The 2022 NFL season has not gone off as planned. Unless you’re the Buffalo Bills.
Josh Allen’s team has spent the first two weeks of the season dismantling squads that made the playoffs last winter, torching them through the air and brutalizing them on defense. Other than that, however, things have been … a little weird.
Tua Tagovailoa and Carson Wentz currently make up half the players tied for the league lead in touchdown passes. The Cincinnati Bengals are 0-2. The New York Giants are 2-0. The best quarterback the Dallas Cowboys have inserted in their lineup is Cooper Rush.
That’s set several paths in motion that will reach their terminus over the next five months. Some will end at the top of the 2023 NFL Draft. Two will lead to the Super Bowl. What can we believe in and what’s just an early season smokescreen?
1
2022 is the backdrop for a very real Super Bowl hangover
We’ve only got two weeks of data, but things don’t look great for either the Los Angeles Rams or Cincinnati Bengals. The two teams have one win between them, and it was a hang-onto-your-butts situation in which the Rams nearly coughed up a 28-3 lead to the Atlanta Falcons. The two starting quarterbacks the Bengals have lost to are Mitchell Trubisky and Cooper Rush.
Yeesh.
Let’s start with Los Angeles, where the Rams forced three first half turnovers in Week 1 and still lost by 21. That came against the Bills so, fine, whatever. Then came Sunday’s collapse against the Falcons, a team so disinterested in contending this fall they signed Marcus Mariota to be starting QB. Here’s how LA reacted after taking a 25-point lead into the third quarter and pushing its win expectancy to 99.7 percent:
Bad! The Rams eventually held on for the win, but this is concerning. Matthew Stafford has thrown five interceptions in two games. Cam Akers is averaging 2.4 yards per carry. The defense has allowed 58 points in two games.
And yet they still have a better record than the Bengals, who spent the offseason upgrading their roster and still have yet to win a game. Joe Burrow has been sacked 13 times in two games, or roughly one in every eight passing plays. It’s a very small sample size, but advanced stats point the two turnover-prone QBs from Super Bowl 56 as negative influences on their offense so far:
Buy or sell? Buy on the Bengals. Sell, a little, on the Rams.
The Bengals are 0-2 after botching winnable games. Showdowns against the Bills, Chiefs, Buccaneers and (we’ll get to them) Dolphins still loom. The fatal flaw from last year’s team remains fatal and Zac Taylor is back to looking overmatched as a head coach.
The Rams at least have a win on the books, but it’s hard to get too excited about this start. Stafford looks worse than he did in 2021, but he recovered from a late-season tailspin to win a Super Bowl. Since the NFC is so much weaker than the AFC, LA has more room for a rebound.
2
The Cowboys don't need Dak Prescott because it's COOPER RUSH SEASON, BABY
Dallas scored three points in its season opener vs. the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. None after its opening drive. The Cowboys entered Week 2 as seven-point underdogs to the defending AFC champions and without starting quarterback Dak Prescott.
This didn’t matter. They had Cooper Rush.
Rush’s value over the past five seasons has mostly been inherent only to Dallas management. The longtime backup and seldom-used passer was released on cut-down day and brought back to the practice squad, allowing every other team in the league a chance to sign him. Instead, he was promoted to the active roster, came in relief of Prescott in Week 1 and made his second career start in Week 2.
Rush was aggressively “not bad” in leading the Cowboys to their first win, though a pass rush that got to the aforementioned Burrow six times and hit him nine more was equally valuable. With 51 seconds left in a tie game — and one time out to pair with Mike McCarthy’s eternally chaotic clock management — Rush completed three straight passes to set up a game-winning field goal and give Dallas the hope it can survive its early Dak-less stretch.
Buy or sell? Sell.
Rush was everything the Cowboys hoped he could be Sunday, avoiding turnovers and only taking one sack on the afternoon. But Week 2’s win was as much a product of Cincinnati’s lack of cohesion as anything else. Rush was effectively Teddy Bridgewater vs. the Bengals, which isn’t a bad formula for winning games. After failing to extend his lead throughout the first 29 minutes of the second half, however, he suggested his ceiling as a QB is “boringly average until game tape catches up with him.”
3
Tua Tagovailoa, legitimate MVP candidate
Running with “candidate” gives some latitude here. Derek Carr was an MVP candidate. Carson Wentz and Jared Goff were both MVP candidates toward the end of the 2010s. Lead a surprising team to the playoffs and you’ll wind up on a three-to-five name shortlist for the league’s biggest award (which pretty much exclusively goes to quarterbacks at this point).
That appears to be the baseline of Tagovailoa’s 2022, but he has the chops to rise even higher. On Sunday he did something no Miami Dolphin has done since Dan Marino; he threw six touchdown passes. This, plus his 469 passing yards, puts him in exclusive company. Per Stathead, only 10 players in league history have ever thrown for 450-plus yards with at least six touchdowns in a single game.
This shine through a small sample size has put him amongst elite company. After two weeks, he trails only Josh Allen and Patrick Mahomes when it comes to expected points added (EPA) per play:
There’s little in Tagovailoa’s NFL history that suggests he can keep this up. His performances in Weeks 1 and 2 were the third- and second-most efficient starts of his career by adjusted yards per attempt. His current touchdown rate is more than double his career high. He’s averaging 165 more passing yards per game than in either of his first two years as a pro.
Regression is coming. Will Tagovailoa rise above it?
Buy or sell? Buy.
Tagovailoa he doesn’t have to be that good to be an MVP candidate. He just needs to keep the Dolphins on track for a playoff bid in a hyper-competitive AFC and spar with Josh Allen in the East. This is a narrative award and few players have a better story than “overcame injury and doubt to lift his revamped offense and first year head coach to Miami’s first playoff win since … DAVE WANNSTADT WAS HEAD COACH ARE YOU KIDDING ME???”
4
Lamar Jackson's going to get a guaranteed contract
Jackson didn’t sign a contract extension with the Baltimore Ravens that reportedly would have given him $40 million less in guaranteed money than Kyler Murray received this summer. Instead, he opted to bet on himself in the final year of his rookie deal in hopes Ravens management would give him a Deshaun Watson-style, fully guaranteed contract.
He provided plenty of evidence he’s worth an unheard-of (outside of Cleveland’s swirling whirlpool of dysfunction) contract to start 2022. Through two weeks, Jackson is on pace for 4,500 passing yards, 51 touchdowns and nine interceptions. He’s balanced that off with a 1,000-yard, nine touchdown pace on the ground. This is, what most NFL historians would consider, very good.
Jackson wasn’t the reason Baltimore lost in Week 2. He was the reason the Ravens led 35-14 heading into the fourth quarter. He’d thrown for 228 yards and had as many touchdown passes (three) as incompletions through three quarters. He did this with a receiving corps so depleted he’d only targeted four different players — one of whom was a fourth-round rookie who wasn’t even the first tight end his club drafted in 2022.
He also did this, which, yep that’s Lamar Jackson all right.
LAMARVELOUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
TUNE IN ON CBS! pic.twitter.com/nCyyHMqU0G
— Baltimore Ravens (@Ravens) September 18, 2022
Jackson led a scoring drive that gave his team a 38-35 lead with 2:24 to play, only to have his once-proud defense collapse into cinders against Tagovailoa’s sudden brilliance. This could be the story of Baltimore’s 2022. If it happens, you can’t blame the quarterback.
Buy or sell? Buy, but …
It’s going to be a while before he gets there. The Ravens aren’t interested in meeting his guaranteed contract demand and, after offering him considerably less up-front cash than Kyler Murray, don’t seem especially interested in committing an upper crust QB deal to him at all.
Baltimore has two more years after 2022 to think it over and extend its bargaining window by franchise tagging Jackson in 2023 and 2024. After that, we get into the nebulous, Kirk-Cousins-in-Minnesota middle ground that’s never been tread by a former MVP before. If Jackson wants a fully guaranteed deal and can keep this up through 2024, he’ll get there.
5
The Detroit Lions are going to the playoffs
Detroit has one of the most explosive offenses in the NFL. After two games, the Lions are averaging more 29.5 points per contest. They’re doing all this despite an entirely mid performance from Jared Goff at quarterback.
This team has been three hours of watching a thunderstorm descend on the plains each week. Amon-Ra St. Brown and D’Andre Swift have made plays at an absurd rate. Aidan Hutchinson, after a low-key NFL debut, rose up to sack Carson Wentz three times in Week 2 while adding three quarterback hits and two tackles for loss. Dan Campbell has his guys fired up and doing stuff like this on a regular basis:
The rest of the NFC is a mess. Only three teams are 2-0 and one is the New York Giants. Detroit has a wonderful opportunity to steal a playoff bid and prove its long rebuild is way ahead of schedule.
Buy or sell? Sell, but while being very sad about it.
The Lions are great to watch. Dan Campbell has a bunch of young players looking to prove themselves and veterans other teams didn’t want fully bought into his specific brand of football insanity. It’s wonderful and exciting and the exact opposite of the Matt Patricia experience in Michigan.
But this defense still stinks. Hutchinson is only one man, and while he was a wrecking ball in Week 2 the Commanders still scored 27 second half points while allowing Wentz to throw for 337 yards and three touchdowns. The Eagles scored 38 points in two quarters in Week 1 while averaging 45 yards per drive.
When the dam bursts in Detroit this offense is forced to keep the team afloat. A cache of skill players and a brilliant offensive line is moderately buoyant. Jared Goff, however, may be an anchor waiting to drop. Despite his solid numbers he hasn’t made the big downfield throws required to lead this offense into a new era (nine throws 20+ yards beyond the line of scrimmage, two completions).
