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. This week, the Raiders axed their offensive coordinator after an ugly loss to the Browns, the Colts coached their way to a loss in Kansas City, the Bears coached their way to another close win, J.J. McCarthy hit a new low, and more. Welcome to Winners and Losers.
Winner: The Rams’ Winning Streak
The Rams are the best team in football. If you think that’s an overreaction to what they did to the Buccaneers, I’d implore you to revisit the five games that preceded Sunday night’s ass-whooping. The Rams have now won six in a row, and five of those wins were over teams that would make the playoffs if the season ended today. The lopsided win also gave the Rams the league’s best point differential, at plus-127—and the NFC’s best record. They’re also a blocked field goal against the Eagles and an overtime fumble against the 49ers away from being 11-0. If this isn’t the best team in football, which team is?
The Rams might also be the NFL’s most balanced team. On offense, they’re running at a top-10 clip by EPA, and they’re passing at a top-five clip by the same metric. Defensively, they’re top five in EPA allowed against the pass and the run, and only Houston and Denver are giving up fewer points per drive.
The Bucs game was a showcase for just how well-rounded this team can be. Matthew Stafford, who’s mastered Sean McVay’s offense, looks like he could sling passes downfield for another 10 years, just a few months after it looked as if he’d barely make it through training camp. He cooked a formidable Tampa Bay defense with three touchdowns, peppering them with an assortment of sidearm throws, some tight-window throws, and a no-look touchdown for good measure. In an era of young, dynamic passers, how can this 37-year-old be the coolest quarterback in the league?
Sunday night wasn’t so fun for the opposing quarterback. Baker Mayfield got the hell beat out of him by the Rams’ unrelenting pass rush. He suffered a left shoulder sprain that will require an MRI to reveal the full extent of the injury. Mayfield seemed to injure the shoulder—the same one that was hurt during his final season in Cleveland—on a Hail Mary attempt at the end of the first half.
The Rams’ pass defense dominated against both Mayfield and his replacement, Teddy Bridgewater. Mayfield averaged just 2.0 yards per dropback before his exit, and Bridgewater didn’t fare much better, putting up 2.6 yards per dropback in garbage time. Neither quarterback really stood a chance against the Los Angeles pass rush. Jared Verse, who has been unblockable all season, had four pressures, while Braden Fiske, a fellow 2024 draft pick, led the team with five.
When the Rams rush the passer like they did Sunday night, football looks so damn hard for opposing offenses. And it looks so easy when Stafford and Sean McVay are clicking. It’s been said that there are no dominant teams in the league this season, but after the past two months from the Rams, we may have to reassess that.
Loser: Chip Kelly
Just hours after a 24-10 home loss to the Shedeur Sanders–led Browns that dropped the Raiders to 2-9, Pete Carroll made Chip Kelly his second scapegoat for the mess in Las Vegas, firing the NFL’s highest-paid coordinator on Sunday night. The Raiders offense isn’t the worst in the league, but the numbers suggest that it’s exactly the 30th worst. It ranks 30th in points per drive, 30th in yards per play, 30th in total EPA, 30th in EPA per play, 30th in success rate, and 30th in series conversion rate. That’s the only measure of consistency this unit found during Kelly’s short-lived tenure calling the plays.
While Kelly wasn’t exactly Kyle Shanahan on the headset, the offense’s issues stretch far beyond the play calling. The offensive line and receiving corps are not up to NFL standards. If you can name more than three of the guys on the Raiders’ starting offensive line, you either work for the team, root for the team, or need to spend more time with your family. Their most consistent receiver might be Tyler Lockett, who joined the team midseason. Quarterback Geno Smith has been a shell of what he was in Seattle. Star tight end Brock Bowers has been hurt. And the head coach decided his underqualified son should coach the offensive line. That line surrendered 10 sacks (including three by league leader Myles Garrett) on Sunday against the Browns.
There are maybe three offensive play callers on earth who could have made this work, and Kelly is not one of them. But the Raiders were paying him like one, which makes the firing easy to justify. He was doing a replacement-level job as a play caller. He couldn’t figure out a way to mitigate the offensive line deficiencies. He couldn’t get first-round pick running back Ashton Jeanty going and may have even gotten Jeanty off to a slower start by trying to change his pre-play stance for no reason. The passing game lacked creativity, which was the main issue with Kelly’s failed offenses during his earlier NFL stints in Philadelphia and San Francisco. And they couldn’t score—Sunday’s game marked the fifth time this season the Raiders scored 10 points or less.
Kelly’s biggest mistake was taking the job in the first place. He had it good as Ohio State’s offensive coordinator. You have a massive talent disparity pretty much every week and get to call plays for an NFL-caliber receiving corps every season. And he left to coach a team that hasn’t been good in 20 years and is led by a 74-year-old who was showing signs of decline in Seattle two years ago. This was a bad job, and Kelly wasn’t the right person for it.
Loser: Rational Shedeur Sanders Discourse
Before Shedeur Sanders on Sunday, a Browns quarterback hadn’t won his debut in the 26 years since the team was reincarnated in Cleveland in 1999. That alone is worthy of applause for the fifth-rounder. And in the historic win for the franchise—it’s a very low bar—Sanders threw a touchdown and an interception while averaging over 10 yards per attempt. But if you want to continue feeling good about Sanders’s starting debut, do not check out the advanced metrics from Sunday. He posted a QBR of just 8.7, per ESPN. He averaged –0.21 EPA per dropback, with a success rate of 23.8 percent. It was not an efficient outing for Sanders based on the stats that more reliably measure quarterback play.
In normal cases, we’d pat the rookie quarterback on the back and say, “Nice effort, bud.” But no discussion about Shedeur ever seems to be normal, and with the dichotomy between his traditional passing numbers and advanced metrics, we’re probably headed for another round of unhinged debates over this highly scrutinized rookie.
The film from the game won’t make it any easier to offer up a balanced assessment of Sanders’s first NFL start. He made some legitimately impressive plays, including a deep, off-platform throw on third-and-long that set up Cleveland’s first score.
But he followed that up with a brutal interception that could have been picked off by two Raiders defenders.
Sanders pulled off another nice out-of-structure throw later on, only for Jerry Jeudy to waste the effort by fumbling while trying to pull off an open-field juke.
Outside of those plays, it was a quiet day for Sanders. His first touchdown came on a screen pass that went for 66 yards on third down. Nearly 70 percent of his passing yards came after the catch, so there weren’t a lot of throws on his highlight reel. Sanders did show improvement in other areas compared to his play in relief of an injured Dillon Gabriel last week against Baltimore. Most notably, he got rid of the ball quicker and took only one sack. Sanders didn’t break the structure of the offense too often and made more good plays than bad when he did.
There was enough good to keep Sanders’s supporters encouraged—and enough bad to fuel the critics who don’t think he’s talented enough for the NFL. The truth is, the 21 dropbacks we saw from Sanders against a bad Las Vegas defense didn’t tell us much about his future, but that won’t stop us from yelling at each other about it for the next week. And if Gabriel returns as the starter next week—which Kevin Stefanski didn’t rule out after the game—we may be arguing about this game and how Sanders played in it until training camp opens up next summer.
Loser: Shane Steichen
When you have Patrick Mahomes down, you cannot let him get back up. There’s plenty about Steichen’s play calling down the stretch of the Colts’ 23-20 loss to the Chiefs in overtime that’s worthy of criticism—Jonathan Taylor got just two carries in OT, for instance—but punting on a fourth-and-4 near midfield with under five minutes remaining in regulation was the most egregious decision. Steichen had a choice in that situation: try to gain 4 yards and put the game away or punt the ball back to the league’s greatest quarterback, with the Chiefs needing only a field goal to send the game into overtime.
Predictably, Mahomes marched the Chiefs right down the field for the game-tying score—and from there, the Colts were lucky to even make it to overtime, needing a goal-line stand to keep Kansas City out of the end zone late in the fourth quarter. We didn’t see much better from Steichen and Co. in the extra period. Indianapolis got the first possession but punted after yet another three-and-out. And, once again, Mahomes marched his team down the field and into position for the game-winning field goal.
It was the kind of loss that can stick with a team. The Colts returned from their bye week looking to validate a surprisingly dominant start to the season and entered the fourth quarter of Sunday’s game at Arrowhead Stadium with a 20-9 lead. A fumble by Chiefs running back Kareem Hunt to open the quarter gave Indy the ball with a chance to put Kansas City away. One score may have done it, but the Colts couldn’t even get a first down. They gained just 11 yards over the final 15 minutes—and just 18 if you include their overtime drive. Daniel Jones’s nine dropbacks down the stretch produced just 17 yards. Taylor’s three rushes netted just a single yard. With a chance to defeat the league’s bogeyman—and put the defending AFC champs in a potentially insurmountable hole at 5-6—the NFL’s best offense got punked.
And the Colts got punked by Steve Spagnuolo, specifically, which is why I’m hesitant to pin Indy’s collapse solely on Steichen. A lot of the league’s top play callers have found their offenses caught in Spags’ blender. Still, the Chiefs’ defensive coordinator completely pantsed the Colts offense in the second half. The Chiefs’ pass rush had been struggling coming into the game, and Spagnuolo was desperate for answers. He seemed to find them during halftime. With a mix of zone blitzes and simulated pressures, Kansas City pressured Jones on 35 percent of his dropbacks in the third and fourth quarters and overtime and goaded him into short, harmless passes. His average time to throw dropped to 2.46 seconds, and he had an average depth of target of just 5.2 yards. He simply could not escape Spagnuolo’s pressure. Steichen and Taylor, who have helped spark Jones’s turnaround season, couldn’t bail him out, either.
Even after this disheartening loss, I’m not ready to sell all of my Colts stock. This remains one of the most balanced teams in a conference where every contender has flaws. But I did lose a little trust in Steichen after this one, and not because he was outschemed by a great defensive coach. He had a chance to win the game and punted on it.
Winner: Jahmyr Gibbs
Imagine watching Sunday’s Lions-Giants game with someone who knows nothing of football and trying to explain why it actually makes sense that Jared Goff’s salary is over 10 times higher than that of Jahmyr Gibbs. Even knowing what we do about football and positional value, it still feels wrong after a game like Gibbs had—and, really, you can extend that to the whole season. Without Gibbs, there’d be no explosive element to Detroit’s offense. Without Gibbs, this offense would completely stink.
And it stunk for most of Sunday. The Giants’ pass rush won its battle in the trenches, and Goff was a stationary target in the pocket. Goff is at his best in a clean pocket and at his worst when Detroit needs him to be an athlete and make a play.
Goff’s lack of mobility hurts the Lions in games where they can’t protect. Goff can still play the role of distributor with quick passes, but there won’t be many downfield throws. But that’s less of an issue if you have a running back who can do this.
Gibbs’s 69-yard touchdown run on the second snap of overtime essentially won Detroit the game and capped off one of the best rushing performances of the century. He ran for 219 yards on only 15 carries. That’s 14.6 yards per attempt! Also, Gibbs averaged 1.01 EPA per attempt in Sunday’s win, which is the best mark for any running back with 10 or more carries in a game since 2000, per TruMedia.
The Giants defense must have felt like it was trying to tackle a phantasm whenever Gibbs touched the ball. Safety Dane Belton may have had the roughest go of it. He whiffed on a tackle on the overtime run and also got left in Gibbs’s wake on a 49-yard score earlier in the game.
When Gibbs breaks the first level with a full head of steam, an explosive run is almost always bound to follow. His teammates know it, too. Penei Sewell was celebrating the game-winning touchdown before he even crossed midfield. Goff said he started celebrating after just 7 yards.
“You can see the angle he’s about to take and the angle the safety’s at, and it’s over,” the Lions quarterback said. “That’s what makes him so special, is that next-level speed. Twenty-four on their team [Belton] is not a slow player. He’s a really fast player; he’s a really good player. And Jah ran away from him a couple times.”
Player evaluation can be tricky, especially at the running back position, where performance is based on so many factors. Players like Gibbs make it easy, though. He just moves differently than everyone else on the field. Even the most casual football fan knows how valuable a player like that can be.
Loser: Trying to Cover Jameis Winston
Gibbs wasn’t the only player electrifying the Ford Field crowd. Giants quarterback Jameis Winston put on a show of his own, throwing for 366 yards and two touchdowns in a losing effort. But Winston’s best play of the day—and perhaps the best play by a quarterback all season—wasn’t a throw.
That is an appropriate use of all caps. HOLY SHIT. I’m writing this hours after seeing that play live, and I’m still in disbelief. Dude, he adjusted to the ball to beat the coverage and stiff-armed a 240-pound tackler off him to finish the play for a touchdown. I would pay good money for a livestream of the next Lions film session. Derrick Barnes, the flailing defender seen in the clip above, has to be dreading it.
We learned after the game, via The Athletic’s Colton Pouncy, that Barnes was assigned to rush the passer on the play but peeled off into coverage when he saw Winston leaking out on a route. If he hadn’t had such good instincts and been such a team player, the Giants’ touchdown would have been a walk-in, but at least Barnes wouldn’t have to live with this great shame. Let that be a lesson. Never go out of your way to try hard.
Winner: Eagles Turmoil
The game was certainly exciting, but it wasn’t well played. Not by either team. The Cowboys spent the first half stepping on rakes and, in the words of Dallas head coach Brian Schottenheimer, spotted the Eagles a 21-0 lead after the first 20 minutes. Philadelphia spent the next 40 minutes pissing that lead away with penalties, a series of fumbles, and some play calling cowardice. It was a game that neither team seemed particularly interested in winning. Dallas eventually did on a Brandon Aubrey field goal as time expired.
The win keeps the Cowboys in the playoff race, but those aspirations still feel like a lost cause with the Lions and 49ers (and, right now, even the Panthers) standing between them and the NFC’s seventh seed. This game was more about the defending champs, who are always just an offensive stinker away from locker room strife. It won’t come from A.J. Brown this week after he went off for 110 yards and a touchdown, but offensive coordinator Kevin Patullo can expect more criticism coming his way. And it will be well-deserved after the way the offense once again pulled a disappearing act in the second half. Patullo sat on the lead by calling far too many early-down runs and basic pass plays that were snuffed out by a woeful Cowboys pass defense. That strategy would have allowed the Eagles to cruise to an easy win a season ago, but the run game isn’t what it was in 2024.
This was an ugly result for the offense, but it could have been much worse. The Eagles scored their second touchdown after an erroneous roughing the kicker call against Dallas extended the drive. Their third and final touchdown drive was sparked by a third-and-12 heave from Jalen Hurts that DeVonta Smith somehow tracked down for an explosive play. We’ll spend the next week lamenting the Eagles’ scoreless 40-minute stretch to end the game, but, really, this offensive performance was disjointed after the opening drive.
The defense also deserves some blame for the meltdown. The secondary, which was shorthanded after losing cornerback Adoree’ Jackson and safety Reed Blankenship to injuries during the game, couldn’t cover Dallas’s George Pickens, who exploded for 146 receiving yards on nine catches. It couldn’t cover CeeDee Lamb, either, but Lamb dropped a handful of passes, including a key third-down throw that could have put the Cowboys ahead earlier in the fourth quarter.
Lamb was able to haul in a 48-yard throw over Cooper DeJean, who was forced to move outside after Jackson left the game. And DeJean was on the wrong end of another big play when Pickens beat him on a downfield jump ball that sparked the game-tying drive.
It was an uncharacteristically undisciplined game from the Eagles defense and an unsurprisingly disjointed performance from the offense. Even the special teams chipped in with a few game-changing mistakes. It’s going to be a toxic week of coverage in Philadelphia, but this team seems to thrive in negativity. Maybe a setback like this is exactly what this team needed.
Loser: The Vikings’ Brain Trust
You can’t draw any firm conclusions on a young quarterback’s career after only six starts. But if you could, the conclusion on J.J. McCarthy’s outlook after six games would be resounding. McCarthy, in his current form, is not a viable NFL quarterback. What we saw on Sunday in Minnesota’s 23-6 loss to the Packers wouldn’t qualify McCarthy for an XFL job. He averaged just 2.5 yards per dropback. That’s a Wemby per dropback. McCarthy also lost an average of –0.67 EPA per dropback, meaning that every 10th time he dropped back to pass, he essentially gave Green Bay another touchdown. That’s certainly how it felt watching on Sunday. And it’s how it has felt watching him throughout his first half dozen pro starts as he’s approached historically bad territory. Of the 854 quarterback seasons by a qualified passer this quarter century, McCarthy ranks 853rd in EPA per dropback—ahead of only JaMarcus Russell in 2009.
To be fair to McCarthy, he was under siege from the opening whistle of Sunday’s game. Micah Parsons took up residence in his pocket, and the Packers pressured McCarthy on nearly half of his dropbacks. But McCarthy created some of the pressure himself by holding on to the ball and hoping an open receiver would pop into his line of sight. But even if you ignore the pressured dropbacks, McCarthy’s performance was abysmal.
McCarthy’s poor play has tanked the Vikings’ season, but we shouldn’t blame him for this mess. It wasn’t his decision to let Sam Darnold (and Daniel Jones) walk in free agency. It wasn’t his choice to enter the season with Carson Wentz as the only veteran option on the QB depth chart. It wasn’t his decision to go all in during the offseason and spend more money in free agency than all but one team, only to hand the keys to the roster to an unproven, young passer with severe mechanical flaws who was coming off a knee injury. That falls on Minnesota’s brain trust, which includes both head coach Kevin O’Connell and general manager Kwesi Adofo-Mensah.
If one of those two has to take the fall for botching the quarterback decision, it will likely be the latter. O’Connell, last year’s NFL Coach of the Year, has already earned his reputation as a QB whisperer over the past few seasons. One bad season by McCarthy won’t take that away from him. Adofo-Mensah hasn’t earned enough goodwill to escape criticism for his role in all of this, though. As unfair as it is to judge a general manager on draft picks over a short time frame, Adofo-Mensah has been particularly bad at making picks. His draft history has been especially bad in the first round, where he burned picks on Lewis Cine, who’s no longer on the roster, and McCarthy, who right now looks unplayable. Receiver Jordan Addison has been a hit, but there aren’t many legit stars on Adofo-Mensah’s four-year draft record. And while the 44-year-old general manager has made smart mid-level signings in free agency while hoarding draft capital, he’s missed on some of his bigger gambits—headlined by the McCarthy pick and Darnold decision.
No matter how you split the blame among McCarthy, O’Connell, and Adofo-Mensah, all of their reputations have taken a hit over the last two and a half months. Barring a miracle turnaround for the 22-year-old quarterback, this could cost the QB and GM their jobs and turn up the heat on one of the league’s most coveted young coaches. I would say this season from hell couldn’t possibly get worse, but I’ve seen enough Vikings football to know that’s not true.
Winner: Ben Johnson
The Bears survived another close game—this time against a Steelers team that was without Aaron Rodgers, which might raise even more questions about the Bears’ legitimacy. Chicago leads the NFC North at 8-3 but also has a negative point differential (–3) on the season and a probably unsustainable record in one-score games. The Bears are almost certainly fraudulent. That doesn’t mean the head coach behind Chicago’s turnaround is. No matter how badly regression eventually hits this team, I’m all in on Ben Johnson.
Even if the numbers say the Bears are fake, their improvements on offense are very real. After the 31-28 win over Pittsburgh, Chicago ranks 11th in points per drive (up from 28th in 2024), eighth in yards per play (up from 32nd), and 11th in total EPA (up from 26th). Most impressively, Johnson has orchestrated a top-10 run game with the league’s second-highest explosive play rate, and he’s done it without the top offensive line he worked with in Detroit. (On the flip side, the Lions’ run game hasn’t been nearly as efficient and has had trouble generating explosive plays when Jahmyr Gibbs isn’t vaporizing opposing defenders.) This could be a one-year blip, but through the first 12 weeks, the Ben Johnson effect has been felt in both Chicago and Detroit.
Despite Johnson’s success, the inconsistent performance of Caleb Williams remains a point of consternation in Chicago, and Sunday’s game won’t change that. We saw plenty of good from the second-year quarterback. He is throwing with more confidence and with better timing each and every week but is still prone to inaccuracy and the odd lapse in judgment. The sack-fumble he took in his own end zone, which gave the Steelers a free touchdown, looked straight out of his rookie year.
Still, Williams has made enough progress in his first season under Johnson for fans to feel good about this partnership—and to feel good about the general direction the 24-year-old is heading in after last year’s debacle. Getting off to an 8-3 start is cool and all, but generating positive vibes around a young Bears quarterback is Johnson’s biggest win of his coaching career thus far.
