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: The Ravens’ Super Bowl Hype
One of the greatest mysteries of the 2024 season will be how the Raiders beat this Ravens team in Baltimore back in Week 2. I’m still not entirely convinced that game actually happened. They can do wild things with video editing software these days. Whatever the case, the Ravens team we saw lose to Las Vegas a few weeks back was not the team that throttled the red-hot Bills on Sunday Night Football. The Baltimore we saw in the 35-10 win over Buffalo in Week 4 looked more like the team many pegged as the biggest threat to Kansas City’s reign over the AFC.
Derrick Henry, who rushed for 199 yards, will be the story all week. He took an 87-yard jaunt for the game’s opening score and never really stopped running.
That long run padded Henry’s stat line, but the veteran back averaged 4.9 yards per carry on his other attempts. The Bills just never looked very interested in tackling him.
And they never looked capable of tackling Lamar Jackson, who chipped in with 54 yards on six carries and never allowed Buffalo to fully commit to stopping Henry. Jackson has never performed particularly well against this Bills defense, which has focused on neutralizing him as a runner in past games. But with Henry, who’s been a bogeyman for the Bills throughout his career, standing next to Jackson in the Ravens backfield, that was difficult to do. This had been Baltimore’s aim when signing the 30-year-old back: reducing the playmaking burden on Jackson in this offense. With Henry now leading the NFL in rushing after his dominant performance on Sunday night, it’s safe to say he’s provided that relief. But Lamar is still doing his part. The Ravens quarterback ranks ninth in the NFL in rushing, with 308 yards. This isn’t just the best two-headed rushing attack in the league today—it might be the best we’ve ever seen. Jackson and Henry are on pace to finish with a combined 3,349 rushing yards this season.
Baltimore’s offense has found its groove, and the defense just played its most complete game of the season after holding the Bills to only 236 yards of offense. Josh Allen still made his plays—there’s only so much you can do to contain a quarterback capable of this—but all of the easy splash plays Buffalo’s offense had been creating through the first three weeks disappeared. The Ravens’ run defense has been strong all season, but we’ve seen rookie defensive coordinator Zach Orr start to find answers against the pass. Allen struggled to find open receivers all game. It was the first time all season that his average time to throw crept over the three-second mark, as well as his first game of 2024 with an expected points added average in the negative, per TruMedia.
After an 0-2 start, which has been a death sentence for NFL teams in the past, the Ravens are now 2-2 and just a game back in the AFC North, with only the Steelers ahead of them in the standings. With four of their next seven against divisional opponents, including two monster games against the Bengals, this team could run away (both literally and figuratively) with the division by Thanksgiving.
Losers: Aaron Rodgers and the Jets
From awkward sideline embraces to passive-aggressive comments in the offseason, it felt like Rodgers and Jets coach Robert Saleh were destined for a public, verbal spat at some point this season. We may have gotten the first sign of discontent after the Jets dropped an ugly, rain-soaked game to the Broncos. After New York’s offensive line was called for five false starts during the 10-9 loss, Saleh mentioned Rodgers’s pre-snap cadence as a possible area of improvement. That seemed to tick off Rodgers, who has weaponized the tactic to punish overly jumpy defensive linemen throughout his career, including a few times in 2024. When asked about Saleh’s comments, Rodgers said that one way to handle the situation is to “hold them accountable.”
To be fair to Saleh, he did acknowledge there hadn’t been any problems with the cadence or pre-snap operation heading into the game—and he didn’t say the Jets needed to make adjustments. He merely named it as a potential factor for the issues that plagued New York on Sunday.
This is probably a nonstory, but Rodgers’s addition of the “accountable” line feels like a dig at the Jets coaching staff. The quarterback had every right to feel grumpy after the loss. He was sacked five times and took 14 hits in total from the Broncos pass rush. He limped through the final three drives of the game, including two failed attempts at a game-winning drive after Greg Zuerlein missed a 50-yard field goal in the rain with under a minute remaining. Denver never relented, blitzing Rodgers 22 times, including eight blitzes of six or more rushers. The goal was clear: knock Rodgers off his spot and force the 40-year-old to make plays on the move. He couldn’t. Rodgers averaged just 2.7 yards per dropback when blitzed on Sunday.
Rodgers never really looked capable of outrunning the Broncos defense. He made several impressive passes—proving he still has some dimes left in his arm—but consistency was a problem. The Jets offense played poorly as a unit, and the quarterback wasn’t any better. In other words, it felt like every other Jets game over the past few seasons.
“I can’t say I had a spectacular game,” Rodgers said afterward. “I missed some throws. The weather sucked, but so did some of my throws. We had some chances but way too many mental mistakes, too many poor throws, and then we just missed some easy stuff.”
Those missed throws and mental mistakes rarely occur when Rodgers is playing at his best. Consistent precision was a hallmark of his game throughout his prime. It’s been missing since his last MVP campaign in 2021. If the Jets are ever going to get the version of Rodgers they wanted when they traded for him last offseason, he’ll need to rediscover it.
Winner: Kliff Kingsbury
Here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to type out at any point this season: There isn’t a better play caller in the NFL than Kliff Kingsbury at the moment. Rookie Jayden Daniels, who padded his early lead in the Offensive Rookie of the Year race with another near-perfect performance, deserves a lot of the credit for Washington’s surprising 3-1 start to the season, but Kingsbury has made his transition back to the NFL as seamless as any we’ve seen in recent history.
It’s not just that Daniels is playing well and seems to be improving by the week. It’s how easy the Commanders offense has made things look for the rookie quarterback. It was fair to say that Kinsgbury held the rookie’s hand through the first two games with a scheme that Bengals cornerback Cam Taylor-Britt accurately described as a “college offense.” He called a bunch of run-pass options and option plays that utilized Daniels’s running ability. But Kingsbury has started adding new layers these past two weeks, culminating with Sunday’s comprehensive performance in the blowout win.
Daniels was the star once again, finishing 26-of-30 for 233 yards and a touchdown through the air, along with 47 yards and a score on the ground. It was his best performance as a passer. He made anticipatory throws over the middle of the field, he navigated the pocket to buy time, and outside of one poorly thrown interception, he didn’t make any rookie mistakes.
As good as Daniels looked, his degree of difficulty was never too high thanks to Washington’s early-down success. Running backs Brian Robinson Jr. and Jeremy McNichols combined for 169 yards on 29 carries, and the Commanders finished with a 55 percent success rate on early-down runs, which kept Daniels out of obvious passing situations all afternoon. Kinsgbury’s run-game call sheet included some Wildcat plays, runs from unbalanced formations, and plenty of quarterback-centric runs. It was a scheme junkie’s dream offensive performance.
The Commanders are now 3-1 and own the NFL’s most efficient offense. They lead the league in pass-game EPA and run-game EPA, per TruMedia. They’re second in success rate. Up until Daniels’s interception in the second quarter on Sunday, the Commanders had scored on 16 consecutive possessions. The film, especially over the past two weeks, has been just as impressive as the numbers. There isn’t a statistical split that suggests Kingsbury’s NFL revenge tour will end anytime soon.
Loser: The Trevor Lawrence–Doug Pederson Partnership
Pederson is officially at the “throw your players under the bus” stage of the coaching hot seat cycle. Pederson made that clear after Sunday’s disheartening 24-20 loss in Houston when he was asked whether he’d consider taking over the play-calling duties for Press Taylor after another disjointed performance for the Jags offense.
“As coaches, we can’t go out there and make the plays, right?” Pederson said, in a clip that will get plenty of run in Jacksonville over the next few days. Perhaps Pederson, who’s sitting on the hottest seat of any head coach at the moment, is already in job preservation mode. It was the first time Pederson revealed that Taylor was calling the plays after being hounded about it all offseason. The Jaguars head coach, who hasn’t won more than 10 games in a season since leading Philadelphia to a Super Bowl in 2017, could buy himself a few more weeks of job security by taking over the play-calling.
It may be too late for Pederson to clean up the mess he’s created. The Jaguars offense is poorly coached, and the play-calling has been easy to criticize over the past two seasons. But Pederson’s assessment of Sunday’s performance isn’t entirely wrong. Jacksonville’s players left a lot of yardage on the field. There were bad penalties, egregious drops, and more than a few missed throws by Lawrence. It wasn’t an exquisitely called game—especially in the red zone—but the play-calling was good enough. The players, led by Lawrence, were not.
But pointing out how poorly the players are executing won’t help Pederson’s cause. Their performance is a reflection of his coaching. And with quarterback reclamation projects emerging as a major theme of the 2024 season, Jags owner Shad Khan won’t need much convincing to move on from this staff to rescue Lawrence and get his development back on track.
Winner: Joe Flacco, the Season Saver
The Colts climbed back to .500 with a 27-24 win over the Steelers but couldn’t avoid the six words they’ve dreaded all season: Anthony Richardson leaves game with injury. Before coming to a sudden and disappointing end, the second-year quarterback’s day started on a high note. He completed three of his first four passes for 71 yards and ran for another 24 yards on three designed rushes. The second of those runs ended with Richardson taking a direct shot to the right hip, which sent him to the sideline.
Richardson had plenty of time to slide but opted to fight for a few extra yards—a mistake he’s made more than a few times early in his NFL career. Not only did that gambit lead to an avoidable injury, but it also nearly cost Indianapolis the ball.
Richardson sat for just one play before returning to the field. Colts coach Shane Steichen decided to put Richardson’s mobility to the test and dialed up an option run for his hobbled quarterback. Steichen said he wouldn’t let injury concerns get in the way of utilizing Richardson’s mobility in the run game, and he backed up that talk on Sunday. But Richardson pulled up early after keeping the ball and later explained that his injury (a hip pointer) made it difficult for him to accelerate. The 22-year-old said he lobbied Steichen to get back into the game, but the Colts head coach ultimately decided against it.
Enter Richardson’s 39-year-old backup, Flacco. When we last saw Flacco, he was leading the Browns into the playoffs after replacing an injured Deshaun Watson in Cleveland. On Sunday, the veteran provided the same service for a Colts team that was in danger of falling to 1-3 with a tough (and undefeated) Steelers team on the opposing sideline. Flacco didn’t light up Pittsburgh’s defense but produced a professional quarterbacking display that helped Indy stave off a late comeback attempt. He averaged only 6.5 yards per attempt but threw two touchdown passes and didn’t throw an interception. It was the boring brand of football any team would want from a backup making a cameo appearance—especially one pushing 40.
Richardson said after the game that he’s “just a little sore” and expects to play next week against the Jaguars. This could be the last we see of Flacco for a while, but with Richardson still playing this reckless style of football—and his coach refusing to cut back on his designed touches in the run game—it may not be the last time the Colts need him.
Loser: Red Zone Offense
There are a lot of factors leading to the NFL’s decline in scoring. The quarterbacks are young and bad. Offensive linemen are poorly coached. Two-high coverages are turning even the best quarterbacks into cowards. All of this is true—or mostly true, at least—but there may be a more intuitive explanation for why scoring is down over the past few seasons: Offenses have gotten worse in the red zone.
In a study for Sports Info Solutions published last week, James Weaver found that “red zone success rate decreased year-over-year while non red zone success rate increased” over the past two seasons. According to Weaver, those two numbers had mirrored one another over the last decade but started to diverge a few seasons ago. The gap has never been wider than it was over the first three weeks of the season. From his piece:
We saw several teams get burned by poor red zone performances on Sunday. The Rams lost 24-18 in Chicago after scoring just one touchdown on four trips into the red zone. The Jets lost by a single point after going 0-for-2 in the red zone. And the Jaguars, continuing a nightmare season in the red zone, could have put the Texans away in the fourth quarter after getting to Houston’s 1-yard line, but Jacksonville turned it over on downs after Trevor Lawrence was stuffed on a pitiful quarterback draw.
The teams that seem to be struggling the most in the red zone are those without a reliable running game. As Weaver found, the red zone is upside-down for offensive efficiency: Running the ball is generally the most effective method of moving the ball, while passing efficiency drops off in tighter quarters. “Running the ball has resulted in a 46.2% success rate, while passing is only at 42.1%,” Weaver wrote.
The Rams’ issues in the red zone on Sunday offer the best illustration of this phenomenon. Led by a fearless performance from Matthew Stafford, Los Angeles had no problem moving the ball between the 20s despite the total absence of a run game. Even against a tough Bears defense, Stafford kept the Rams offense ahead of the chains, but that changed when they got into the red zone.
Matthew Stafford Struggled in the Red Zone Vs. Chicago
With a banged-up offensive line, Sean McVay wisely leaned on Stafford’s passing prowess on Sunday. But in the red zone, he was rendered useless, and the Rams coach didn’t have enough trust in his run game—in his banged-up offensive line, specifically—to finish off drives. Maybe he should have shown more faith. After all, the Rams’ lone touchdown on Sunday came on a run play.
That was one of three red zone runs called by McVay on Sunday. A few more run calls may have made the difference for a tough day in Chicago.
Winner: Travis Kelce
Kelce hasn’t completely beaten the “washed” allegations, but he put a big dent in the prosecution’s case with a seven-catch, 89-yard performance in a 17-10 win over the Chargers. Those seven catches included gains of 18 and 38 yards, so they weren’t the dink-and-dunk receptions we’d seen for Kelce this season.
It couldn’t have come at a better time. The Chiefs, who are already without running back Isiah Pacheco and wide receiver Hollywood Brown for the foreseeable future, lost leading receiver Rashee Rice, who was carted off the field on Sunday after suffering a knee injury during an interception return. ESPN’s Adam Schefter reported that the fear is a torn ACL, which would end the second-year receiver’s season and put a tremendous amount of stress on Kansas City’s 34-year-old tight end. Rice had effectively replaced Kelce as Mahomes’s most trusted target on throws to the middle of the field.
It will be easier for the Chiefs to overcome the loss of Rice if Kelce can replicate Sunday’s performance on a more consistent basis over the next three months. That’s a lot to ask of Kelce, and it may not be enough to save this passing game, which will be banking on rookie Xavier Worthy, Justin Watson, and JuJu Smith-Schuster more than anyone expected coming into the season. Worthy might have a breakout in him—and his 54-yard touchdown reception could have been a sign that it’s coming sooner rather than later—but he doesn’t have the build to take on the workload of a WR1 for a full season, especially if it includes a lot of targets over the middle of the field. Smith-Schuster played that role for the team in 2022 but has lost a few steps since then. And Watson is more of a vertical threat. Kelce is the only pass catcher on the roster capable of filling the void.
Kansas City is 4-0 and is two games clear of its closest competitor in the AFC West. This team will march right into the playoffs again, and it will probably be a heavy favorite to win it all by the time the calendar flips over to January. I’m not making the mistake of writing off the Chiefs as serious contenders. But if Kelce can’t keep this up, we’ll have to revisit this discussion.
Winner: Justin Jefferson
It’s impossible to pick out the MVP of this Vikings team, which moved to 4-0 after leaving Lambeau Field with a 31-29 win over the Packers. Head coach Kevin O’Connell has built the league’s most dynamic and balanced offense. Defensive coordinator Brian Flores has tormented opposing quarterbacks throughout the season, and that continued on Sunday, with his Vikings intercepting Jordan Love three times. And then there’s Sam Darnold, who leads the league in touchdown passes after throwing three more against the Packers and whose stunning play might be the story of the 2024 season after four weeks. But Sunday’s win in Green Bay was another reminder that Jefferson is still the best member of the team.
Based on the box score, it was a ho-hum day for the NFL’s best receiver: six catches, 85 yards, and a touchdown. But those numbers don’t really tell the story. That one touchdown came on one of the best “concentration” catches you will ever see, with Jefferson hauling in the ball with one hand after it ricocheted off his chest plate and bounced off the defender’s shoulder. Even in slow motion, it looks like an impossible task:
That grab gave Minnesota a 28-0 lead that it nearly blew after two Darnold turnovers in the second half, but Jefferson helped seal the win with this unreal display of body control along the sideline.
That was one of Jefferson’s four first downs in the game. Even when opposing defenses know Jefferson is getting the ball, it can be difficult to stop him. First-year Packers defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley tried to account for the star wideout by throwing double teams and bracket coverage at Jefferson in obvious passing situations, but that gravity just made things easier for his fellow receivers.
Throwing single teams at Jefferson wasn’t any more effective, as we saw later in the game. The truth is, there are no answers for a player as dominant as Jefferson. There isn’t an obvious weakness in his game, and there are plenty of strengths. He runs routes better than anyone. He has an elite pair of hands. He can out-muscle physical corners for 50/50 balls and contort his body to erase inaccuracies from his quarterback. He is the ultimate talent in today’s NFL. If there’s any member of this team worthy of being included in the MVP discussion, it’s Jefferson.
