Week 15 brought a ton of games with big stakes—and what those games lacked in drama, they made up for statements made and lessons learned. As we’ve been doing all season, we’ll publish the takeaways Sunday and update them live through Monday morning. So come back again if not all 10 are here yet …
This week provided another test that Nick Sirianni’s Philadelphia Eagles passed with flying colors. It was, indeed, one of those Only in Philly weeks. The Eagles had won nine straight to move to 11–2 and stay within a game of the Detroit Lions for the No. 1 seed in the NFC playoff picture. The ninth of those wins, against the Carolina Panthers at home, was a little uneven, but not any real reason for panic.
Then, A.J. Brown said something in postgame, and the volume turned up to a million. You’d have thought the team was coming apart at the seams, and Sirianni was back at that shaky press conference that kicked off his tenure. That’s Philly. But it’s not these Eagles.
Instead of listening, Sirianni focused inward. He showed the players a reel of celebrations Wednesday. The defense mobbing Chauncey Gardner-Johnson after an interception. Saquon Barkley dancing with Grant Calcaterra after the tight end scored. Barkley and Mekhi Becton strumming air guitars. Brown and DeVonta Smith coming up with a Dwayne Wade–LeBron James impression. And, yes, Brown and Jalen Hurts, together, doing their best Kid ’n Play.
From there, the week was all about the Pittsburgh Steelers. Sirianni knew his players got the picture.
“He let us address it,” left tackle Jordan Mailata told me Sunday night. “Once it was done, he made sure to move on and keep the Steelers the main thing. He didn’t let it linger. We kept pushing on. And that was Coach’s message. Nick did a great job of just moving on from that. And seeing him move on made us move on and keep the main thing the main thing. Like I said, it was our business this week, but it’s none of our business.
“When we get the message from [the] head coach, the captains and the leaders on this team, we have to enforce that amongst the rest of the locker room. And we all responded really, really well this week.”
It showed in Sunday’s resounding 27–13 win over a tough Pittsburgh team. The Eagles didn’t just beat the Steelers. They beat the Steelers into submission.
It started with Jalen Hurts, Brown and the rest of the passing game coming alive in a way that belied the All-Pro receiver’s complaints of the Sunday previous. Faced with a rugged Steelers front that wasn’t going to let Barkley run roughshod over them, Philly put the ball in Hurts’s hands, and Hurts responded with 146 yards and two touchdowns on 12-of-13 passing in the first half. The Eagles went into halftime up 17–13, despite running for just 50 yards at 3.3 per carry over the first 30 minutes.
The run game would come around, even if it didn’t go wild in the second half, and the defense would buckle down, too—keeping the Steelers off the scoreboard and to just 83 yards and four first downs after halftime.
“I’m not worried what the headlines are going to say tomorrow, right? But I do sincerely believe that we played complementary football today and that should send a message to everyone,”Mailata says. “Not like we’re trying to [send a message], it’s just that we know it is a great reminder for us moving forward of how much of a complete team we have. And if we protect the ball, if we play sound football? Coach has a saying: tough, detailed, together. I think tonight we really executed that.”
All three elements of the slogan were on display over the game’s final 10:29.
The Steelers, down 14, had just punted and pinned Philly at its own 3, presumably validating Mike Tomlin’s decision not to go for it on fourth-and-7 from Eagles’ 46. Little did Tomlin know what was coming—Pittsburgh wouldn’t get the ball back.
Hurts converted third-and-6 with a short throw to Brown that the receiver took for a 21-yard gain. Barkley churned out seven yards on a third-and-2. Hurts struck downfield to Smith for 22 yards to dig the team out of second-and-14. Hurts converted a fourth-and-1, then a third-and-1 with Brotherly Shove keepers. And Kenneth Gainwell got the yards needed on third-and-2 with 2:12 left, and Pittsburgh out of timeouts, to get Philly in victory formation.
“I can tell you right now—the one-two,” Mailata says about the drive. “It is hard to find people to have that one-two: to keep moving the ball, to keep that time of possession up. And that’s what it showed me today, that the next-man-up mentality and the one-two were there. You could see it on the film. Guys just turning up each play, just giving that grit. That was a battle, man. That was no easy game.”
It was never going to be. But it gave everyone who didn’t know a window into who the Eagles have become over the ongoing 10-game winning streak.
Since, of course, very few folks were focused on that the past few days.
“For me, I don’t focus on the fans,” Mailata says, in a matter-of-fact way. “I don’t feed off the fans, to be honest. I think, for us, we’re so in tune with each other that we’re just focusing on our job. … We’re just focusing on our job and making sure that everything goes well.”
For over two months now, it has been going well in Philly.
Safe to say, Sirianni has a pretty good idea on how to keep it that way.
Last week’s loss to the Los Angeles Rams stuck with the Buffalo Bills—in a good way. The NFL season is long. It’s hard for a team to bring its best every week. And if every team is going to hit a ditch or two at some point over the course of the year, the Bills sped right into theirs last Sunday in Los Angeles.
On paper, it was understandable. The Bills beat the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs in Week 11, had their bye in Week 12, then throttled the other Super Bowl team, the San Francisco 49ers, in Week 13.
But that doesn’t mean Buffalo was going to accept how it played in Week 14.
“We’ve had tight teams before, Albert, but this team is, I would say, extra tight,” coach Sean McDermott said, leaving Ford Field on Sunday night. “I mean, they really enjoy playing, and they really enjoy playing with one another, from a teammate standpoint. And they also realized that we probably didn’t have the focus that we needed a week ago. And the leaders took over and led by example this week.”
The result: a 48–42 win in Detroit against a Lions team that came in 12–1.
The Bills showed plenty in the win. Josh Allen played like the MVP of the league, and he may well be named that, officially, a couple of months from now. The Bills rushed for 197 yards on 34 carries. Nine different skill guys caught passes. The defense did allow 42 points and nearly 500 yards through the air, but rendered the Lions one-dimensional on offense and allowed a lot of that yardage, and scoring, while Detroit played catch-up, and with a secondary that’s pretty banged up right now.
What you, and everyone else, will remember is James Cook’s 41-yard touchdown run; Allen exploiting a depleted Lions linebacker group by throwing to running back Ty Johnson; and Allen’s strikes downfield to Keon Coleman, Dalton Kincaid and Dawson Knox. You’ll remember Greg Rousseau and Ed Oliver getting after Jared Goff, and the Bills jumping up 14–0, 21–7 and 35–14 on their stunned hosts and in front of a stunned crowd.
McDermott, though, is going to remember, like he said, how one week affected the next.
Even now, he can’t explain exactly what went wrong early on in L.A. But the way the Bills reacted, even in the moment, made him feel a lot better about it. Buffalo was down 38–21 going into the fourth quarter, and the Rams might not have survived had the fourth quarter been 16 minutes instead of 15.
When I asked McDermott what happened at the end of that third quarter, he joked, “Uh … Josh Allen?” And there was a ton of truth in that—Allen was a force of nature that could only be stopped by the expiration of the clock at SoFi. But there’s more to it, too.
That includes what he saw during the week leading up to Sunday’s showdown in Detroit, after, McDermott says, “I probably didn’t have them prepared the way I needed to” for the game against the Rams. And it really came alive, from his own standpoint, in how much he was looking forward to going back to work with the guys.
“We’ve all been there, where you’re like, hey, you’re kind of just trudging through the snow, the wet snow, and it’s like, ‘Hey, we’re good.’ But every week’s a headache, you got guys late, you know how it goes,” McDermott says. “Not that we were perfect and everybody’s an angel. But they want to win and they’re willing to put the work in. And I’m saying, I feel like—as across the board as it could be—it’s almost like they don’t want to let each other down.”
And that, McDermott continues, is, and was, especially true with Allen, who’s embraced the leadership role he’s moved into as some of the Bills’ old cornerstone captains left the building in the offseason.
“It’s staying after to work with receivers for an extra five to 10 minutes to make sure they have the detail, the timing down, in order to execute at a high level in some of those moments,” McDermott says. “I mean, that’s just one example I would say that happens during the week. And then just coming in a way of [being] ready to work. Again, I don’t want to sound like he hasn’t done this in the past, but there’s a difference.”
As a result, there’s a difference in these Bills too—because the group is more tightly knit, more focused and with an increasingly maniacal quarterback.
It showed Sunday, in the lessons they took from the week before.
“Every lion picks up a scar along the way. And we picked up a scar,” McDermott says. “Now, that scar has got to stay with us.”
If these Bills truly are as different as McDermott thinks they are, there’s no doubt it will.
Mike Evans deserves his flowers. The 11th-year vet has been fighting a bum hamstring all year. It cost him a month of games in the middle of the season. This week, after missing Wednesday and Thursday practices to rest it, there were questions about how much it would hobble him.
The Los Angeles Chargers, playing host to Evans’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday, found out pretty quickly.
Nine catches, 159 yards and two touchdowns later, Tampa was leaving Southern California with a 40–17 rout of Justin Herbert & Co., an 8–6 record, a 1.5-game cushion atop the NFC South—and a healthy appreciation for the impact of the team’s longest-tenured player, who’s seen it all over a decade-plus in town. Even if those outside Florida may not get it the way those he works with do.
“It never ceases to amaze me,” coach Todd Bowles told me postgame. “And he does it the right way, that’s what makes it so hard. It’s probably why he doesn’t get the accolades he deserves. But he does it the right way. And when you put it in his area, he’s determined to make a play and get it in the end zone—there’s no stopping him. And so from a team standpoint, you got to catch yourself or you’ll end up watching him instead of coaching …
“It was unbelievable what he did today.”
What’s wild is, through two quarters, and with the Bucs down 17–13, Evans’s numbers and impact were pretty pedestrian.
It didn’t take long for the 31-year-old to change that. On Tampa’s fifth offensive snap of the second half, Baker Mayfield scrambled and broke contain to his left. Evans broke off his route and into Mayfield’s vision. Mayfield dropped it in the bucket, Evans caught it, burst right through the arms of Chargers rookie Tarheeb Still at the 35 and raced past the rest of the defense for a 57-yard score to put the Bucs up 20–17.
Two possessions later, with the Bucs up 23–17, and in third-and-12 from the Chargers’ 35, Evans roasted corner Kristian Fulton to the post for another touchdown, to make it 30–17 and effectively put Los Angeles in the rear-view mirror for good. And show, again, that even with that hamstring issue lingering, he’s still a force to be reckoned with.
“When he hurdled a guy last week, I knew he was back,” Bowles says. “And then the extra oomph he had today. If he hadn’t had a T-shirt on, he probably would have broken another tackle and scored again. The guy had [his] T-shirt on that one. But he was doing some great run after catches, which we hadn’t seen in the early part of the year. We need every yard, and he’s helping us get everything.”
Truth is, that’s been the case for a long time, and on more than just game day.
Bowles has been witness to it through plenty of major transitions, too—first his own, from defensive coordinator to replacing Bruce Arians as head coach, then at quarterback, going from Tom Brady to Mayfield. So he knows first-hand what Evans has meant to the Bucs.
“He’s been impressive, because no matter who’s here, who’s coaching, who does what, he always produces and performs the same,” Bowles says. “It takes a guy with great mental toughness and mental discipline to get that done and go through a few coaches and still do the things that he’s doing to be great. I mean, it’s been unbelievable. He’s probably one of my favorite two or three players ever. And I’m sure he’s everybody’s.
“He’s great in the community, he works hard at practice, he works hard in the weight room, good dude off the field and he competes like hell. So that makes it easy for a coach. It makes it very easy. And the fact that he’s older, the young guys coming, it’s something that they can aspire to be and it teaches them work ethic and how to be a pro.”
His production, of course, gives them plenty to aspire to.
Evans came into this year with a string of 10-straight 1,000-yard seasons. He came into Sunday’s game, after missing three games and with four to go, with just 590 yards, making an 11th 1,000-yard season pretty unlikely. But after pushing that to 749 with Sunday’s big day, he now needs to average just 83.7 yards to get there.
Maybe he will. Maybe he won’t.
Regardless, what he means, and has meant, to the Buccaneers won’t change. As the Chargers could tell you.
The NFL’s decision to put two games on Christmas figures to have a material effect on the AFC playoff race. All four teams set to play Saturday, then again the following Wednesday, are squarely in the chase. The Chiefs, Houston Texans and Steelers lead their divisions, and the Baltimore Ravens are one game back in the AFC North. On Saturday, the Steelers will play the Ravens and the Chiefs will play the Texans. On Christmas, it’ll be Steelers-Chiefs and Texans-Ravens.
The state of things for the teams involved? Well, when I talked to Texans safety Jimmie Ward, he’d already taken a turn in the cold tub, right after Houston outlasted the Miami Dolphins, 20–12, at home. When I spoke with Ravens tight end Mark Andrews after Baltimore routed the New York Giants 35–14 in New Jersey, he was ready to board a train home. That mode of travel is standard for a New York trip for Baltimore, but it takes on a little added importance with the 10 days ahead.
“There are benefits to it,” Andrews tells me. “You’re not going 30,000 feet in the air, with the dehydration and stuff like that. That part’s going to be good.”
The rest is, well, TBD.
Patrick Mahomes told the media last week that “it’s not a good feeling” looking ahead at a stretch like the Chiefs were facing this late in the season. “You never want to play this amount of games in this short a period of time,” the quarterback continued. “It’s not great for your body. But, at the end of the day, it’s your job.”
That, of course, was before Mahomes got hurt in Sunday’s win over the Cleveland Browns. He’ll undergo more tests Monday, and he’s always been as tough as they come when it comes to playing through injuries, but this is exactly what the concern was when the league scheduled this back in the spring—that a star player would be put in a position where he might risk making a bad injury worse if he doesn’t push through on short rest in consecutive weeks.
Given that, this was a good time to dig in with a couple of guys in the midst of that meat grinder of a three-game stretch—coming off the field from the first leg of a tough relay.
“Really you just got to take each day [as it comes],” says Ward, now in his 11th season. “You got to take one day at a time, can’t really look ahead. You just got to hammer the recovery, stay in the training room and try to heal your body for the next game. … I just got out of the cold tub. So attack it today. Start watching film today. I’m pretty sure coaches watched film today. They probably went right to their office. They’re probably starting game planning.”
I checked, and they were. Because every minute will count for the four contenders.
“It’s the little things,” Andrews says. “I’ve already started to recover. I did six minutes in the cold tub after this game trying to reset the body knowing that it’s a short week. Just taking time at the nighttime to put in the massages, do every little thing to make sure that by game time Saturday, I’ll be jumping out of my skin.”
That’s the goal, anyway.
And, as Mahomes said, it’s not like they have a choice.
“It’s our job,” Ward says. “We get paid for it. Playing on Christmas, it’s pretty cool—never got to play on Christmas before. Three games in 10 days, that’s cool. There are other teams that are going through it, too.”
How it affects the four of them will be interesting, of course, and certainly could impact how the league handles these things going forward.
The Dallas Cowboys have told you what they think of Mike McCarthy. Sometimes, this works the other way—where you see a team mailing it in and it’s so clearly a sign that the players are out on their coach. In this case, Dallas had every opportunity to do just that. A month ago, on a Monday night, they got beat 34–10 by a Texans team that didn’t even play that well. They had two games in the 10 days to follow. The quarterback was out for the year. They were 3–7.
Instead, the Cowboys have surged. They’re 3–1 since, and would probably be 4–0 were it not for Monday night’s punt team meltdown against the Cincinnati Bengals.
On Sunday, they became the first team to enter a game as an underdog to the Panthers in nearly two years. They proceeded to soundly beat Dave Canales’s suddenly feisty bunch 30–14, behind another solid afternoon from Dak Prescott stand-in Cooper Rush, another starry effort from CeeDee Lamb and another dominant showing from Micah Parsons.
“It’s just who we are, a bunch of guys that love to compete, a lot of winners on this team, a lot of wins over the last few years with coach McCarthy and these core players,” Rush told me over the phone afterward. “There’s a culture there—you’re going to go out there and play your butt off and compete no matter what.”
Now, in the NFL, with a team like this, the “win one for coach” idea can get overblown.
For most guys, there’s a pretty big individual interest at play, when you’re playing out the string for a team that’s fallen out of the race. Very few players’ futures are secure, and the tape will be their résumé—there’s no hiding dogging it in an adverse situation, and doing that can certainly stick with a guy who’s looking for a job.
That said, McCarthy’s still the Cowboys’ coach, and his players know the situation he’s in, without a contract for next year. So when I asked Rush whether there was any element there of playing for McCarthy given the tenuous situation he’s in, the quarterback, now in his fifth year playing for the coach, didn’t miss a beat.
“It’s just more who he is—it’s just been the attitude the last couple of years,” Rush answered. “He does a great job having a pulse of the team, keeping guys together, keeping us together in the locker room and creating that culture that no matter who we’re playing, what we’re doing. If you’re out there, you’re competing your butt off. He has us well prepared.”
It showed again Sunday.
Now, again, McCarthy’s situation is different than some other coaches on the hot seat. Since his contract is up, the Cowboys would have to draw up a new deal to keep him, which takes the idea of just kicking the can down the road off the table. So it may be easier to let him go than it would be to stay the course.
Yet, here we are, and McCarthy, coming off three consecutive 12-win seasons, was faced with his darkest hour as Cowboys coach. And he’s giving the Joneses plenty to think about.
I like that Sean Payton was a little salty after the Denver Broncos’ win. Denver crushed the Indianapolis Colts on Sunday. It put the team by itself in second place in the AFC West, behind only the division champion Chiefs. It gave the team nine victories, to lock up the franchise’s first winning season in eight years. It all happened with a team that’s gotten younger over the two years the coach has been in Colorado.
So here was Payton afterward: “If you’re in this industry, you want to be somewhere where it’s really important and the expectations are high. So it’s nice to get the ninth win. We’ll have some cupcakes for you guys as you leave and then we’ll go from there.”
Translation: This isn’t close to where I’m looking to be.
By invoking the standard set by John Elway and Peyton Manning in the Broncos’ past, Payton is implicitly setting the bar there for his players. Which, by every indication I’ve gotten, the players seem to understand—not just in how they handled Sunday and its aftermath, but in how they’ve embraced his demanding, difficult program.
And if you don’t believe it, the fourth quarter of Sunday’s game provides proof, not just in how the Broncos outlasted the Colts, but in how they beat them in every phase of the game.
Denver entered the fourth quarter trailing 13–10. Rookie Bo Nix had three picks and was probably playing his worst game in three months. The run game had stalled. The defense had taken it on the chin a little, too—with Anthony Richardson and Jonathan Taylor getting their footing, and plenty of yardage, on the ground.
Then, Marvin Mims Jr. returned a punt 61 yards to the Colts’ 15. Two plays later, Nix found second-year tight end Nate Atkins for a score to put Denver up 17–13. Four snaps later, third-year pass rusher Nik Bonitto sniffed out a double-pass, picked off Adonai Mitchell’s cross-field throw (technically it was scored as a fumble, because it was thrown behind the line), and ran it back 50 yards for a touchdown to make it 24–13. And after that, Nix drove Denver 35 yards for a final score to cash in a Patrick Surtain II interception.
So just like that, the special teams, defense and offense coalesced when it mattered most.
It hit the Colts like an avalanche, which is exactly how Payton’s best New Orleans Saints teams used to make their opponents feel. And while I don’t think the Broncos are quite there yet, this, to me, was another compelling piece of evidence that they’re on their way.
I also think Payton believes that.
Otherwise, I’m not sure he’d be talking postgame the way he was.
The very end of Bill Belichick’s time out of coaching, to me, colors who he is. And that starts with his brief flirtation with the New York Jets, how that happened, and why it ended.
Belichick has a pre-existing relationship, going back to the 1990s, with Mike Tannenbaum, who is working (along with fellow ex-NFL GM Rick Spielman) as a consultant to the Jets’ search. So the coach reached out to his former Browns and Jets colleague to gauge interest, and Tannenbaum took it to the team. The Jets then mulled it, then worked to set up a meeting between Belichick and owner Woody Johnson.
At that point, things between Belichick and North Carolina were heating up. So the coach circled back. The Jets, of course, are on the very front end of what they expect to be an exhaustive and thorough process. As such, the timing didn’t work out. Additionally, my understanding is Belichick didn’t just indiscriminately reach out to every team with an opening.
What does this tell us? Well, first off, while the Jets did have geography going for them, this does show that a pretty smart football guy thought the football situation there could be turned around relatively quickly, otherwise the call wouldn’t have gotten made. Second, Belichick still had designs on the NFL, but it couldn’t just be any NFL job (again, he didn’t call everyone).
That indicates two things: Belichick wanted to get back to his life’s work and coach in 2025, and his overwhelming preference was to do it his way. In other words, he didn’t want someone going halfway in on him (maybe letting him coach, while delegating out the rest). And I do think the last year showed him that while an NFL job offer might’ve been coming, it probably would’ve been more difficult to get anything approximating the control he had in New England.
To me, that’s not about being a dictator. It’s about Belichick’s own belief in what works.
And with Belichick’s study of college football having gone deep, aided by his son’s position as Washington’s defensive coordinator and his own vast Rolodex, the opportunity to run things his way, and win his way, was there at that level in a way it wasn’t in the pros. In fact, as those around him see it, NFL elements like NIL (salary cap) and the transfer portal (free agency) should give him and his staff a leg up on the competition.
So how will it work? I think through older players, three or four years in and unhappy with their draft standing, coming over in the portal under the premise that Belichick and his staff will better prepare them for the pros, with a steady stream of younger players developing through the pipeline. And having played for Belichick, those guys will be more attractive to NFL teams, that’ll likely presume they’re more ready for the pros.
In fact, Rams coach Sean McVay told me over the weekend that UNC prospects will absolutely be more enticing to him now, because they’ll have gone through Belichick’s program.
Maybe Belichick will wind up loving it, and make his way off into the sunset in a few years having changed the Carolina football paradigm. Maybe it won’t work. Or maybe he’ll wind up, in a year or two, back in the pros after showing his program still works—his buyout drops from $10 million to $1 million on June 1, meaning there’s not much stopping an NFL team from coming after him in 2026 or ’27.
Either way, while I’m a little disappointed we won’t get to see him in the NFL next year, I’m fascinated to see how the next chapter for the greatest coach ever plays out.
The 49ers face a slew of big decisions this offseason. The Niners are now 6–8. They’re on the brink of elimination from the playoff picture after a run of four NFC title games, and two Super Bowl appearances, in five years. They’ve mortgaged contracts to facilitate it. The bill is coming due. Could they push things off another year? Sure. But …
This is where the Rams were in early 2023, at the point where they needed to reset their cap, or it might become a two-year ordeal, rather than one that can be dealt with in a single offseason. The good news? The Rams wound up making the playoffs, despite carrying $75 million in dead money on their cap—and did it thanks to a comprehensive football program that was humming in the departments of player development and coaching.
The Niners are like that, too.
They have between $250 million and $300 million in cap commitments for 2025, and that’s without lifting a finger in free agency, adding a draft class or, most notably, doing a long-term deal with Brock Purdy. They have 12 guys with cap numbers for next year exceeding $9 million. There are guys such as Deebo Samuel who could be on the chopping block. There are free agents such as Charvarius Ward who will be tough to keep. Tough calls are coming.
And that’s where Purdy comes into the picture. He’s the Niners’ guy. They believe in him, and view re-signing him as a “when,” not an “if.” But “when” is certainly complicated by this traffic jam of big contracts—a result of the high level at which the Niners have developed talent over Kyle Shanahan and John Lynch’s time in charge. They’ll be willing to do business with Purdy this offseason, but at what level? That, to me, is the question, with the question for Purdy being how willing he might be to push things to the limit?
The Niners have been here before. Coming out of 2017, they quickly moved to re-sign Jimmy Garoppolo rather than franchise tagging him a couple of months later. They did it in January to give themselves a measure of certainty, still in the infancy of the current regime. I’d think they may try, again, to move fast, to see if there’s a compromise to be done early with Purdy.
But with Purdy under contract for 2025 at a very reasonable rate, they have some flexibility with him that they don’t have with other players.
Which only underscores how complicated the next six months or so will be.
So while there’s every reason to believe that Shanahan and Lynch will be able to work their way out of all this (the 2019 and ’23 Super Bowl teams did look considerably different from one another), it sure won’t be easy.
Travis Hunter is the most fascinating draft prospect we’ve had coming into the league in years. The Colorado corner/receiver/everything edged out Boise State RB Ashton Jeanty for the Heisman Trophy on Saturday night, and his next step will be taking his unprecedented résumé—no one has ever won the Heisman, Bednarik and Biletnikoff awards before—to the pros.
One thing I feel relatively confident saying is he won’t be used in the NFL the way he has been in college, as a full-time, two-way player.
So the operative question when considering his professional future is which way is best to use a guy who has the capability of being a top-shelf receiver or corner. And the answer I’ve got from scouts, and pretty emphatically, is the same as it was for Charles Woodson, Champ Bailey and Chris Gamble when they were coming out, after having been used at both those positions as collegians (Woodson was less full-time on offense than the other two).
“Dominant CB that will be a role player at WR on third down,” texted one AFC college scouting director. “Special man cover skills. Long, explosive, twitchy, super instinctive. Rarely allows separation. Outstanding ball skills. Can match up and cover multiple types of receivers and takes the ball away. He’s a raw receiver with natural athleticism and hands.”
“Best player in the draft,” texted a second AFC college scouting director. “He’s easy [to evaluate].”
“He’s an amazing athlete with rare instincts,” added another AFC exec Sunday. “Great length, a playmaker. Best value league-wide will be at cornerback due to the difficulty of finding elite players at the position. But right now, he’s actually a better receiver. Thin frame and durability is an issue. He’s still maturing, but probably will never be over 185 to 190 pounds.”
The next question, then, is whether he’s a better receiver than Arizona’s Tetairoa McMillan or a better corner than Michigan’s Will Johnson, with McMillan and Johnson considered the standard-bearers this year at those spots. When I asked the third AFC exec that, he quickly responded, “No,” but then backtracked.
“Actually, at receiver, possibly,” he added. “They’re just different stylistically.”
The first college scouting director went the other way, saying, “I’d say no with McMillan, and yes with Will Johnson.”
So maybe he’s the draft’s best receiver. Maybe he’s the draft’s best corner. Maybe he’s not.
But that it’s even a question on both at the same time tells you all you need to know. I’ll have a little more on Hunter coming in the Tuesday notes.
Fourteen games down, two to go. Let’s empty the notebook on Week 15 here with the quick-hitters …
• Jerod Mayo’s postgame press conference after a 30-17 loss to the Arizona Cardinals should get your attention. The New England Patriots’ coach was asked about not running Drake Maye on third-and-1 and fourth-and-1 plays near the goal line, given the QB’s athletic traits and size. “You said it, I didn’t,” Mayo responded, in what sounded like a criticism of his own offensive staff. Not great.
• The Cardinals rushed for 163 yards Sunday, in a game they had to have. James Conner remains among the league’s most underrated players, and Arizona’s not going away after a midseason lull.
• Here’s hoping Geno Smith is all right. It was awful seeing him go down Sunday night.
• While we’re there, the Green Bay Packers looked downright terrifying to open that game against the Seattle Seahawks, marching right down the field, and to a 14–0 lead, on the road. They scored on five of six possessions through three quarters, and cruised to a win—and the defense, under Jeff Hafley, looks like it’s catching up to the offense, particularly with the growth of young guys such as Edgerrin Cooper.
• If the Eagles are locked in for Week 18—and not sitting guys with their playoff standing set—it’d be tough to expect a Giants win there. But I think it’s fair for New York to hope for a split of its next two (at the Falcons, then home against the Colts) to avoid ending the season on a 12-game losing streak. Because it’d be hard to sell the idea of just running the whole thing back again if the team’s last win of the year came in the first week of October.
• My sense is Mike Vrabel is high on the list of the three teams with head coach openings now, and will probably be the most sought after candidate in January. What’ll be interesting to see is who’ll be willing to let him set a program up his own way—which could mean bringing ex-Tennessee exec (and current Giants exec) Ryan Cowden with him as general manager and perhaps Browns tight ends coach Tommy Rees as OC (though Josh McDaniels might be a possibility to come with him to certain locales, too).
• The Washington Commanders did well to survive in the Superdome on Sunday, but you’re starting to see where the roster is probably another offseason or two away from being a real contender. Which is to be expected, knowing what GM Adam Peters and coach Dan Quinn inherited. They’ve done great work. That doesn’t mean there isn’t still a lot of work to do.
• I love how the Saints keep playing for Darren Rizzi, and how Rizzi gambled on them in going for two when down 20–19 at the end there. As my colleague Conor Orr wrote Sunday, New Orleans could do worse than just rolling with Rizzi next year.
• Aaron Rodgers and Davante Adams may be old and playing out the string of a lost season, but it was fun to watch the chemistry those two have come back to life on Sunday in Jacksonville, as the Jets notched their fourth win of the year (and, incidentally, their first Sunday win in exactly three months).
• Joe Burrow has every right to be frustrated. He went through a lot over the past year, and got himself to a place where he’s playing great ball. It’s a loss for all of us that we won’t get to see it continue into January, thanks to a Bengals defense that seemed to get old all at once.