What a fun Sunday, capped by a superdramatic finish to Bills-Jets …
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Just because we’re in the age of supercharged offenses, and hold-on-to-your-butts defenses, doesn’t mean we won’t get Sundays like this one. And in Week 6, the NFL’s two unbeatens, a pair of incredibly complete teams, each fell for the first time and fell for the first time at the hands of teams driven by fast, aggressive, playmaking defenses.
Maybe you didn’t know when the season started. But you should know now—both the Jets and Browns are really good on that side of the ball.
We can start here with the Jets, and their captain, C.J. Mosley, who arrived in New Jersey four years ago looking to build something new, after being tasked at his past two football stops, at Alabama and with the Ravens, with maintaining a proud defensive tradition. And, no, no one is saying the Jets’ defense is at that level of prestige. What it is, though, is drawing closer to establishing its own standard under third-year coach Robert Saleh, and Sunday’s spine-tingling win over the 5–0 Eagles was a very big step in cementing that.
“Today was our big test,” Mosley told me on his drive home Sunday. “When we played against Kansas City, we had a great three quarters. We didn’t start too well, but we told ourselves coming in, Let’s make sure that we set an example. And we say we want to be a championship team, want to be a championship defense, want to be the best defense. But you gotta go out there and beat the best and play against the best, and we did and we stood toe-to-toe with them.
“Nobody flinched. We handled the new plays that they ran. The plays that they did get, we didn’t get too high or too low. And every time we went out on the field, we’re going out there with the expectation to dominate.”
Before the season, the Jets’ defense playing this well would’ve been seen as a bonus.
Six weeks in, for post–Aaron Rodgers New York, it’s become essential. And, increasingly, these Jets look like they’re up for the task—they nearly were against Kansas City, as Mosley said, and they have been against the Broncos and now the Eagles, too. In the last of those games, on Sunday at home against the defending NFC champions, and through a 20–14 win, that meant making three massive stops in the fourth quarter, and putting the only touchdown of the second half on a silver platter for the offense.
In others, at the wire, they’d have to do it themselves. Which is exactly how Mosley figures, as the leader of the pack, they should approach it, anyway.
“Yeah, anytime the defense is out there, especially to close out the game, we want to get it done,” he says. “Or we want to get the ball to the offense, so they can go down to win the game for us.”
Effectively, the Jets’ defense did both when it mattered most.
Entering the fourth quarter down 14–12, and with Philly driving, the first big play came. On a first-and-10 from the Jets’ 42, Jermaine Johnson came screaming off the edge, got to Jalen Hurts and hit his arm, sending the ball skyward and easy for Bryce Hall, one of the heroes of the Denver win, to collect. The New York offense then went three-and-out, and the Eagles drove again, going all the way from their own 18 to third-and-6 from the Jets’ 15. There, it was Bryce Huff coming through with a sack that pushed the Eagles back four yards and helped force a Jake Elliott miss on a 37-yard field goal try (it bent right at the end).
All of which, after another Jet punt, set up the biggest play of all—a clean Tony Adams pick of Hurts at midfield, which was returned 45 yards to the Eagles’ 8. On the next play, with 1:50 left, the Eagles let Breece Hall score untouched because it was the only way they’d get the ball back. The two-pointer made it 20–14.
“That was another example of everybody doing their job,” Mosley says. “It was a great disguise from the back end, great disguise up front, show one thing and pop into the zone, and he made a great play, almost took it to the house. And man, it was just a fun game, just to be in that situation and being in that environment against one of the best teams in the league with a great quarterback. And the guys, like I said, nobody flinched.”
The end result, really, is the Jets’ defense buying time for Zach Wilson to get comfortable, the offensive line time to work out its issues, and—maybe, just maybe—Rodgers time to make a miracle comeback. In case you missed it, the future Hall of Famer was at MetLife to take all this in (“I missed that mustache,” Mosley jokes), and he was there without crutches, which only led to more speculation of what might happen three months or so from now.
“Anything is possible with this guy, apparently,” Mosley says. “So we got to keep doing our job. It’s another thing where we got to control what we can control. Try to play for him to come back. We have to keep our same mentality. I think the big message today when people would ask about Aaron and how do you feel about the record and everything, it was, If he was still playing, what would our goals be compared to him not playing right now? We have to have the same mindset as if he was our starting quarterback, especially on the defensive side.
“We just have to keep the same mentality. Aaron’s, he’s not on the field but he’s still on our team. He’s still in our heart.”
Of course, to get him back on their field, the Jets’ defensive guys will have to do more than hold up their end of the original bargain. Thus far, that’s just what they’ve done.
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Jim Schwartz may well prove to be the best assistant coach hire of the offseason. To really give you a snapshot of what Schwartz’s Cleveland defense is doing, I figured it’d be instructive to look at what the 49ers did last week against a more-hyped Cowboys unit, and compare it to how the Browns played San Francisco on Sunday. So here you go …
• The Niners scored 42 points on Dallas and 17 on Cleveland.
• The Niners rolled up 421 yards on the Cowboys and 215 against the Browns.
• The Niners turned it over once against Dallas and three times in Cleveland.
• The Niners had 25 first downs against the Cowboys and 15 against the Browns.
• Brock Purdy’s passer rating was 144.4 against Dallas and 55.3 against Cleveland.
Now, there were some mitigating factors. The 49ers were at home against the Cowboys. The conditions were pretty crappy in Cleveland. And Christian McCaffrey and Deebo Samuel got hurt in-game, which is not a small detail.
That said, this is a Cleveland defense no one was talking about before the year, and one that had to lift up an offense that turned to PJ Walker on the fly with Deshaun Watson still hurt, and one that ultimately responded with two crucial three-and-outs, and another stop that made kicker Jake Moody’s game-winning attempt just long enough to sail wide right in the Browns’ stunning 19–17 win.
“Defense played phenomenally,” Walker told me from the locker room postgame, after performing pretty admirably himself. “They played lights out, man. It’s week after week. And for us as a team, we gotta rally around those guys and play for them as well, the same way they played for us. … They’re doing a great job.”
And they have been all year.
Consider this: Through five weeks, the Browns have allowed just 1,002 yards. That’s the third fewest by any team (behind only the 1971 Colts and ’70 Vikings) through five games since the merger. They’ve held two of their five opponents to a single field goal. In another game, a 26–22 loss to the Steelers in Week 2, Pittsburgh scored twice on defense, and, outside of a 71-yard touchdown pass from Kenny Pickett to George Pickens, the Steelers had just 184 yards and nine first downs. That leaves a 28–3 loss to the Ravens as the lone hiccup. And even in that one, two of the four touchdowns Cleveland allowed were scored on short fields because of the offense’s turnovers, and the Browns still held Baltimore under 300 yards.
Sunday, San Francisco got to the end zone twice. One touchdown was set up by an interception that put the Niners on the Browns’ 8. The other was a five-play, 84-yard drive to open the game.
So yeah, the story of Walker’s a good one, and we’ll bring you more on him on the site Monday. But the reason the Browns are 3–2 is the same one that explains the Jets’ staying alive without Rodgers.
It’s the defense—and it’s the guy running a simplified scheme predicated on bringing the talent out in stars by getting monsters like Myles Garrett and Denzel Ward to play fast—who deserves a lot of the credit for it.
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While we’re here, the Niners did get bit by the injury bug in their upset loss, and that leads into an interesting story line that Tim Kawakami of The Athletic brought to my attention on Twitter (or X?) on Sunday. That story line: With Samuel, McCaffrey and Trent Williams all getting nicked up a bit in Cleveland, will San Francisco be careful a week from Monday night in Minnesota?
It may sound a bit strange that a team would sit stars simply because of the playing surface—particularly coming off a loss—in Week 7 of the season. But if you’ve followed this stuff, you’d know the Niners are among the more militant teams when it comes to which surfaces they play on.
And you can put the NFL’s reigning Defensive Player of the Year at the top of the list of fighters.
“I really think FieldTurf is a problem in the NFL,” Niners edge rusher Nick Bosa said last summer, when he and I were discussing the injuries in his past. “And the turf I played on in New York [that he tore his ACL on in 2020] was brand new. It was super soft, and apparently, they rolled a cement roller over it twice after the game because we had two ACLs and a bunch of other injuries on it. So I think if the NFL cared about our safety at all, then we’d all play on grass like top soccer teams do. So that’s kinda b.s. to me.”
Making it worse is that Minnesota is one of three remaining slit-film turf fields in the NFL. There were six last year, and three (Detroit, New York, New Orleans) swapped out their fields in the offseason after data was released that showed slit-film had a significantly higher injury rate for players than grass or other synthetic surfaces. Indianapolis and Cincinnati are the other two that still have it.
The Vikings and Colts have pledged to change their fields in 2024, but obviously that won’t help a hobbled Niners team next Monday. So it’ll be interesting to see how Kyle Shanahan’s crew handles it. I’d imagine, as Kawakami intimated, they’ll be cautious.
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The Jaguars deserve a lot of credit for winning their last three in a row. Or at least more than you’d typically give a playoff team for doing that.
Consider this: Three weeks ago, the Jaguars were coming off getting beaten by 20 by the Texans, had fallen to 1–2 and faced a four-game stretch with two games in London on the front end and a short week capped by a road Thursday-nighter on the back end. And here they are now, a win in New Orleans away from sweeping that gantlet.
“It’s a glimpse of what we can be,” coach Doug Pederson told reporters after Sunday’s 37–20 win over the Colts. “There are still some areas that we have to clean up, obviously. The team really in these last three weeks kind of figured some things out, figured out who we are as a football team. That’s exciting to see. They really embraced that.”
So what was it exactly that they embraced that brought them to this point, where they could come out of a trip overseas with no bye and dominate a division opponent in their only home game through this run?
I figured I’d ask, and was able to cobble together a rundown of the past 18 days.
• Players, staff and execs packed for the trip Wednesday, Sept. 27. On the 28th, the team practiced at its facility, before hopping on a late-afternoon charter to London Heathrow. The football folks slept on the flight, which landed at 6 a.m. U.K. time Friday, so they could jump right into meetings, and get a 2:20 p.m. practice in at their hotel, The Grove, about an hour away from London in Hertfordshire.
• On Saturday, the logistics and IT people packed up the operation at The Grove after the team finished its work in the early afternoon. On Sunday, everyone packed their bags for the hourlong drive (no police escorts in the U.K.) to Wembley Stadium. As all of that was happening, the football operations people were moving the team to Hanbury Manor in Ware, which is also an hour from London. The Jaguars beat the Falcons, 23–7, then bussed to Hanbury Manor, where their luggage and football infrastructure was waiting.
• On Monday, the players had the day off. About 20 attended Fulham-Chelsea at Craven Cottage—Fulham is owned by Jaguars owner Shad Khan—while others golfed on the hotel property or went sightseeing with friends and family in and around London. Meetings started Tuesday, and practice started Wednesday for the game against the Bills at Tottenham on Sunday, Oct. 8.
• The logistics and IT folks packed up Friday and Saturday to prepare to leave Hanbury Manor, so everything would be ready to roll when the players and coaches boarded buses for another hour-plus, non-police-escorted ride into the city.
• The Jaguars outlasted the Bills in a slobberknocker of a 25–20 win. The players, staff and execs boarded the buses an hour after the game for Heathrow (I talked to OC Press Taylor for last week’s Ten Takeaways as they were climbing aboard). Wheels up. Lights off. And eight hours later, the plane landed Oct. 9, last Monday, at 2 a.m. Jacksonville time, when they had to claim their luggage and pass through customs. The buses pulled into the team’s new practice facility, the Miller Electric Center, at 4 a.m. Players went home; coaches got right to work.
• Players were off Monday, and Pederson lightened the physical load on players by staging shortened practices Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Friday and Saturday were mostly as they would normally be. The Jags got the win over Indianapolis to get to 4–2, their best six-game start in 16 years. Afterward, Pederson reminded the players to keep grinding, with the Thursday trip to New Orleans ahead, and that he’ll make it up to them during the “mini-bye” after the game, while the coaches dived right into the Saints.
And that’s where they are now, in the normal fire drill that is run up to a Thursday game.
Challenging? Of course it is. But as Pederson said, it can also be (and Pederson would argue has been) revealing in showing what a team is made of. In this case, we’ve got a group that seems to be coming out of a stretch like this better than it went in. Which is pretty cool.
Joe Burrow is alive and well, and so are his Bengals. We’re going to have a much deeper look at the state of the team on the site later Monday, but the overall upshot is simple: Cincinnati found a way to survive the first month and a half of the season, and its bye is welcome now.
That Seahawks team the Bengals outlasted by a 17–13 count Sunday, is really good. And maybe most impressive is how Cincy won the game.
Afterward, Zac Taylor gave everyone on defense a game ball, because, in reality, those are the guys who won the game for his team. The Seahawks held the Bengals’ loaded offense to three points over the game’s final 42 minutes, necessitating a series of late stands from the defense to put the win away. There was a sack from Sam Hubbard that snuffed out one fourth-quarter surge into the red zone, and another from B.J. Hill to close the game out.
“They’re just relentless,” Taylor said over the cell later in the afternoon, from one of his kids’ games with the bye week kicking off. They’re relentless. They rise up and they know the game’s on their shoulders. The guys you mentioned, you talk about core starters. B.J. [Hill], D.J. [Reader], Trey [Hendrickson], Sam [Hubbard], Logan [Wilson] and Germaine [Pratt], who are invested right behind them as the two linebackers, those guys take a lot of pride in winning a game for us. That’s what it felt like today.”
It also made it feel a lot like the Bengals are growing into a complete team, one that doesn’t need Burrow, Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins to go off week to week to win a game.
And that was in a win in which those guys showed, again, that they’re plenty capable of doing that when needed. Take the Arizona game in Week 5 and the first half of the Seattle game, and in those six quarters, Burrow completed 54 of 68 throws (79.4%) for 460 yards, five scores, a pick and a 113.2 passer rating. What’s more, he’s succeeded in running to throw, running to run, and absorbing hits in a way that he might not have two or three weeks ago.
So Burrow, once again, has top-of-the-league quarterback play in him, and a team around him that proved after that hot start that it could win even when he doesn’t—with the defense grinding out four stops without allowing a point through a fourth quarter in which the Bengals’ offense could manage only 15 yards from scrimmage and a single first down.
Cincinnati will need all of it after the breather the bye will afford them, with a trip to San Francisco and a home date with the Bills coming in Weeks 8 and 9; then the Texans, Ravens, Steelers and Jaguars after that. But, for now at least, those Super Bowl hopes the Bengals rightfully harbored over the summer are very realistic again. And, like I said, we’ve got a lot more on that coming.
It’s possible the Commanders will wind up being the Eagles’ toughest competition in the NFC East—and they may need to be, for the sake of those currently in charge. That Washington team, of course, isn’t at Philly’s level. But if Ron Rivera’s crew can find a little consistency, and keep playing like it did in Sunday’s 24–16 win in Atlanta, there are a lot of pieces there, from the defensive line to the receivers to the young defensive backs and running backs and even to, yes, the quarterback.
And if that happens, then maybe a reset won’t come so fast for new owner Josh Harris.
Some of the pieces came together Sunday. The offense and special teams did first. Jamison Crowder’s 61-yard punt return set up Washington’s first touchdown, and Sam Howell keyed the second one, by running and throwing the ball, and wrapping things up with a tight-window bullet to Curtis Samuel to cap a seven-play, 52-yard march to the end zone. But mostly, it was the defense in Atlanta, and especially after those first two touchdowns.
A Kendall Fuller pick set up Washington’s third score, one that made it 24–10. And that was just the start for a group that really tightened up after the Falcons cut the lead to 24–16 with 12:38 left.
The Falcons controlled the ball for more than 10 minutes in the fourth quarter, and didn’t score in the game’s final 12 minutes. Three times, they drove into Commanders territory. Twice they were picked off—once by corner Benjamin St-Juste, and once by linebacker Jamin Davis—and once they went four-and-out. The Davis pick in particular, on the Washington 26, illustrated where the defense was when the game was on the line.
“Ultimately, we just all knew the situation,” Fuller told me postgame. “We knew that we were protecting our end zone. You just take it one play at a time. I think in that situation, Jamin just made a big play. It’s not like the other players, just because they didn’t catch the ball, that we weren’t locked in or that we weren’t ready for the moment. It’s just a matter of we knew we were protecting the end zone and made some good plays and good catches. We came up big at the end to make a play at the end to get off the field.”
Now, the Commanders were coming off three straight losses. But the second was in overtime at Philly, and the third was a bit of a no-show four days later against Chicago, one Fuller promised was dealt with accordingly. And as for this one, Rivera, I’m told, still felt like, coming out of it, his team had a lot to chip away at, something that was reflected in how he addressed the players postgame.
“Y’all did your job, but you gotta pay attention to detail,” he said. “We were not detail-oriented today. We got to be detail-oriented. You want to be a great team? Details. Little things add up. Little things become big things. Big things become great things, and you become champions.”
Soon enough, we’ll have a better idea of how close the Commanders can get to any of that, with division games against the Giants and Eagles up the next two weeks. And after that, we’ll probably have a better handle on where the team is going this year, and even where Harris might take it thereafter.
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The Lions, again, are no one’s underdog. Detroit pounded a 3–1 Buccaneers team into submission Sunday, and it happened differently than the last few wins did for Dan Campbell’s crew. David Montgomery got hurt in the middle of the second quarter, and the Lions’ run game stagnated, averaging just 1.8 yards per carry.
Which barely mattered at all.
Jared Goff wound up throwing for 353 yards on 30-of-44 passing, Amon-Ra St. Brown had 12 catches for 124 yards and a touchdown, Jameson Williams burst back on the scene with a 45-yard touchdown—and a defense that was a laughingstock at this point a year ago played lights out again.
“I can’t say enough about our defensive performance today and really for five games this year, to be honest with you,” Campbell told reporters. “Man, we’re just playing as one unit right now. When your defense only gives up six points it’s saying a lot.”
The Bucs had just 13 first downs and 251 yards. They crossed midfield only three times. And because of how the defense was playing, Goff’s third-quarter bomb to Williams that made it 17–6 felt like a dagger.
So yeah, the Lions were suffocating the Bucs like they had the Panthers and Packers the two weeks before. But they were doing it in a different way, a dynamic that’s giving Detroit the look of a very real powerhouse as we approach midseason. And here’s another thing that gives them that look: In the four games since losing to Seattle, the Lions have trailed for a total of less than four minutes, and that stretch of 3:43 came in the first quarter in Green Bay, after the Packers took a 3–0 lead less than two minutes into that game.
Controlling teams that way, and being able to accomplish that in different ways week to week is a tough thing to pull off in the NFL. But the Lions have. And that makes them a scary opponent for anyone going forward.
The Dolphins did beat the NFL’s only winless team Sunday, but there is a little significance to the win for a team that’s now 5–1 for the first time in more than 20 years. That significance is in how the Panthers came sprinting out of the gate, taking a 14–0 lead against a team that hasn’t had to play from behind much this season, and in what the Dolphins did from there.
Bottom line, a couple of weeks ago, when Buffalo built a double-digit lead on Miami in Orchard Park, the Dolphins crumbled, and that was curtains for the visitors. Likewise, in their wins, they weren’t really challenged, so it could be hard to tell how Miami would do when another big one came.
Against the Panthers, they looked just fine. Their drives after going down by two scores: touchdown, touchdown, touchdown, punt, touchdown, touchdown, punt, pick-six, touchdown, kneeldown.
“And this one was a big one because we were down 14–0,” Mike McDaniel told his players in the locker room postgame. “You find out a lot about people when unforeseen circumstances happen. And I saw no panic, no blink, no come to Jesus with people. People were confident as hell. … This week was a big one for us as we move forward.”
And next up, is a bigger one, with a trip to Philly on tap.
The Bills need to listen to their leader. Here’s what Josh Allen had to say, after Buffalo edged the Giants at home—winning on the final play, when a Tyrod Taylor throw sailed over Darren Waller’s head (and the refs let a grab from Taron Johnson on Waller go)—by a count of 14–9.
“We’re a much better team than we showed tonight, and showed last week,” Allen said. “We got to figure out why that is, and how to get out of a funk early.”
The truth is, the Bills looked shaky in the opener, amazing in Weeks 2, 3 and 4, and have looked pretty beatable the past two weeks (losing to the Jaguars and nearly falling to the Giants), and that’s a problem because the teams that advance in the playoffs are usually the consistent ones.
Everyone saw what the Bills could be when they blew out the Raiders, Commanders and Dolphins, and everyone knows how they have the explosive potential to do that to anyone.
All due respect to a game Giants group, Buffalo didn’t look that way Sunday night. But the Bills gutted it out, and have a Sunday-to-Thursday turn next, with the Patriots on the road, then the Bucs at home, which should give them ample opportunity to show they’re still who everyone thought they were a couple of weeks back.
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It’s time for the quick-hitters. Let’s dive right in …
• I’m not even kidding when I say Tyreek Hill’s backflip in full pads while holding a phone and recording himself in selfie mode was the most athletic act I saw in Week 6, and maybe all season. Or ever.
• The Titans are now 2–4, with an injured quarterback and a lot of dead money on their salary cap. New GM Ran Carthon should listen to aging vets like Denico Autry, Kevin Byard, DeAndre Hopkins or even Derrick Henry.
• The Colts’ first priority should be the long-term health of Anthony Richardson’s shoulder. If that means shutting him down for the rest of the season, as much as it would suck for the rest of us, then so be it.
• Tyson Bagent looked mildly intriguing for the Bears, at least physically. We should know soon whether he’ll start again with Justin Fields’s having dislocated his throwing thumb.
• The energy for Houston is completely different than it has been. We’ll have more on that, and rookie QB C.J. Stroud, later Monday. But for now? The defense did a heck of a job closing out the Saints and, for the first time in what seems like forever (thanks, Jack Easterby), the arrow’s pointing up for the Texans.
• The Patriots showed a little fight at the end in coming back against the Raiders. But the fact that they had Mike Gesicki and Vederian Lowe responsible for stopping Maxx Crosby on what would be the game-winning play (a safety that ended New England’s last possession) is just as bad as the fact that they had two offensive penalties on their first two snaps. This isn’t just un-Patriot-like. It’s a bad football team.
• Baby steps for the Raiders—the defense has now closed out two opponents over a six-day stretch, something it struggled mightily to do last year. And, of course, it happened just as Jimmy Garoppolo got hurt.
• I love how the Rams were able to flip the run game in the offense and incorporate more physical gap-scheme running, and maintain their normal level of production. Second-year back Kyren Williams went for 158 yards on 20 carries in the team’s win over Arizona on Sunday.
• I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but Jonathan Gannon’s really got an overmatched roster playing well, and the Cardinals hung around for most of the afternoon with a solid Rams team Sunday. Arizona, you’ll remember, is loaded with picks for 2024.
• We get the Kellen Moore Bowl with Chargers-Cowboys on Monday night! And here’s your backstory, which I wrote in June.
