The NFL's most interesting divisional races
Plus, Tuesday night football and a celebration of coaches being fired
The NFL’s three most interesting divisional races
The 2020 season has been roughly as messy as predicted. Injuries and positive COVID-19 tests have poured ink into relatively crystal waters for several contenders. Some teams have faded to the bottom of the league’s power dynamic. Others have used that opportunity to rise to the top of their divisions. In the NFC East, it’s somehow possible to do both at the same time.
I dunno, man. Weird season.
Anyway, the first five weeks of the year have set the stage for a handful of compelling playoff races. A couple are roughly what we expected, like Tom Brady and Drew Brees battling for the NFC South (as long as Teddy Bridgewater doesn’t crash their party). Then there are those that look like a competition on the surface, but seem destined to fall apart as the season wears on (what’s up, Bears?). And a few took some wild turns in Week 5.
Let’s run with that last part. Here are the three most interesting — for better or worse — division races in the NFL, presented in no particular order.
The NFC East
The Cowboys stand atop the division at 2-3. The Eagles, at 1-3-1, may have a commanding lead in the race to the postseason.
That’s because quarterback Dak Prescott is done for the season after suffering a compound ankle fracture that will deprive Dallas of one of the game’s most explosive quarterbacks. Prescott evolved over time from a low-yield, high-efficiency dual threat to a 5,000-yard passer who can also move the chains with his legs. That’s exactly what the Cowboys needed, as their pitiful pass defense left them mired in shootouts and in need of every yard Prescott could gain.
The good news is that Dallas has one of the higher value backups in Andy Dalton. The bad news is that he is very much still Andy Dalton. He looked pretty good filling in for Prescott — 9 of 11, 111 yards, one fumble, and three scoring drives, including the game winner that was set up by this pass:
But he’s still a quarterback who went 14-26 with an 84.2 passer rating the last three seasons, albeit with a perpetually cursed Bengals franchise. Dalton has the chops to be a competent starter in the NFL, but the Cowboys just downgraded from a top 10 QB to a bottom 10 one. And that top 10 guy could only get them to 1-3.
Then you have Philadelphia, which lost in Pittsburgh Sunday but may have had its most encouraging game in the process. Carson Wentz looked less broken than he had the previous four weeks, throwing a pair of touchdown passes while retaining his grip on the league’s interception crown (nine in five games).
Wentz should get more help as injured contributors like Alshon Jeffery, DeSean Jackson, and Dallas Goedert return to his passing game. He should also see his career-high sack rate of 8.9 percent drop once offensive line standouts like Lane Johnson and Jason Kelce return to full health, though the team is still reeling from the losses of Brandon Brooks (torn Achilles) and Andre Dillard (torn bicep). He’ll need to in order to overcome a middling defense that’s already given up 27 points or more three times.
Washington and the Giants are also in the division. This is a fact and a reflection on how much you should care about their playoff hopes. Ron Rivera cannot decide on a quarterback and Daniel Jones decided to make all our 2019 jokes about him a reality one year too late. The Giants and Football Team are both NFL football teams in this, the year of our lord 2020. This is the nicest statement anyone will make about them this season.
The NFC East has a collective -154 point scoring differential through five weeks. A team ending the season over .500 would qualify as a mild surprise. And yet that team will still host a playoff game. They will probably win that playoff game when the Bears miss a field goal with 15 seconds left to play.
Bless this mess.
The AFC West
This was supposed to be the Chiefs' division. It probably still is, but the Raiders’ win at Arrowhead Stadium was a shot across the bow of the defending champions. Las Vegas took Kansas City's game script and flipped it on them, torching an uneven secondary with an array of deep balls that hinted how dangerous a mostly realized Jon Gruden offense can be.
The architect behind that Week 5 upset was Derek Carr, who overcame one awful interception by showcasing a deft touch downfield that had been lacking in recent years. Carr ranked 41st out of 42 qualified quarterbacks in 2019 with an average air distance of 6.2 yards for his throws. He looked nothing like a checkdown passer in Kansas City, throwing perfect strikes to Henry Ruggs, Nelson Agholor, and Hunter Renfrow to put the Chiefs on their heels throughout their matchup:
Las Vegas is now 3-2 and a game behind the 4-1 Chiefs with the first leg of a heads-up tiebreaker on its side. Losses to the Bills and Patriots are understandable, while wins over the Saints and Panthers look better now than they did at the time.
Of course, the king stays the king, and Kansas City can still fall back on wins over the Ravens, upward-trending Chargers, and depleted Patriots on its championship-defense resume. Patrick Mahomes is still entirely capable of Patrick Mahomes things like, say, a 65-yard dart through coverage for a (theoretical) touchdown.
The concern in western Missouri lies with an inconsistent defense that shut down reigning MVP Lamar Jackson in Week 3 but has also given up 300+ passing yards to high-variance quarterbacks like Carr and rookie Justin Herbert. When the secondary does show up, the run defense can be a problem, like in Week 4's win over the Brian Hoyer/Jarrett Stidham Patriots. New England didn't have much to offer in the passing game, yet still found a way to run for 185 yards on 35 carries. That could plague KC later in the season.
This will create an opportunity for Gruden, who can dial up some weirdness to keep the Kansas City defense off balance. On Sunday it was unleashing Carr’s deep ball, but Vegas has a talented rushing game and strong intermediate targets (starting with Darren Waller) that can provide the versatility needed to turn Week 5’s momentum into something more.
It will need all the offense it can get, because the Raiders defense isn’t built on a trustworthy foundation. Through five weeks, Paul Guenther’s unit ranks 30th in quarterback pressure rate and 31st in missed tackles, giving opposing coordinators little to worry about at the line of scrimmage. At the very least, the Raiders showed against the Chiefs they can create pressure despite a relative lack of defensive star power; three sacks of Mahomes nearly doubled their season total to that point (four).
The Chargers and Broncos have both struggled with wins, leaving the Raiders a clear-cut No. 2 in the West. They have the chance to be even more if they can keep their surging offense alive and find a way to keep a patchwork defense seaworthy.
The AFC North
The top three teams in the AFC North have 12 wins between them. The entirety of the NFC East has four.
On paper, no division race looks as compelling as the one between 4-0 Pittsburgh, 4-1 Cleveland, and 4-1 Baltimore. A caveat: the schedule hasn’t been especially tough in the North. The Browns’ four wins includes one club with a winning record (the Colts) and three with four victories combined (the Cowboys, Bengals, and Washington). There isn’t a team on the Steelers’ undefeated record with more than one win. The Ravens lost to the Chiefs, beat Cleveland, and then played roughly the same lineup of dorks (Houston, Washington, Cincinnati) as their two biggest rivals.
Even so, there’s plenty of intrigue in the rust belt. Pittsburgh is undefeated after four games for the first time since 1979. The Steelers offense looks rejuvenated with Ben Roethlisberger back under center, and while he hasn’t been the prolific gunslinger he’d been through the mid-2010s, offensive coordinator Randy Fichtner has found creative ways to up his efficiency through shorter throws and inventive playcalling.
The defense has been as good as expected, though relatively untested. The T.J. Watt-led pass rush remains excellent. A 38.1 percent pressure rate is tops in the league; no other team is higher than 31 percent. Unsurprisingly, the Steelers rank first in both sack rate (12.3 percent) and QB hits (50), which suggests they’ll have the chops to bother the MVP-caliber passers they’re set to face on the road to the postseason.
Baltimore hasn’t looked like the dominant team that finished the 2019 regular season on a 12-game heater, but its talent level remains elite. Even though Lamar Jackson isn’t playing at last year’s MVP level, his relative decline can be explained by some offensive line struggles (he’s getting sacked on 8.2 percent of his dropbacks compared to 5.4 last year) and his willingness to attempt longer, more difficult throws (his average pass distance is up to a career-high 9.4 yards downfield).
His performance should stabilize as the season wears on and the Ravens get back in game shape. Even if he doesn’t, he’s still got a 9:2 touchdown-to-interception ratio, a 100.5 passer rating, and a 5.8 yard per carry average. He’ll be fine.
The defense leads the league in points allowed, and while that’s mostly a function of some bad teams early in the year — Kansas City hung 34 on them in an easy win — Football Outsiders’ schedule-adjusted efficiency metric paints them as a top-10 unit. The passing defense has been tested with a gauntlet of young quarterbacks early on and has mostly held up, most notably embarrassing Baker Mayfield in the season opener.
So let’s talk about Baker! First-year head coach Kevin Stefanski has put him back on track — not quite at his late-2018 level, but still reasonable — behind a wide-open playbook that relies on him trusting his playmakers. Stefanski’s gameplan is to roll Mayfield out of the pocket in play-action situations to create space in the backfield, then use his quarterback’s arm strength to make hay in the sunshine with that extra time.
While the offense has been a bright spot, the defense raises questions. Despite a handful of young stars, Cleveland has been mostly mediocre on that side of the ball. Players like Myles Garrett, Larry Ogunjobi, and Denzel Ward can wreak havoc on opponents, but enterprising offensive coordinators will just turn their efforts at an overwhelmed linebacking corps or borderline depressing Karl Joseph-Andrew Sendejo safety tandem instead.
The Browns have the most work to do of the three teams vying for AFC North supremacy thanks to that Week 1 mollywhopping by Baltimore’s hand. Still, they could always sneak to their first division title since 1989 (oh my god) should the Steelers and Ravens beat each other up enough. Right now Pittsburgh’s in the driver’s seat, but there’s too much season left to call anyone a true favorite. Things are set to get wild in the North. This could, against all conventional wisdom, make Cleveland must-watch television each week. — CD
Titans vs. Bills, in five words or fewer
Titans motivated by “adversity,” ugh
The joy of coach firings
How ya feeling today, Falcons fans? I know it sucks to be 0-5, and even though you should be used to them by now, the 28-3 jokes are still so fucking annoying. But you ought to be feeling good, dare I say, even slightly euphoric after the team canned head coach Dan Quinn and general manager Thomas Dimitroff. Watching a terrible coach get kicked to the curb just over a quarter of the way through the season is almost as good of a feeling as winning the Super Bowl. Hell, it IS a championship for teams like the Falcons with no other real high point to cling to in the storm.
Fans don’t get much in the way of accountability. We’re a captive market. Sure, you can vote with your dollars when your team sucks, but that’s a mass collective action that takes time, and might not even work since the bulk of the economic structure of pro sports, especially the NFL, is wholly wedded to television contracts. And what are you going to do, not watch? Lol.
So when the people responsible for your team’s garbage way FINALLY get held accountable—never mind that it’s mostly because some billionaire’s ego is being damaged—it feels like your voice has been heard, and maybe it kind of has. Most owners (with notable exceptions like trash person Woody Johnson) know that you can’t run an operation like this for long, even if they’re a year or two late in handing the deadbeat his walking papers.
But it’s so damn gratifying when it finally happens. On a rational level, throwing the bums out is the first step toward turning around a bad team. It’s the promise of a new guy using that early first-round draft pick wisely, chasing the right free agents, and making tough decisions to move on from the players it’s time to move on from… rather than clinging to the skeleton of that almost-there team from three and a half years ago, a full geological time period in pro football. Even better, there’s the emotional high of it—GET THE FUCK OUT, FOOL! And when it happens before the end of the day on Sunday, well, chef kiss! The owner is so pissed off and so embarrassed by another bad performance, they can’t even wait ‘til proper office hours to hand these clowns their pink slips.
(*I will quickly point out that you can find joy in a head coach getting fired without being an asshole about it.)
The next few months, more likely the next few years, are going to be difficult, but this is the first step on the road to not being embarrassed about the team you have somehow chosen to root for, even if it’s going to take an actual Super Bowl win for the rest of us to stop making 28-3 jokes. So enjoy the moment, Falcons fans (and Texans fans, and oh God, I’m so sorry your team is a hopeless void, Jets fans). —RVB