Every week this NFL season, we will break down the highs and lows—and everything in between—from the most recent slate of pro football. Welcome to Winners and Losers.
Winner: Matt LaFleur, QB Whisperer
It’s time to put some respect on LaFleur’s name. He resurrected Aaron Rodgers’s career and helped him win back-to-back MVP awards. While all that was happening, LaFleur was developing Jordan Love into a quarterback who’d eventually be worthy of a $220 million contract. But the most impressive coaching job of LaFleur’s career may have come on Sunday, when he coached the Malik Willis–led Packers to an upset win over the Colts.
With the Packers opening the season on a Friday last week, LaFleur and Willis had a few extra days to prepare for the spot start, but the young quarterback was traded to the team only a couple of weeks ago, so the two had plenty of ground to make up. And before the 16-10 win over the Colts, Willis had never thrown for more than 100 yards in an NFL game. He came into the league as a raw passer and had shown only incremental progress over his first few seasons. Crafting a winning plan for the game would take every bit of LaFleur’s skill as a coach. This take from Rex Ryan didn’t age well, but it does a good job of explaining what the Packers coach was up against this week—and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who disagreed with Ryan before Sunday afternoon.
LaFleur’s plan was simple: run the damn football and avoid passing situations at all costs. Now, I’m not sure even the most optimistic Packers fans would’ve seen their team running for 237 yards in the first half, but that’s what happened, and it made the rest of the plan far easier to execute.
LaFleur pulled out all the stops in the run game and leveraged Willis’s legs to good effect early. On the rare occasion that Willis did have to attempt a pass—he finished the game with only 14 attempts—LaFleur kept things simple for his quarterback, either with short screen passes or designed shot plays. Willis wasn’t asked to go through a progression too often. He was given either-or reads, and if there wasn’t a clear answer, he could take off on a scramble. It was quarterbacking made easy, and Willis’s stat line reflected that. He finished the game 12-of-14 for 122 yards and a touchdown. His lone touchdown pass, the first of his three-year career, may have been his most difficult throw of the day.
The only thing LaFleur didn’t prepare Willis for was what to do when the center barfs all over the ball right before a key third-down snap.
Every coach has weak points, and I guess this is LaFleur’s.
Other than that, it was a master class in how to call plays for a limited passer. LaFleur provided Willis with the kind of support he never got in Tennessee, where performances like this never felt possible whenever he got on the field. But LaFleur is proving to be a special coach who seems to have a magic touch with quarterbacks. That’s an invaluable trait in this league, where quarterback play determines most games, and it’s not something we can ignore when discussing the best coaches in the NFL. LaFleur’s name belongs near the top of that list, and the guys ahead of him are headed to Canton.
I don’t know how sustainable a Willis-led offense is for the Packers, but we may not have to find out, as Love is speedrunning his recovery from a knee sprain. Green Bay’s QB1 is targeting a Week 5 return, so we won’t get too much more of Willis. But no matter who’s starting at quarterback, you can be sure LaFleur will have them ready to play.
Loser: Caleb Williams’s Rookie of the Year Campaign
This is not the start to Williams’s career that anyone in Chicago had envisioned. The Bears are 1-1 after dropping an ugly game in Houston. That isn’t a terrible result for a young team playing on the road against a legitimate championship contender, but there’s no way to feel good about what we saw out of Williams and the Bears offense in the 19-13 loss on Sunday night.
Williams was sacked seven times and picked off twice. In a repeat of his disjointed debut against Tennessee, the first overall pick was skittish in the pocket, uncomfortable reading the defense, and generally inaccurate. And unlike in the Week 1 game against Tennessee, Williams didn’t display the flashes of talent that might make such a woeful performance easier to stomach for Bears fans who are desperate for a franchise quarterback to call their own.
It’s still far too early to give up on the ultra-talented Williams, but it’s time we reconsider how much help he’ll get from what was expected to be a strong supporting cast in Chicago this season. The receiving corps has been banged up early, with Keenan Allen missing the game against Houston and Rome Odunze missing practice throughout the week. The offensive line hasn’t played well through two weeks (though, to be fair, Williams doesn’t make his line’s job any easier with his constant movement). And, most concerning, offensive coordinator Shane Waldron doesn’t appear capable of working around any of these issues after he failed to deal with similar problems during his time running Seattle’s offense the last few seasons. The outlook is bleak.
If not for Bryce Young and the inept Carolina offense, Williams would rank dead last in most advanced efficiency metrics. His dropbacks are averaging negative-0.38 expected points added per play with a success rate of just 32.1 percent, per TruMedia. To put those numbers in perspective, Young averaged negative-0.21 EPA per dropback with a 36.5 percent success rate in 2023. The Panthers quarterback has taken his awfulness to an unforeseen level in 2024, but even his historically terrible rookie season was more efficient than what we’ve seen out of Williams through two games.
On Sunday night against a hungry Texans defense, we saw the worst of Williams’s game. He didn’t have much of a pocket to work with, facing pressure on nearly 40 percent of his dropbacks, but when the offensive line gave him time, Williams panicked or just failed to get rid of the ball on time. With the pressure mounting, Williams pressed to make big plays that simply weren’t there and would have thrown the Bears out of the game if not for a valiant effort by the defense. It looked a lot like his final season at USC—only the Trojan defense was so bad it made more sense for Williams to take risks. It was assumed that playing in a more structured offense, with talented players around him, would relieve the playmaking burden Williams had at USC last season. But through two weeks, that hasn’t been the case, and the generational prospect is off to a generationally disappointing start.
Winners: Marvin Harrison Jr. and Kyler Murray
Look, I won’t fault anyone for freaking out after Harrison was held to 4 yards on one catch in his NFL debut. The fourth pick in April’s draft was billed as a generational receiving prospect and looked like a UDFA throughout Arizona’s Week 1 loss in Buffalo. Harrison dropped a pass and didn’t create much separation when running vertical routes. It was a bad performance.
But it was only one performance, and it took all of seven days for Harrison to make us forget all about it, dropping 130 yards and two touchdowns on the Rams in Arizona’s 41-10 win. The doubters—if there still are any—will point out that all of his production came in the first quarter and that Murray was 0-for-3 when targeting him after that initial frame, but they’ll have no rebuttal to the highlights Harrison produced on Sunday. Nobody will be questioning Harrison’s hands or big-play ability after he hauled in this touchdown over Tre’Davious White.
And this 60-yard catch-and-run will answer any questions about Harrison’s speed after he finished with one of the slowest max speeds of any receiver in Week 1, per Next Gen Stats.
The rookie will be just fine if he continues getting service like that from his quarterback. Murray continued his hot start to the season with another big outing. He finished his day with a perfect passer rating after completing 17 of 21 passes for 266 yards and three touchdowns. He also tacked on 59 yards as a runner, bringing his season total up to 116 yards. After two games, Murray is on pace to finish with 3,600 passing yards and nearly 1,000 running yards. Those have been MVP-winning numbers for other dual-threat quarterbacks. If Murray can keep this up, he could find himself in that discussion for the first time since Arizona’s 7-0 start in 2021.
Loser: The Christian McCaffrey–Less 49ers
The 49ers landed on the Week 2 loser list before a down was played in Minnesota on Sunday. The day before San Francisco’s 23-17 loss to the Vikings, the team put McCaffrey on injured reserve, sidelining him for at least four weeks as he works through Achilles tendonitis and calf tightness. The 49ers run game did just fine without McCaffrey in a Week 1 romp over the Jets, with Jordan Mason racking up 147 yards rushing on the ground, but losing the star back for extended time is sure to cause problems eventually. Those problems showed up this week in one key area: explosive plays.
Kyle Shanahan’s run game was productive in the box score without its lead back for a second consecutive week. Mason hit the 100-yard mark and found the end zone against Minnesota and now ranks second in running yards after two games. The former undrafted free agent is playing well and picking up a bunch of yards after contact, but he isn’t beating second- and third-level tacklers like McCaffrey did last season. Only 6.3 percent of Mason’s carries have gone for 15-plus yards. McCaffrey’s explosive run rate was double that in 2023, per TruMedia.
McCaffrey’s absence is also being felt in the passing game. It’s been only two weeks, but Brock Purdy’s efficiency numbers are down across the board, and the productivity of the short passing game has been the main difference.
Purdy’s throws to running backs averaged 0.03 EPA per play in 2023. That has dropped to negative-0.28 this season, per TruMedia. And without McCaffrey posing a threat out of the backfield, Minnesota could drop into deeper zone coverages on early downs, when San Francisco’s opponents are typically forced to load up the box. And Shanahan played into Brian Flores’s hands, starting the game with a pass-heavy script. Seven of the first eight offensive snaps were pass plays, and the offense didn’t find a groove until Shanahan started calling more early-down runs, which unlocked the middle of the field. But the 49ers were never able to draw the Vikings secondary closer to the line of scrimmage on first and second down. Purdy averaged nearly 9 yards per throw but attempted only one pass over 25 air yards—and that one just barely made the cut.
The Vikings forced the 49ers to go on long, painstaking drives. One slipup and the Niners would find themselves in an obvious passing situation, where Flores shines as a defensive play designer—and really plays with the psyche of opposing quarterbacks. With Minnesota’s defense playing on the back foot on early downs, Purdy had plenty of time to read the defense from a clean pocket. But on third down, Flores dialed up the pressure and was able to rattle the 49ers quarterback.
Without McCaffrey on the field, there is more pressure on Purdy to create explosive plays in the passing game. He’s handled that pressure just fine through two weeks, but there will be more games like this over the next month—or maybe longer if McCaffrey’s injuries linger—if the run game doesn’t get more explosive in a hurry.
Loser: Mike McCarthy (Again)
Take it away, Jerry.
Yeah, that’s the good stuff. It had been too long. But it probably doesn’t feel that way for Jerry Jones, who had a similar look on his face the last time he watched the Cowboys play in his building—a 48-32 playoff loss to the Packers. This latest setback against the Saints hit all the same beats as that one, with the New Orleans offense marching up and down the field and the Cowboys offense struggling to find any breathing room and digging itself into an early hole that Dak Prescott was unable to climb out of.
It has been a theme of the Mike McCarthy era for Dallas to come out flat against a seemingly inferior opponent, so maybe Jerry shouldn’t be so surprised it happened again after an uneventful offseason. One of the few changes to the team came at defensive coordinator, where Mike Zimmer replaced Dan Quinn. Zimmer is a more aggressive play caller than Quinn. And while that increased aggression helped Dallas beat Cleveland in Week 1, we saw the downside of the approach against the Saints. Derek Carr (surprisingly) thrived in the face of the Cowboys’ pressure, and Zimmer couldn’t come up with an adjustment to slow him down. Getting dissected by Carr, whom Zimmer had never lost to before Sunday, might have been the first sign that Zimmer has passed his expiration date as an elite defensive coordinator. The shots of a confused Zimmer searching for answers on the sideline didn’t inspire confidence.
Even if Zimmer’s defense ends up leading to this team’s demise, it will be McCarthy, who has run out of scapegoats after replacing both of his coordinators the past two offseasons, in the hot seat. Last offseason, Kellen Moore got the boot so McCarthy could take over as the chief play caller … but the offense is plagued by all the same issues. Bringing in Zimmer was supposed to get this defense over the hump in the playoffs … but it looks vulnerable in all the same ways it did under Quinn. And with the team now pot committed to Prescott after signing him to a record-breaking deal last week, McCarthy looks like the only viable fall guy for the Cowboys’ inevitable late-season collapse, because, well, Jerry can’t face the real culprit for this mess of mediocrity: himself.
Winners: Chiefs Conspiracy Theorists
Chiefs haters might wake up losers on Monday morning, but the conspiratorial haters convinced there’s a leaguewide plot involving the referees to ensure Kansas City’s success will be buzzing all week after a defensive pass interference call on Bengals safety Daijahn Anthony saved the defending champs from certain defeat.
I love a good officiating controversy as much as the next fan, but it’s a stretch to blame the referees for this one. Anthony interfered with Rashee Rice’s attempt to catch the pass, and had he not made the early contact, it would have been a fairly easy catch for the Chiefs receiver. This loss falls on the Bengals for letting Rice find open space on fourth-and-16.
Before the ref-aided conversion and Harrison Butker’s subsequent game-winning field goal—karma was a clear loser in Week 2—we were headed for another season in which Cincinnati posed the biggest threat to Kansas City’s reign over the AFC. And maybe that should still be the case after the breakthroughs the Bengals offense seemed to make after a pitiful display against New England in the opener. Zac Taylor called more motion than he ever has since taking over the Bengals, and it gave the offense a major boost.
More importantly, Joe Burrow looked more comfortable in the pocket. He got through his progressions, extended plays, and pushed the ball deep after ignoring that part of the field against the Pats. Burrow still isn’t at the top of his game as he continues to get himself right after last year’s wrist surgery, but this was a step in the right direction, if only for the fact that there weren’t any reports of him struggling to pick up a water bottle.
The Bengals’ pass defense also played well after struggling for most of the 2023 season. It intercepted Patrick Mahomes twice, including this one-handed beauty from the shit-talking Cam Taylor-Britt, and held him to 5.4 yards per dropback in what felt like a throwback to Cincinnati’s past wins over Kansas City. But that’s where the Bengals have changed the most since their Super Bowl run in 2021, which was led by Lou Anarumo’s defense. We’re not seeing these competent displays of pass defense nearly as often, and the run defense has been the worst facet of the team through two weeks. The Chiefs run game averaged 0.11 EPA per attempt with a success rate of 57 percent on Sunday against the Bengals. It doesn’t matter how well you defend the pass—even against Mahomes—if the other team is running with that kind of efficiency.
No matter how bad things get for the Bengals offense, it’s easy to remain confident that the talent of Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase, and Tee Higgins will eventually figure it out. But this defense, outside of Trey Hendrickson, does not have the talent to inspire that kind of confidence. Anarumo’s defense was a key element in Cincinnati’s dominance over Kansas City in the AFC title game two seasons ago. The defense hasn’t been able to regain that form, and until it does, it will be difficult for Cincinnati to regain its spot near the top of the AFC.
Loser: Doug Pederson
Let’s continue the theme of coaches running out of answers and turn our focus to rainy Jacksonville, where Pederson watched his Jaguars fall to 0-2 after losing to the Browns 18-13. While the heavy rain throughout the game helps to explain some of Jacksonville’s issues on offense, there’s no good explanation for how Trevor Lawrence entered halftime averaging just 1.5 yards per attempt.
“I’m at a loss because we’ve been together for a while now, right? We shouldn’t be playing the way we’re playing,” Pederson said after the ugly performance. “We shouldn’t be coaching the way we’re coaching. I take accountability there. It starts with me. Then it goes to the assistant coaches and players. I just know that we’re a better football team than what we played today.”
On paper, the Jaguars are a much better team than they’ve shown over the past two weeks, and Lawrence is a far better quarterback (and is playing a lot better) than his 2024 stat line suggests. We saw that in the second half, when the Jags ratcheted up the tempo and let Lawrence orchestrate the offense from the line of scrimmage. Jacksonville couldn’t quite close the gap after the defense locked up the Browns offense over the final two quarters, but the offense moved the ball consistently.
The Jaguars appeared to be on the comeback trail after a fourth-quarter stop with the deficit cut down to three. But Browns punter Corey Bojorquez struck a blow to the cause with a coffin corner punt that pinned Jacksonville at its 2-yard line. Pederson decided that was a good time to dial up a deep dropback for Lawrence—who was going up against one of the better defensive lines in the NFL while playing behind a suspect offensive line—and he was immediately sacked for a safety.
“Yeah, we knew what we had to do,” Pederson said of the play call after the game. “We had to go 98 yards obviously. We had a chance to push the ball down the field at that time. It just felt like the pocket collapsed a little bit on his left side. Just nowhere to go with the ball. We’ve just got to clean that stuff up.”
That “stuff” could refer to any number of things. Is it the pass protection that can’t hold up in obvious passing situations? The receiving corps that can’t separate? The quarterback, who can’t seem to get out of his own way and isn’t getting any help from his coaches? Is it the play calling? Or is it all of the above?
I’m not sure how to answer that question, and it doesn’t sound like Pederson does either after an 0-2 start to this make-or-break season for him and his coaching staff.
Winner: Derek Carr and Learning to Live a Little
They don’t hand out MVP awards after Week 2, but if they did, Carr would be working on his acceptance speech right now after leading the Saints to another dominant win—this one over the heavily favored Cowboys by a shocking 44-19 score. Lighting up the Panthers is one thing, but carving up this Dallas defense, fresh off a dominant display in Week 1, is an eye-opening result for a quarterback who was widely viewed as a lame duck coming into the season.
OK, that dance was pretty cringe-inducing, but Carr’s game has been anything but through two contests. After throwing for 243 yards on just 16 attempts against the Cowboys, he’s averaging a ridiculous 11.4 yards per attempt, which leads the league by nearly 2 full yards. What’s shocking is how Carr is doing this. We’ve seen him play productive football in the past—he was a legitimate MVP candidate in 2016—but we’ve never seen him play this well when under pressure. That has always been the knock against Carr. Here’s how Joey Bosa once put it after a game in 2021:
“We knew once we hit him a few times, he really gets shook,” Bosa said. “And you saw on [Christian Covington’s] sack, he was pretty much curling into a ball before we even got back there. Great dude, great player ... but we know once you get pressure on him, he kind of shuts down.”
Fast-forward to 2024, and Carr is no longer folding against pressure, thanks in large part to Saints offensive coordinator Klint Kubiak. The first-year OC has developed an offense built around the run game. With Alvin Kamara off to a fast start, defenses are homing in on the run, which takes the teeth out of the pass rush. As a result, Carr has been pressured only seven times through two weeks. We’re not dealing with a meaningful sample size here, but Carr’s numbers under pressure have been mind-blowing. He’s averaging 20.7 yards per dropback, and he’s thrown two deep touchdowns, including this downfield strike to Rashid Shaheed.
I don’t know how long this will last, but this version of Carr is a lot more fun to watch, and I hope he’s here for good. While veteran quarterbacks don’t typically change their playing style this dramatically, Carr finally playing in an offense that doesn’t put so much on his plate could be the key to unlocking this part of his game. What Kubiak is asking of his quarterback is a far cry from the complex offenses Carr’s been in under Jon Gruden and former Sean Payton assistant Pete Carmichael Jr., and it’s brought out the best in him.
If this continues, we’ll have to reconsider what the Saints are capable of this season. Dennis Allen has fielded a top-10 defense by EPA in three of the past five years, and the Saints are fifth in the NFL in that metric this season. The offense won’t maintain this efficiency, and Carr won’t average 20 yards per play under pressure all season, but there’s enough talent here for a good play caller to put together a top-10 offense. And Kubiak looks the part.
Loser: Sean Payton’s Reputation
Bo Nix should consider himself lucky to have Payton as his coach. Not because the Broncos coach is making his transition to the NFL any easier. Nix has already thrown more interceptions in two games (four) than he did all of last year at Oregon (three). But the rookie quarterback can always count on Payton to be the center of attention—no matter how bad Nix’s stat line gets.
That will be the case this week after Payton’s bizarre decision to pass up an onside kick attempt after the Broncos cut Pittsburgh’s lead down to seven points with 1:54 left in the game and the Broncos down to their final timeout. Here’s how Payton attempted to explain the decision after the game:
Payton said the decision came down to “weighing the odds versus recovering an onside kick or getting the ball back with 26 seconds.” The Broncos chose the latter option despite knowing they’d have no timeouts remaining for said drive. It’s an unfathomable decision for any coach, but especially for one who won a Super Bowl in New Orleans thanks in large part to an onside kick. If that isn’t a sign that Payton’s days as a difference-making head coach are done, then Nix’s awful start to the season should be.
Winner: Blaming All Your Problems on the Refs
Unlike the Cowboys, the Ravens have someone other than themselves to blame for their shocking Week 2 loss after a questionable defensive pass interference call on Brandon Stephens set the Raiders up for the game-tying score.
Ravens safety Eddie Jackson could be getting a call from the league office after saying it was a “BS call,” but he has a point. Davante Adams was attempting to push Stephens off him, and the Baltimore corner was simply fighting back. A no-call was the right call in that situation, but NFL referees will never turn down an opportunity to insert themselves into the game if you let them. That was one of several 50-50 calls that seemed to go against Baltimore down the stretch in a game in which it lost 109 yards to penalties while the Raiders were penalized for only 15 yards.
Still, the uneven whistle doesn’t fully explain how the Ravens could lose a home game to a much weaker opponent. The team’s offensive line, which couldn’t block Maxx Crosby all game a week after failing to block Chris Jones, played a bigger role in the loss than the referees did. And none of those calls would have mattered if the defense didn’t let Gardner Minshew complete nine of 13 passes for 126 yards (9.7 yards per attempt) and a touchdown to lead a 10-point turnaround in the fourth quarter. The refs didn’t cause Justin Tucker to miss another field goal—and shouldn’t stop us from asking whether the GOAT is officially past his prime.
The Ravens have several problems they will have to sort out over the next three months if this team is going to launch a proper Super Bowl campaign. The questionable refereeing just helped shine a light on those problems.
