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http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2016/11/21/miami-dolphins-new-york-giants-nfl-week-11-peter-king
On the Dolphins, Giants and Others Nobody Saw Coming
Miami has won five straight, and so has Eli Manning and crew. A look at how those streaks were extended Sunday, plus notes on Kirk Cousins’ exuberance, Luke Kuechly, flag football’s future and the rest of Week 11
By Peter King
Flurries outside my window in New York late Sunday night. It’s beginning to look a lot like the pennant race, with quite a few teams we didn’t see coming. Such as:
• The 6-4 Dolphins, winners of five straight, preventing the Patriots from clinching the division while New England trees still have leaves. Miami has a trustworthy late-game quarterback—finally—in Ryan Tannehill.
• The 5-5 Bucs, who will be a game out of first place in the NFC South on Thanksgiving.
• The best Dallas team in eons is still hearing footsteps from the Giants (7-3) and 6-3-1 Washington, which is one explosive team.
• The two 6-4 teams atop the NFC North—Detroit and Minnesota. They have a two-game lead on the moribund Packers.
• Oakland (7-2), which would earn sole possession of the penthouse in the AFC West with a win over Houston tonight in Mexico City.
In all, 21 teams are within two games of first place in the eight division races, with six regular-season weeks left. Cool thing: Look at Thanksgiving. Six teams, none below .500, all among the 21 I mentioned. The slate:
12:30 p.m. ET (CBS): Minnesota (6-4) at Detroit (6-4). For first place in the NFC North.
3:30 p.m. ET (FOX): Washington (6-3-1) at Dallas (9-1). “We want Dallas!f” the Washington crowd yelled late Sunday night in the rout of Green Bay. You got ’em.
8:30 p.m. ET (NBC): Pittsburgh (5-5) at Indianapolis (5-5). Ben Roethlisberger at Andrew Luck. A nightcap with 70-point potential.
Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. This column’s going to be heavy on the teams we didn’t see coming, and disparate stories I don’t often get to tell.
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On Ryan Tannehill and the Dolphins
Photo: Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images
The best defense in football over the last month (Los Angeles’) was throttling the Dolphins 10-0 with seven minutes left at the Coliseum. For some reason—confidence? stupidity?—quarterback Ryan Tannehill looked at the other 10 guys in the huddle before the first snap and said, “Take a deep breath, everybody. We’re gonna win this game.”
In the next six minutes, Tannehill, whose cross to bear has been some awful late-game performances in his four-and-a-half seasons in Miami, hit 12 of 13 throws for 124 yards and two touchdowns. It’s the best he’s ever been, under the circumstances, late in a game since entering the league.
It took him just under three minutes to go 77 yards on the first drive, then 95 seconds to go 75 yards and throw a gorgeous laser to a sliding DeVante Parker, in the only place he could have caught the ball, low and outside, near the side of the end zone. A perfect throw, capping two perfect drives.
Since getting the coaching job, Adam Gase has trusted Tannehill, and Tannehill has bought in. (Tannehill in their first meeting last winter: “What do you want me to do, coach?”) Gase has responded in kind. Tannehill helps make out the game plan by telling Gase what he likes and what he doesn’t; Gase gives Tannehill authority to change calls on the field without reservation.
“I’m really excited where I’m at in this offense,” Tannehill said, sitting on the team bus after the game. It shows: In comeback wins over Buffalo, San Diego and the Rams in this streak, Tannehill had thrown for 264 yards in the last eight minutes of the three fourth quarters, with no turnovers.
“To win ball games in the fourth quarter,” Tannehill said, “you’ve got to play with confidence and a full knowledge of the offense. And you better be able to make some big plays.” Finally, Tannehill is doing that, and it looks like the Dolphins’ quarterback of the future is also their quarterback of the present. Won’t it be interesting if, on Jan. 1, in the last game of the season, the New England-at-Miami game has significance in a division that rarely is competitive in Week 17?
I think my eyebrows got raised when I heard Marshall Faulk on the NFL Network pregame show Sunday talking about the early path for new Rams quarterback Jared Goff. “They’ve got a pretty easy schedule going forward,” Faulk said. Hmmm. Goff’s first five games, assuming he stays in the lineup:
“Those last six minutes are going to haunt us.”
—Rams defensive end Robert Quinn, after his team blew a 10-0 lead to the the Dolphins and gave up two long scoring drives to lose 14-10.
View: https://twitter.com/Edwerderespn/status/800530950895476736
“Uneven” is about the nicest word I can use to describe the 116-passing-yard debut of the first pick in the draft, Jared Goff, for the Rams on Sunday.
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On everything else …
Photo: Mark Goldman/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
“How you like me now!!!!” So there was this strange Vine (didn’t Vine die?) after Washington’s massacre of the Packers last night. It’s quarterback Kirk Cousins, following one of the best games of his life (21 of 30, 375 yards, three touchdowns, no picks, 145.8 rating), being approached by GM Scot McCloughan, captured by a CSN Mid-Atlantic camera and microphone. “How you like me now!!! How you like me now!!!” Cousins screams, while McCloughan attempts to hug him. Cousins doesn’t return the hug.
McCloughan says, “Good job. Good stuff, man,” and they slap hands, and a glaring Cousins then runs his hand over McCloughan’s head. It was … a little weird. There’s never any joy on either man’s face, as you figure there might after you beat the Green Bay Packers decisively. Last year, Cousins threw for 4,166 yards, completed 70 percent of his throws, with 29 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. He was a free agent, and Washington didn’t pay him what he thought he was worth. Cousins signed a one-year, $19.95-million deal with Washington in July.
He didn’t seem particularly happy about not getting a long-term deal but stiff-upper-lipped the topic whenever asked about all summer. He told our Albert Breer in training camp, “I’m not going to take things personally,” and “Here I am. The team says they want to see another year. That’s fine.”
It didn’t seem fine after his best game of the season late Sunday night. What does it mean? Probably nothing. If Cousins harbors a grudge against his GM, he can join about 300 NFL players who do the same. But it doesn’t mean he won’t end up signing a long contract with Washington, because he’s clearly in the process of proving he deserves what the upper echelon of quarterbacks makes. McCloughan’s a smart personnel guy, working for an owner who won’t let Cousins get away. That’s how I see it.
The Panthers must be smart with Luke Kuechly. One of the saddest sights seen on a football field in 2016, or any year: Luke Kuechly sitting on the field Thursday night, crying. The apparent concussion, his second in 14 months (last year he missed three games with one), must be taken ultra-seriously. In September, I asked Kuechly on my podcast if he’d consider retiring early because of head trauma. “No, no,” Kuechly said.
“You love the game, you love everything about it. I've been playing since I was a little kid, and there is good and bad with everything you do. You have to take the good with the stuff that might not be as good. I love the game of football, and I'm going to play as long as I can.” Jenny Vrentas will take up this story more thoroughly in her Tuesday column, but for now I just say that the NFL has made it clear it intends to protect players from themselves with strict concussion guidelines that must be followed with an eager player such as Kuechly.
Ben Roethlisberger showed the way last year when he left an eight-point game in the fourth quarter at Seattle when his peripheral vision was damaged severely (temporarily, it turned out), and the Panthers have to be sure that whether Kuechly is as active as Roethlisberger in seeking help, that can’t matter in the protocol treating him.
Kuechly is such a football-aholic. Ron Rivera told me a story last week about Kuechly. Last Christmas Eve, Kuechly was in the football offices at Bank of America Stadium watching tape, alone. No other players around. Rivera told him to go home. Kuechly said he had a little more tape to watch, and since his family wasn’t coming in until later, he wanted to stay and watch.
Rivera said he was leaving for the night at 6:30, and Kuechly had better be gone then too. At 6:30, Rivera went into the room where Kuechly had been watching tape. “I put my hand up near the bulb, and it was still hot,” Rivera said. “Obviously, he’d just left.” Dedication to one’s craft is a good thing. But let’s be sure the team and the player are doing the right thing for the player.
Roman Harper showed me something the other night. Harper, a 33-year-old safety, played eight years for the Saints, then two (2014 and 2015) for Carolina, and now he’s back with the Saints in the twilight of his career. The other night the Panthers were all in blue, courtesy of the NFL’s color rush uniform design, and the Saints all in white. When Kuechly was laying on the field, then sitting up and sobbing, there were several concerned Panthers surrounding their defensive leader … and one Saint.
It was Harper, leaning in to say things to Kuechly, and showing his concern. That night Carolina defensive backs coach Steve Wilks, who is close to Harper, sent him an image of the scene, which Harper hadn’t seen, and Wilks texted him: “This is some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen.” I talked to Harper on Friday. “I went out there without my helmet, with sunflower seeds and a spit cup,” he said. “I didn’t even realize it. I just saw my friend out there, and I was so concerned. When I saw him on the ground, I had to go. It’s a special bond, our fraternity of players. Especially when you’ve played with a guy, and you think so highly of him.
Man, I love Luke. He’s a great friend of mine. I don’t care what jersey he’s wearing. I guess it was moving to some people, but I didn’t think anything of it.” Harper said he texted with Kuechly after the game, and Kuechly asked him about running back Mark Ingram, who’s been concussed during the game. “That’s Luke, worried about one of our guys,” said Harper.
So football’s under fire, the Kuechly visual will scare moms (rightfully so) and the NFL should be out waving the flag for flag football. I spent time in New Orleans last week with Drew Brees for a piece for NBC’s pregame show Thursday night, and while I was there, we got on the subject of flag football. “I feel like flag football can save football,” Brees said. Pretty strong. He coached son Baylen in flag football last season because he believes so strongly in it. In fact, Brees played flag through junior high school; he never was in a tackle football game until high school. With all the warning about the development of the brain in young people, doesn’t delaying tackle football seem smart if kids are going to play it at all?
“I feel like that is a great introductory method for a lot of kids into football,” Brees told me. “Otherwise I feel it's very easy to go in and have a bad experience early on and then not want to ever play it again. I feel like once you put the pads on there are just so many other elements to the game, and you’re at the mercy of the coach in a lot of cases too. And to be honest, I don't think enough coaches are well-versed enough in regards to the true fundamentals of the game especially when the pads go on at the youth level.”
Do not be mad at the missed PATs. It’s actually a very good thing. Kickers missed 12 extra points Sunday, which, as NBC pointed out Sunday night, is four more than they missed for the entire 2014 regular season. That’s the last year team kicked the short PATs, with the ball snapped from two-yard line. Now it’s snapped from the 15-yard line in an attempt to make the kick a more competitive play.
Basically, it’s now a 33-yard field goal. And if kickers are missing those regularly, they need to go find a new line of work. The PAT used to be an automatic play—with over 99 percent of them made in each of the last four seasons the kick was a short one. Now the percentage is around 94. At least it’s not a gimme anymore. It’s a remotely competitive play.
And five quickies. Still think the Browns will win at least one game—maybe Week 16, home, against San Diego, which will be playing out the string then …
Dirk Koetter is on his way to getting a few coach of the year votes, having the Bucs at .500 after 10 weeks, and with wins at Atlanta, at Carolina, and at Kansas City …
I can’t see Mike McCarthy being endangered in Green Bay. That’s not a panicky franchise …
If Seattle at Dallas is the NFC Championship Game on Jan. 22, there’s a good chance it’ll be a better game than the Super Bowl … It feels very much like Chuck Pagano is saving his job in Indianapolis.
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Stat of the Week
Photo: Jim Dedmon/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
The key number for Drew Brees is 107.
Drew Brees, the Saints’ 37-year-old quarterback, sometime gets 107 needles stuck in him, all over his body, preparing to play a football game. When I met with him last Tuesday at 5:45 a.m. to drive to work for an NBC video story, he told me a couple of things I never knew.
There is a recovery tool practiced by some premier athletes—in football and other sports—called Dry Needling. Last week, on Monday at the Saints’ training facility, one day after Brees played Denver and three days before he played Carolina, the Saints’ trainer put these 107 hypodermic needles in specific trigger areas where Brees felt either pain or discomfort, or in places Brees was trying to do maintenance work to stave off future trouble spots.
Sounds pretty painful, getting stuck with 107 needles. “Sometimes,” Brees said as we drove into work that morning, his words captured by NBC audio. “Some you don't [feel], some you do if it hits a tight spot. It'll shoot this kind of … we'll call them zingers … It'll shoot this like … hitting a nerve or something just shoots down your arm or your back or your leg or something like that, but it means that it's working. But I’ll do it neck, shoulders, high back, mid back, low back, glutes, IT bands, hips, sometimes hamstrings, groin, calves, foot. It’s great.”
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• Romo on signing with Dallas as an undrafted free-agent in 2003: “I actually wanted to go to Denver a little bit more, I felt like I had a better chance of making the roster. The mistake you make as a rookie free agent is you look at the starter and wonder whether you're going to play and where is that opportunity, but it is really about making the team and going in and competing with the other guys who are on the bubble. Dallas provided that opportunity.
The money … Arizona, I believe, offered the most, probably around $20,000 or 25,000, which was like being rich at that time. Denver came in and they were like 15 to 20 but they also had Mike Shanahan who I had strong respect for, and obviously the Cowboys came in … It was Mike on one side and then Bill Parcells on the other. [Dallas assistant coach] Asshole Face would call in and then eventually he passed to Jerry [Jones], so you went through the whole gamut …
Jerry is like, 'We have to get this kid, you told me he has a chance. Let's go ahead and give him the 15 or 20, we'll go to 20.' And Asshole Face literally said to him, 'Nah, we don't even need to, I've got him. We can keep it at $10,000.' So I still tell Sean to this day that he owes me $10,000. Jerry told him that right after, he goes, 'Sean, I don't know much about your coaching philosophy right now, but I do know you are a heck of a salesman and you just saved me $10,000.’”
• Romo on dealing with career setbacks: “When you have setbacks, it is the same as a play or a practice or a day that doesn't go well. It just happens and all of a sudden you get back up and some things take longer than others, but I do know that if you have the right mental makeup and frame of mind, and mental toughness, really, you're torn up, it's devastating and now you're like, I'm going to be okay, and we're going to be good, you figured out something, you've studied and you've worked and now you have this feeling that it is going to be different.
And that's how you can come back from setbacks. If you're a professional player in any sport you are going to have setbacks and we all know the saying. It is really not about setbacks, but how you mentally come back from it and if you're good and you have the mental approach the right way, man, that stuff just weirdly helps you get better and allows you to be passionate going forward to change what happened. That's happened multiple times.”
Question is: Will it happen again—and will it happen in Dallas or elsewhere?
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Things I Think I Think
1. I think these are my quick notes of analysis from Week 11:
a. Steve Smith, 37, has wrung just about every ounce of ability out of a 16-year career. On Sunday, he passed the 1,000-catch mark by snagging a ball across the middle in traffic—just perfect. He now is 13th all-time with 1,005 catches and eighth all-time with 14,448 receiving yards.
b. Best guesses for Tony Romo’s 2017 landing spot: Broncos, Bears, Jets, Cardinals—certainly not in that order, because we can’t know who will be most bullish on Romo.
c. Most fun fact of the weekend: Bears GM Ryan Pace was a senior defensive end and captain at Eastern Illinois in 1999, when Tony Romo was a freshman quarterback on half-scholarship for EIU. So now Pace will have to decide whether the guy he knew as a college benchwarmer should be in the mix for his 2017 quarterback job in Chicago.
d. There no excuse, none whatsoever, for kickers missing all these 33-yard field goals—aka “extra points.”
e. Come on: seven missed PATs before halftime of the early games Sunday, and 11 misses or blocks for the day.
f. You watch that first Baltimore drive of the day at Dallas, when the Ravens ran it down the Cowboys’ throat for a Terrance West rushing touchdown, and you see the tremendous impact all pro guard Marshal Yanda has on everything Baltimore does offensively.
g. Loved this tidbit from Charles Davis on the FOX telecast of Bills-Bengals, quoting Cincinnati defensive coordinator Paul Guenther talking about the offensively multiple Bills: “It’s like trying to defend Navy, with better athletes.”
h. I still don’t know how good the Giants are, but I do know they’ve got the kind of defense that will make them a tough out in January.
i. Arizona coach Bruce Arians will be able to stand up at the end of this season and tell the truth when he says to his coaching staff: “Men, we had a lot of faults on our team this year, and our offense was nowhere near as good as last year, but this is no BS: Special teams are the reason we’ll be home in January instead of competing for the Super Bowl.”
2. I think A.J. Green being out with a torn hamstring with six games left and the Bengals 3-6-1 basically qualifies as the end of the five-year playoff streak in Cincinnati.
3.
• Miami at home. Dolphins entered the Coliseum 5-4, and on a four-game winning streak.
• at New Orleans. Saints are 4-6 and just okay on defense, so this would qualify as “pretty easy,” except in the last two games at home, New Orleans beat Seattle and lost to Denver on that fluky two-point PAT return.
• at New England, quite possibly the best team in football.
• Atlanta at home. Falcons have a two-game lead in the AFC South and are the highest-scoring team in football.
• at Seattle, on a short-week Thursday. Now the Rams have beaten Seattle four of the last five times they’ve played, so that’s something. But I’m not sure I’d call a game at Century Link Field with a rookie quarterback starting his fifth game any word close to “easy.”
Five games. The elementary ones are at Drew Brees and against a team on a four-game winning streak. The other three are against division leaders, two on the road—the highest-scoring team in football, Tom Brady, and the division powerhouse in the loudest place in football. Man, what would a tough schedule look like? The ’85 Bears five weeks in a row?
4. I think Tyler Dunne of Bleacher Report, one of the young stars in our business, has a great story on the mysterious Aaron Rodgers. It includes these amazing details: a source said he has not spoken to his family since December 2014; Christmas gifts for Rodgers were mailed back to the family; the family was told it was not welcome in Green Bay anymore. As the source said: “He put himself on an island where he has no family. And you wonder why he did can’t do his job like he used to.” Amazing piece by Dunne.
5. I think, whether you think the personal stuff is getting in the way of football for Rodgers, these numbers are unthinkable: Pro Football Focus after 10 weeks had Rodgers as the most inaccurate quarterback in football on throws 20 yards and deeper. That is absolutely stunning for one of the best deep-ball throwers in football. And what makes this even more surprising is that Rodgers is second in the league in time taken before passing. Only Tyrod Taylor has had more time to throw than Rodgers.
6. I think this story on the logic of Mike Tomlin often going for two after touchdowns is missing one important element. And it’s the fact that if you’ve got a very good quarterback/decision-maker (which Ben Roethlisberger is) and an elusive back with great hands (which Le’Veon Bell is) and if you practice plays from the two-yard line enough (which the Steelers do), you are going to make the two-point play more than you fail. Isn’t the object of the game to score more points than the other team?
The Steelers are 15 for their last 22 tries in two-point attempts. That’s 30 points. If the Steelers kicked the PAT in each of those cases and were perfect (no lock there), they’d have scored 22 points. Bottom line: The more you do something—assuming you’ve got good players doing that something, which the Steelers absolutely do—the dumber it is NOT to do it.
7. I think, by the way, Steelers president Art Rooney II agrees with the non-venomous and intelligent folk among us: Mike Tomlin is in no danger of losing his job as Pittsburgh coach. I asked Rooney the other day what he thinks of the screams to fire Tomlin. “The simple answer is I don’t pay much attention to it,” Rooney said, “Look at Mike’s track record. We’re comfortable with that. Whatever adversity we have, we think Mike handles it extremely well.” Good for him. I will bring up four points here:
a. Entering Week 11, the Steelers had lost four in a row—the first against a team (Miami) that had won four in a row entering Sunday, and the next three against division leaders (New England, Baltimore, Dallas) with a combined 20-7 record.
b. Tomlin has been an average of four games over .500 in his nearly 10 years as Steelers coach. Chuck Noll was an average of 2.6 games over .500 in his career, Bill Cowher 4.1.
c. Changing coaches because your coach stinks is okay. Changing for the sake of a four-game losing streak … I will bring back this stat from earlier this year: Since 2000, the Patriots have had one coach, and the other three teams in the AFC East have had an average of 7.3 coaches per franchise.
d. Not saying history will repeat itself, but I remember going to Steelers training camp in the summer of 2004 and being puzzled by the fact that the Steelers were coming off a 6-10 season, with an ugly playoff loss the year before to Tennessee … and owner Dan Rooney rewarded Bill Cowher with a contract extension. Made no sense after 12 years, with such a bad taste left from the year before. Well, the Steelers went 26-6 over the next two regular seasons, and won the Super Bowl in the second year after Cowher signed the extension.
8. I think, after 11 weeks, and coming off the Cowboys facing Baltimore’s top-rated defense in football, I’m still on the Ezekiel Elliott-for-MVP train. That could change, but that’s where I am now, even after the Ravens limited Elliott to 128 scrimmage yards (which is not exactly holding a guy down). Elliott has a league-high 110.2 rushing yards per game, and 138.2 scrimmage yards per game, 1.1 touchdowns per game.
9. I think it’s worth noting that only one rookie running back in history has even won the MVP. It was called the NFL’s most outstanding player award in the fifties. In 1957, Cleveland running back Jim Brown won it. And that year, he averaged 83.1 yards from scrimmage per game. Elliott’s got him beat—so far—by 53 yards a game.
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http://mmqb.si.com/mmqb/2016/11/21/miami-dolphins-new-york-giants-nfl-week-11-peter-king
On the Dolphins, Giants and Others Nobody Saw Coming
Miami has won five straight, and so has Eli Manning and crew. A look at how those streaks were extended Sunday, plus notes on Kirk Cousins’ exuberance, Luke Kuechly, flag football’s future and the rest of Week 11
By Peter King
Flurries outside my window in New York late Sunday night. It’s beginning to look a lot like the pennant race, with quite a few teams we didn’t see coming. Such as:
• The 6-4 Dolphins, winners of five straight, preventing the Patriots from clinching the division while New England trees still have leaves. Miami has a trustworthy late-game quarterback—finally—in Ryan Tannehill.
• The 5-5 Bucs, who will be a game out of first place in the NFC South on Thanksgiving.
• The best Dallas team in eons is still hearing footsteps from the Giants (7-3) and 6-3-1 Washington, which is one explosive team.
• The two 6-4 teams atop the NFC North—Detroit and Minnesota. They have a two-game lead on the moribund Packers.
• Oakland (7-2), which would earn sole possession of the penthouse in the AFC West with a win over Houston tonight in Mexico City.
In all, 21 teams are within two games of first place in the eight division races, with six regular-season weeks left. Cool thing: Look at Thanksgiving. Six teams, none below .500, all among the 21 I mentioned. The slate:
12:30 p.m. ET (CBS): Minnesota (6-4) at Detroit (6-4). For first place in the NFC North.
3:30 p.m. ET (FOX): Washington (6-3-1) at Dallas (9-1). “We want Dallas!f” the Washington crowd yelled late Sunday night in the rout of Green Bay. You got ’em.
8:30 p.m. ET (NBC): Pittsburgh (5-5) at Indianapolis (5-5). Ben Roethlisberger at Andrew Luck. A nightcap with 70-point potential.
Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. This column’s going to be heavy on the teams we didn’t see coming, and disparate stories I don’t often get to tell.
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On Ryan Tannehill and the Dolphins
Photo: Sean M. Haffey/Getty Images
The best defense in football over the last month (Los Angeles’) was throttling the Dolphins 10-0 with seven minutes left at the Coliseum. For some reason—confidence? stupidity?—quarterback Ryan Tannehill looked at the other 10 guys in the huddle before the first snap and said, “Take a deep breath, everybody. We’re gonna win this game.”
In the next six minutes, Tannehill, whose cross to bear has been some awful late-game performances in his four-and-a-half seasons in Miami, hit 12 of 13 throws for 124 yards and two touchdowns. It’s the best he’s ever been, under the circumstances, late in a game since entering the league.
It took him just under three minutes to go 77 yards on the first drive, then 95 seconds to go 75 yards and throw a gorgeous laser to a sliding DeVante Parker, in the only place he could have caught the ball, low and outside, near the side of the end zone. A perfect throw, capping two perfect drives.
Since getting the coaching job, Adam Gase has trusted Tannehill, and Tannehill has bought in. (Tannehill in their first meeting last winter: “What do you want me to do, coach?”) Gase has responded in kind. Tannehill helps make out the game plan by telling Gase what he likes and what he doesn’t; Gase gives Tannehill authority to change calls on the field without reservation.
“I’m really excited where I’m at in this offense,” Tannehill said, sitting on the team bus after the game. It shows: In comeback wins over Buffalo, San Diego and the Rams in this streak, Tannehill had thrown for 264 yards in the last eight minutes of the three fourth quarters, with no turnovers.
“To win ball games in the fourth quarter,” Tannehill said, “you’ve got to play with confidence and a full knowledge of the offense. And you better be able to make some big plays.” Finally, Tannehill is doing that, and it looks like the Dolphins’ quarterback of the future is also their quarterback of the present. Won’t it be interesting if, on Jan. 1, in the last game of the season, the New England-at-Miami game has significance in a division that rarely is competitive in Week 17?
I think my eyebrows got raised when I heard Marshall Faulk on the NFL Network pregame show Sunday talking about the early path for new Rams quarterback Jared Goff. “They’ve got a pretty easy schedule going forward,” Faulk said. Hmmm. Goff’s first five games, assuming he stays in the lineup:
“Those last six minutes are going to haunt us.”
—Rams defensive end Robert Quinn, after his team blew a 10-0 lead to the the Dolphins and gave up two long scoring drives to lose 14-10.
View: https://twitter.com/Edwerderespn/status/800530950895476736
“Uneven” is about the nicest word I can use to describe the 116-passing-yard debut of the first pick in the draft, Jared Goff, for the Rams on Sunday.
* * *
On everything else …
Photo: Mark Goldman/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
“How you like me now!!!!” So there was this strange Vine (didn’t Vine die?) after Washington’s massacre of the Packers last night. It’s quarterback Kirk Cousins, following one of the best games of his life (21 of 30, 375 yards, three touchdowns, no picks, 145.8 rating), being approached by GM Scot McCloughan, captured by a CSN Mid-Atlantic camera and microphone. “How you like me now!!! How you like me now!!!” Cousins screams, while McCloughan attempts to hug him. Cousins doesn’t return the hug.
McCloughan says, “Good job. Good stuff, man,” and they slap hands, and a glaring Cousins then runs his hand over McCloughan’s head. It was … a little weird. There’s never any joy on either man’s face, as you figure there might after you beat the Green Bay Packers decisively. Last year, Cousins threw for 4,166 yards, completed 70 percent of his throws, with 29 touchdowns and 11 interceptions. He was a free agent, and Washington didn’t pay him what he thought he was worth. Cousins signed a one-year, $19.95-million deal with Washington in July.
He didn’t seem particularly happy about not getting a long-term deal but stiff-upper-lipped the topic whenever asked about all summer. He told our Albert Breer in training camp, “I’m not going to take things personally,” and “Here I am. The team says they want to see another year. That’s fine.”
It didn’t seem fine after his best game of the season late Sunday night. What does it mean? Probably nothing. If Cousins harbors a grudge against his GM, he can join about 300 NFL players who do the same. But it doesn’t mean he won’t end up signing a long contract with Washington, because he’s clearly in the process of proving he deserves what the upper echelon of quarterbacks makes. McCloughan’s a smart personnel guy, working for an owner who won’t let Cousins get away. That’s how I see it.
The Panthers must be smart with Luke Kuechly. One of the saddest sights seen on a football field in 2016, or any year: Luke Kuechly sitting on the field Thursday night, crying. The apparent concussion, his second in 14 months (last year he missed three games with one), must be taken ultra-seriously. In September, I asked Kuechly on my podcast if he’d consider retiring early because of head trauma. “No, no,” Kuechly said.
“You love the game, you love everything about it. I've been playing since I was a little kid, and there is good and bad with everything you do. You have to take the good with the stuff that might not be as good. I love the game of football, and I'm going to play as long as I can.” Jenny Vrentas will take up this story more thoroughly in her Tuesday column, but for now I just say that the NFL has made it clear it intends to protect players from themselves with strict concussion guidelines that must be followed with an eager player such as Kuechly.
Ben Roethlisberger showed the way last year when he left an eight-point game in the fourth quarter at Seattle when his peripheral vision was damaged severely (temporarily, it turned out), and the Panthers have to be sure that whether Kuechly is as active as Roethlisberger in seeking help, that can’t matter in the protocol treating him.
Kuechly is such a football-aholic. Ron Rivera told me a story last week about Kuechly. Last Christmas Eve, Kuechly was in the football offices at Bank of America Stadium watching tape, alone. No other players around. Rivera told him to go home. Kuechly said he had a little more tape to watch, and since his family wasn’t coming in until later, he wanted to stay and watch.
Rivera said he was leaving for the night at 6:30, and Kuechly had better be gone then too. At 6:30, Rivera went into the room where Kuechly had been watching tape. “I put my hand up near the bulb, and it was still hot,” Rivera said. “Obviously, he’d just left.” Dedication to one’s craft is a good thing. But let’s be sure the team and the player are doing the right thing for the player.
Roman Harper showed me something the other night. Harper, a 33-year-old safety, played eight years for the Saints, then two (2014 and 2015) for Carolina, and now he’s back with the Saints in the twilight of his career. The other night the Panthers were all in blue, courtesy of the NFL’s color rush uniform design, and the Saints all in white. When Kuechly was laying on the field, then sitting up and sobbing, there were several concerned Panthers surrounding their defensive leader … and one Saint.
It was Harper, leaning in to say things to Kuechly, and showing his concern. That night Carolina defensive backs coach Steve Wilks, who is close to Harper, sent him an image of the scene, which Harper hadn’t seen, and Wilks texted him: “This is some of the best stuff I’ve ever seen.” I talked to Harper on Friday. “I went out there without my helmet, with sunflower seeds and a spit cup,” he said. “I didn’t even realize it. I just saw my friend out there, and I was so concerned. When I saw him on the ground, I had to go. It’s a special bond, our fraternity of players. Especially when you’ve played with a guy, and you think so highly of him.
Man, I love Luke. He’s a great friend of mine. I don’t care what jersey he’s wearing. I guess it was moving to some people, but I didn’t think anything of it.” Harper said he texted with Kuechly after the game, and Kuechly asked him about running back Mark Ingram, who’s been concussed during the game. “That’s Luke, worried about one of our guys,” said Harper.
So football’s under fire, the Kuechly visual will scare moms (rightfully so) and the NFL should be out waving the flag for flag football. I spent time in New Orleans last week with Drew Brees for a piece for NBC’s pregame show Thursday night, and while I was there, we got on the subject of flag football. “I feel like flag football can save football,” Brees said. Pretty strong. He coached son Baylen in flag football last season because he believes so strongly in it. In fact, Brees played flag through junior high school; he never was in a tackle football game until high school. With all the warning about the development of the brain in young people, doesn’t delaying tackle football seem smart if kids are going to play it at all?
“I feel like that is a great introductory method for a lot of kids into football,” Brees told me. “Otherwise I feel it's very easy to go in and have a bad experience early on and then not want to ever play it again. I feel like once you put the pads on there are just so many other elements to the game, and you’re at the mercy of the coach in a lot of cases too. And to be honest, I don't think enough coaches are well-versed enough in regards to the true fundamentals of the game especially when the pads go on at the youth level.”
Do not be mad at the missed PATs. It’s actually a very good thing. Kickers missed 12 extra points Sunday, which, as NBC pointed out Sunday night, is four more than they missed for the entire 2014 regular season. That’s the last year team kicked the short PATs, with the ball snapped from two-yard line. Now it’s snapped from the 15-yard line in an attempt to make the kick a more competitive play.
Basically, it’s now a 33-yard field goal. And if kickers are missing those regularly, they need to go find a new line of work. The PAT used to be an automatic play—with over 99 percent of them made in each of the last four seasons the kick was a short one. Now the percentage is around 94. At least it’s not a gimme anymore. It’s a remotely competitive play.
And five quickies. Still think the Browns will win at least one game—maybe Week 16, home, against San Diego, which will be playing out the string then …
Dirk Koetter is on his way to getting a few coach of the year votes, having the Bucs at .500 after 10 weeks, and with wins at Atlanta, at Carolina, and at Kansas City …
I can’t see Mike McCarthy being endangered in Green Bay. That’s not a panicky franchise …
If Seattle at Dallas is the NFC Championship Game on Jan. 22, there’s a good chance it’ll be a better game than the Super Bowl … It feels very much like Chuck Pagano is saving his job in Indianapolis.
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Stat of the Week
Photo: Jim Dedmon/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images
The key number for Drew Brees is 107.
Drew Brees, the Saints’ 37-year-old quarterback, sometime gets 107 needles stuck in him, all over his body, preparing to play a football game. When I met with him last Tuesday at 5:45 a.m. to drive to work for an NBC video story, he told me a couple of things I never knew.
There is a recovery tool practiced by some premier athletes—in football and other sports—called Dry Needling. Last week, on Monday at the Saints’ training facility, one day after Brees played Denver and three days before he played Carolina, the Saints’ trainer put these 107 hypodermic needles in specific trigger areas where Brees felt either pain or discomfort, or in places Brees was trying to do maintenance work to stave off future trouble spots.
Sounds pretty painful, getting stuck with 107 needles. “Sometimes,” Brees said as we drove into work that morning, his words captured by NBC audio. “Some you don't [feel], some you do if it hits a tight spot. It'll shoot this kind of … we'll call them zingers … It'll shoot this like … hitting a nerve or something just shoots down your arm or your back or your leg or something like that, but it means that it's working. But I’ll do it neck, shoulders, high back, mid back, low back, glutes, IT bands, hips, sometimes hamstrings, groin, calves, foot. It’s great.”
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• Romo on signing with Dallas as an undrafted free-agent in 2003: “I actually wanted to go to Denver a little bit more, I felt like I had a better chance of making the roster. The mistake you make as a rookie free agent is you look at the starter and wonder whether you're going to play and where is that opportunity, but it is really about making the team and going in and competing with the other guys who are on the bubble. Dallas provided that opportunity.
The money … Arizona, I believe, offered the most, probably around $20,000 or 25,000, which was like being rich at that time. Denver came in and they were like 15 to 20 but they also had Mike Shanahan who I had strong respect for, and obviously the Cowboys came in … It was Mike on one side and then Bill Parcells on the other. [Dallas assistant coach] Asshole Face would call in and then eventually he passed to Jerry [Jones], so you went through the whole gamut …
Jerry is like, 'We have to get this kid, you told me he has a chance. Let's go ahead and give him the 15 or 20, we'll go to 20.' And Asshole Face literally said to him, 'Nah, we don't even need to, I've got him. We can keep it at $10,000.' So I still tell Sean to this day that he owes me $10,000. Jerry told him that right after, he goes, 'Sean, I don't know much about your coaching philosophy right now, but I do know you are a heck of a salesman and you just saved me $10,000.’”
• Romo on dealing with career setbacks: “When you have setbacks, it is the same as a play or a practice or a day that doesn't go well. It just happens and all of a sudden you get back up and some things take longer than others, but I do know that if you have the right mental makeup and frame of mind, and mental toughness, really, you're torn up, it's devastating and now you're like, I'm going to be okay, and we're going to be good, you figured out something, you've studied and you've worked and now you have this feeling that it is going to be different.
And that's how you can come back from setbacks. If you're a professional player in any sport you are going to have setbacks and we all know the saying. It is really not about setbacks, but how you mentally come back from it and if you're good and you have the mental approach the right way, man, that stuff just weirdly helps you get better and allows you to be passionate going forward to change what happened. That's happened multiple times.”
Question is: Will it happen again—and will it happen in Dallas or elsewhere?
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Things I Think I Think
1. I think these are my quick notes of analysis from Week 11:
a. Steve Smith, 37, has wrung just about every ounce of ability out of a 16-year career. On Sunday, he passed the 1,000-catch mark by snagging a ball across the middle in traffic—just perfect. He now is 13th all-time with 1,005 catches and eighth all-time with 14,448 receiving yards.
b. Best guesses for Tony Romo’s 2017 landing spot: Broncos, Bears, Jets, Cardinals—certainly not in that order, because we can’t know who will be most bullish on Romo.
c. Most fun fact of the weekend: Bears GM Ryan Pace was a senior defensive end and captain at Eastern Illinois in 1999, when Tony Romo was a freshman quarterback on half-scholarship for EIU. So now Pace will have to decide whether the guy he knew as a college benchwarmer should be in the mix for his 2017 quarterback job in Chicago.
d. There no excuse, none whatsoever, for kickers missing all these 33-yard field goals—aka “extra points.”
e. Come on: seven missed PATs before halftime of the early games Sunday, and 11 misses or blocks for the day.
f. You watch that first Baltimore drive of the day at Dallas, when the Ravens ran it down the Cowboys’ throat for a Terrance West rushing touchdown, and you see the tremendous impact all pro guard Marshal Yanda has on everything Baltimore does offensively.
g. Loved this tidbit from Charles Davis on the FOX telecast of Bills-Bengals, quoting Cincinnati defensive coordinator Paul Guenther talking about the offensively multiple Bills: “It’s like trying to defend Navy, with better athletes.”
h. I still don’t know how good the Giants are, but I do know they’ve got the kind of defense that will make them a tough out in January.
i. Arizona coach Bruce Arians will be able to stand up at the end of this season and tell the truth when he says to his coaching staff: “Men, we had a lot of faults on our team this year, and our offense was nowhere near as good as last year, but this is no BS: Special teams are the reason we’ll be home in January instead of competing for the Super Bowl.”
2. I think A.J. Green being out with a torn hamstring with six games left and the Bengals 3-6-1 basically qualifies as the end of the five-year playoff streak in Cincinnati.
3.
• Miami at home. Dolphins entered the Coliseum 5-4, and on a four-game winning streak.
• at New Orleans. Saints are 4-6 and just okay on defense, so this would qualify as “pretty easy,” except in the last two games at home, New Orleans beat Seattle and lost to Denver on that fluky two-point PAT return.
• at New England, quite possibly the best team in football.
• Atlanta at home. Falcons have a two-game lead in the AFC South and are the highest-scoring team in football.
• at Seattle, on a short-week Thursday. Now the Rams have beaten Seattle four of the last five times they’ve played, so that’s something. But I’m not sure I’d call a game at Century Link Field with a rookie quarterback starting his fifth game any word close to “easy.”
Five games. The elementary ones are at Drew Brees and against a team on a four-game winning streak. The other three are against division leaders, two on the road—the highest-scoring team in football, Tom Brady, and the division powerhouse in the loudest place in football. Man, what would a tough schedule look like? The ’85 Bears five weeks in a row?
4. I think Tyler Dunne of Bleacher Report, one of the young stars in our business, has a great story on the mysterious Aaron Rodgers. It includes these amazing details: a source said he has not spoken to his family since December 2014; Christmas gifts for Rodgers were mailed back to the family; the family was told it was not welcome in Green Bay anymore. As the source said: “He put himself on an island where he has no family. And you wonder why he did can’t do his job like he used to.” Amazing piece by Dunne.
5. I think, whether you think the personal stuff is getting in the way of football for Rodgers, these numbers are unthinkable: Pro Football Focus after 10 weeks had Rodgers as the most inaccurate quarterback in football on throws 20 yards and deeper. That is absolutely stunning for one of the best deep-ball throwers in football. And what makes this even more surprising is that Rodgers is second in the league in time taken before passing. Only Tyrod Taylor has had more time to throw than Rodgers.
6. I think this story on the logic of Mike Tomlin often going for two after touchdowns is missing one important element. And it’s the fact that if you’ve got a very good quarterback/decision-maker (which Ben Roethlisberger is) and an elusive back with great hands (which Le’Veon Bell is) and if you practice plays from the two-yard line enough (which the Steelers do), you are going to make the two-point play more than you fail. Isn’t the object of the game to score more points than the other team?
The Steelers are 15 for their last 22 tries in two-point attempts. That’s 30 points. If the Steelers kicked the PAT in each of those cases and were perfect (no lock there), they’d have scored 22 points. Bottom line: The more you do something—assuming you’ve got good players doing that something, which the Steelers absolutely do—the dumber it is NOT to do it.
7. I think, by the way, Steelers president Art Rooney II agrees with the non-venomous and intelligent folk among us: Mike Tomlin is in no danger of losing his job as Pittsburgh coach. I asked Rooney the other day what he thinks of the screams to fire Tomlin. “The simple answer is I don’t pay much attention to it,” Rooney said, “Look at Mike’s track record. We’re comfortable with that. Whatever adversity we have, we think Mike handles it extremely well.” Good for him. I will bring up four points here:
a. Entering Week 11, the Steelers had lost four in a row—the first against a team (Miami) that had won four in a row entering Sunday, and the next three against division leaders (New England, Baltimore, Dallas) with a combined 20-7 record.
b. Tomlin has been an average of four games over .500 in his nearly 10 years as Steelers coach. Chuck Noll was an average of 2.6 games over .500 in his career, Bill Cowher 4.1.
c. Changing coaches because your coach stinks is okay. Changing for the sake of a four-game losing streak … I will bring back this stat from earlier this year: Since 2000, the Patriots have had one coach, and the other three teams in the AFC East have had an average of 7.3 coaches per franchise.
d. Not saying history will repeat itself, but I remember going to Steelers training camp in the summer of 2004 and being puzzled by the fact that the Steelers were coming off a 6-10 season, with an ugly playoff loss the year before to Tennessee … and owner Dan Rooney rewarded Bill Cowher with a contract extension. Made no sense after 12 years, with such a bad taste left from the year before. Well, the Steelers went 26-6 over the next two regular seasons, and won the Super Bowl in the second year after Cowher signed the extension.
8. I think, after 11 weeks, and coming off the Cowboys facing Baltimore’s top-rated defense in football, I’m still on the Ezekiel Elliott-for-MVP train. That could change, but that’s where I am now, even after the Ravens limited Elliott to 128 scrimmage yards (which is not exactly holding a guy down). Elliott has a league-high 110.2 rushing yards per game, and 138.2 scrimmage yards per game, 1.1 touchdowns per game.
9. I think it’s worth noting that only one rookie running back in history has even won the MVP. It was called the NFL’s most outstanding player award in the fifties. In 1957, Cleveland running back Jim Brown won it. And that year, he averaged 83.1 yards from scrimmage per game. Elliott’s got him beat—so far—by 53 yards a game.
