wins, with Hurts becoming increasingly turnover prone. The bottom fell out after a Game of the Year win over the Bills, and the team would limp into the playoffs winning only one more game, before getting pantsed in the playoffs by Tampa Bay. They've started this year with three close and uneven games, beating out GB in Brazil, losing to Atlanta at home, and narrowly defeating NO in the Superdome. All three games have been riddled with errors.
This week, a win is a win, but Nick's terrible decision making was on full display. Nick was coaching for his job, if they lost to NO and went away to Tampa on a bad swing he wouldn't have survived the Bye week. And it showed, Nick made bafflingly inconsistent and poor decisions. He attempted a near-impossible field goal that set up NO on the fifty, called a trick-play off the Brotherly Shove that lost them at least three points, watched his team get an embarrassing punt blocked, and has been inconsistent in the level of aggression and analysis he's going with for the whole season now. Nick is clearly costing the team points right now.
At the same time, while Jalen Carter was trying to win the game single-handed on defense (The People's Governor ) Jalen Hurts was trying to give it away on offense. Jalen Hurts threw an interception in the endzone and had a bad fumble that killed a drive, each of which could easily have lost the game.. Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln said the play was excellent, with Hurts seeming to discover how to scramble again and hitting a few huge passes to win the game. Because anything worth doing is worth doing with made up statistics, Hurts graded out in the mid 80s on PFF the last three seasons as a starter, so far this season he's in the low 60s. Whispers in Philly are starting to compare him to another Eagles QB who had a few great seasons before signing a huge contract and going into steep and turnover prone decline: Carson Wentz, Hurts' predecessor, whose albatross contract and poor performance more or less ended the prior era of Eagles' football.
Some Eagles fans are still confused as to order of operations in this game though, which I think does offer a window into decision making under uncertainty, and how regulations distort decisions.
We can't know what this team is for certain outside of what they've shown on the field, which is chaotic mediocrity for a season and change now. Possible realities: A. the team is bad and lacks talent everywhere and must be rebuilt from the ground up, B. the team is talented all around but Jalen Hurts is unplayably turnover prone, C. the team is talented but Nick Sirianni's coaching is holding them back, or D. the team is talented and they'll figure it out. As a matter of probability, each seems about equally likely, but as a matter of decision making within constraints faced by the Eagles, only C or D matter.
The team is resource limited by the NFL salary cap, and their current investments in players. Particularly, Jalen Hurts is signed for $255mm, which for complicated salary cap reasons actually becomes a totally absurd number if they cut Hurts and remains manageable only as long as they keep negotiating extensions with him. The team is set up to win now, they don't have a lot of development assets on the team, their offensive weapons are mostly players in or past their prime and mostly well paid. They have to dance with them what brung them. If they wanted to rebuild this team from the ground up, eating the void years in the Hurts contract alone, would take years of salary cap hell. Plus extra years of losing to obtain the draft capital to pick up a potentially good quarterback, who will just be a roll of the dice anyway, which might send them back into QB limbo.
As a result of all that, A can be safely ignored. If the whole team is really bad, like papier-mache secondary and d-line that can't get a sack bad, it's not fixable in the near future, it's a multi-year process. B can also be ignored, because the structure of the contract and the QB market means that Hurts can't really be fired, at most he might be tradable in the off-season, but that leaves the rest of the team hanging without a QB. Neither A nor B are actually a path to anywhere.
So the choice is purely between C and D. It doesn't matter whether Jalen Hurts is good or not, it only matters whether Nick is doing everything he can to pull the team together. The question is purely whether the team is good with Nick, or whether the coaching is holding them back. No other significant aspect of the team can be improved during the season.
We'll probably find out in Tampa. Go Birds.
In other league news, I would love to see Dakota and Dem Boys get buried by the Giants, and I'm rooting for the GEQBUS.
From the Saints side one of the popular narratives has been about how Dennis Allen has lost the locker room the fake kneel play against the Falcons last year being the proof and/or hitch. Long standing rumor has been that Erik McCoy was the dude who was actually running our offense, and the fact that the Saints went to shit the moment he went down would seem to reinforce that.
The Saints did seem unmoored as a team. That penning penalty against Slay was just weird, unless there was more going on in game that I didn't see on the broadcast.
Wish us luck against the lesser birds ;-)
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If Hurts can't figure it out, there will be broader implications for the league going forward. The past few years have seen QBs getting huge contracts with a lot of guaranteed money on the theory that it's impossible to win without one and you have to strike when the iron is hot, whatever the cost. But two things have happened since 2020 that have challenged that idea. The first is the sheer number of albatross contracts — Cleveland, the Giants, Jacksonville, Denver, and now possibly Philly are all saddled with them. Arizona is still questionable, as is Dallas. Of the 5 undefeated teams, Seattle, Pittsburgh, and Minnesota are all starting QBs who were considered washed, and Josh Allen is past the point where guaranteed money is an issue. That leaves Kansas City, winners of 3 of the last 4 championships, and Mahomes's contract is more complicated than the others. He's also Patrick Mahomes.
That leaves Cincy, which leads into the other reason these contracts might be on their way out: Burrow is good; the Bengals aren't. A lot of this can be chalked up to their non-existent defense, but one wonders how much of that is due to salary cap considerations. The days when teams can win by chucking the ball deep and hoping that speed will defeat man coverage are over. The return of cover 2 means QBs can't rely on the long ball like they used to. The elimination of blitzing in favor of a spy or additional coverage means that they can't rely on their legs to get out of trouble if there's nothing open. Even without the blitz, sack rates are actually up, since the paucity of open receivers and lack of escape lanes has QBs sitting in the pocket too long.
The upshot is that offenses now have to pound the run game, run heavy packages, and take what the defense gives them on pass plays. There are occasional opportunities to go long, but these rely on being able to read the safeties post snap and not just having a good, accurate arm. Kansas City figured this out early and won two Super Bowls because of it. Miami hasn't figured it out yet, which is why they can't beat good teams. San Francisco figured this out early, which is why they were able to get to the Super Bowl with a seventh round pick.
Take a look at Justin Fields, for example. He was a physical freak who could throw a good long ball and had an excellent set of legs on him, but in Chicago he had a tendency to force deep passes that weren't there and he couldn't transition beyond his first read. Put him in an offense where he isn't expected to win games on his own but play ball control all game and he's in the catbird seat. Now, Fields is more talented than the average bum off the street, but his success, limited as it's been this far, is proof that you don't need a guy making 50 million a year to win games.
As for Hurts, I don't think that lack of talent is his problem. The problem is that Sirianni continues to run the same kind of RPO-heavy college offense that he ran two years ago, when you could still get away with shit like that. The problem is that when you've already given him a contract like that it's hard to put him on a short leash. It worked with Mahomes, but there the Chiefs were getting out ahead of the curve and not making a desperate attempt to adapt to a changing league.
Does this mean that the Eagles should fire Sirianni? I don't think so, but as Steelers fan I'm of the opinion that coaching changes should only be made in the most dire situations, and the Eagles situation is nowhere near dire. If the problem is that they're simply a bad team, a coaching change isn't going to do anything; at best you'll get a truly terrible coach who can play scapegoat for a couple years while the team rebuilds. But you also run the risk of going through coaching carousel hell where guys come in alevert other year with high expectations and get canned as soon as those expectations aren't met.
On the other hand, he's also the kind of guy who cut his teeth in the league post-2010. He's similar to the "system guys" you see in college who have a system they run and don't know anything else. A few years ago these guys seemed like they were the future. Now they seem irrelevant while old guys like Andy Reid have no trouble adapting. I have a theory that any time a coordinator is deemed an " offensive wizard" he's doomed as a head coach.
That being said, firing a coach with a winning record who's taken you to the Super Bowl and made the playoffs every year a few games into the season because the team looks bad is a bush league move. It's like something Cleveland would do.
The problem for Nick is that he barely hung onto his job after the last seven games of 2023, which was clearly a highly talented team taking a nosedive in organization, motivation, and tactics. He avoided getting fired by blaming the OC and DC, who they've replaced with more proven alternatives. ((There's an interesting conspiracy theory that Howie might have gotten too clever trying to play the Rooney rule in his OC/DC hires in 2023)). So rather than looking at it as the team's 2024 record is a small sample size, you have to look at it as the team's record since 12/1/23. Had they lost in NO, and then probably lost in TB as well, they would have been 2-8 across ten games, a pretty large sample size.
I don't think the QB market will reset to a lower level (as % of cap space accounting for terms) until we see some of those players get traded for reasonable value in consecutive off-seasons. If Hurts and Lawrence, for example, get traded for a package equivalent to a late first round pick and then play competently for their new teams, and the next year we see the same happen with Dak Prescott and Baker Mayfield making similar successful moves at reasonable transaction costs; then teams will start to get the message that worthwhile QBs will be available when needed, and teams won't feel the need to lock down any chance at a Franchise QB.
I don't think the post-Jets reclamation projects or the failures of albatross contracts will radically alter the calculus if there isn't an apparent supply of competent QBs. Retreads and day-2 picks are lottery tickets, it's not easy to identify which ones will succeed and when.
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I'm all for not firing coaches who are dealt a shit hand or are still trying to figure it out, but the problem with Sirianni is one of refusing to adjust. Too many NFL coaches are terrible, one trick ponies, or just high on their own supply with respect to game planning.
When the plan isn't working you are supposed to change the plan, with that not happening it makes it look like Sirianni is a bad coach handed a good team and therefore is wasting that potential. That's a reason to move on potentially.
This is especially hard for the Eagles because they had luck with moving on from Andy and Doug, both didn't need to go but it ended up being a good thing for the birds.
I'm a big believer that coaches get stale. You saw it with Andy Reid, with Joe Torre, twice with Joe Girardi. The head coach is only the tip of the iceberg, there are an average of 15 coaches on an NFL staff. When head coaches stay in one place too long, only the really special coaches can avoid ensconcing themselves in layers of friends and associates, calcifying old systems that have trouble responding to changes. Moving on from Andy was good for both parties.
Doug fell victim to the same cycle of a QB with an uncertain talent level somewhere between MVP level franchise cornerstone and unplayable turnover machine: you fire the coach before trading the QB because replacement level coaches are nearly as good as great coaches, while replacement level QBs are essentially useless for a win-now roster. Coaches have minor leagues in the college system they can flow into and out of, producing a reservoir of talent. QBs sink of swim in the NFL.
I really like this frame. Elegantly clarifies some intuitions I've had.
Agree with all.
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