Week one of the NFL season concludes tonight with a Monday Night Football showdown between Aaron Rodgers’ New York Jets and Brock Purdy’s San Francisco 49ers, and while we are deep in the heart of overreaction season, I have a measured take to dispense after studying all the games in detail across eight hours of commercial free football yesterday: the NFL has a lot of bums playing quarterback!
We opened the season with two transcendent talents in the evil Swiftian empire’s Patrick Mahomes and Baltimore’s Lamar Jackson continuing to innovate sports’ most important position, and it seems to have rattled most everyone else. The next night’s game in Brazil was a competent performance between Philadelphia’s Jalen Hurts and Green Bay’s breakout star Jordan Love, at least until he hurt his MCL and will reportedly be sidelined for three-to-six weeks.
This was a harbinger of doom for the rest of the weekend’s QB class. While Josh Allen continued to prove he is Buffalo’s Superman, and Arizona’s Kyler Murray made some throws suggesting he is back to caring about football more than Call of Duty, the rest of the early slate was littered with cowardly checkdowns and incompletions. Kirk Cousins debuted in Atlanta as the NFL’s newest fully guaranteed quarterback and didn’t perform much better than its previous “uncuttable and untradeable” one while being outdueled by Bears castoff and Steelers backup quarterback Justin Fields with his average line of 17/23 for 156 yards and no touchdowns or interceptions. You may look at those manifestly underwhelming numbers and recoil, but they’re better than what most quarterbacks put up yesterday. That’s what a winning stat line looks like these days.
The hyped “generational” number one overall pick, Caleb Williams, is credited with a comeback victory in his NFL debut, although I don’t know how much his 14/29 for 93 yards performance had to do with it, especially when the game-winning touchdown was thrown to the Bears by Titans quarterback Will Levis with one of the worst decisions you will ever see anyone make at any level of football. Joe Burrow, the only man who has ever made Patrick Mahomes look human by comparison, was held to just 164 yards passing against an entirely anonymous New England Patriots team who picked third overall last year, scoring just ten points in the most stunning loss of week one.
The battle of Florida saw more aggressive play from the cops arresting Tyreek Hill before the game than from the last “generational” number one overall pick, as Jacksonville’s Trevor Lawrence continued to trend towards bust territory, completing just 12 of 21 passes for 162 yards. His counterpart in Miami Tua Tagovailoa had much better numbers, but if you remove the 143 yards on two catches by speedsters Tyreek Hill and Jaylen Waddle, #TuAnon loses a lot its puzzle pieces, as his 338 yards passing fall to 195, and the Dolphins certainly would have lost that game if Travis Etienne didn’t do his best Ernest Byner impression and fumble the game away at the one-yard line.
Even in the best game of the morning, both quarterbacks struggled to get much going. Indianapolis’s Anthony Richardson was able to punish Houston on the ground, but 9/19 for 212 yards is as all or nothing of an offense as you will find, which is heavily propped up by Alec Pierce’s preposterous tribue to Randy Moss for a 57-yard gain to keep the Colts’ hopes alive late in the game. Houston’s C.J. Stroud built on his stunning rookie year which established him as one of the NFL’s best QB’s, but his 234 yards passing still would have been his fourth-lowest total from last year.
Derek Carr provided the only Mahomes-ian performance on Sunday, but it grades out to about a B on the Carolina curve, as his New Orleans Saints annihilated the decrepit Panthers before they could even get out of the tunnel, and Carr’s 19/23 for 200 yards and 3 TDs stat line is about the diametric opposite from what last year’s number one overall pick Bryce Young produced. He went 13/30 for 161 yards and two picks to open his second season with Carolina that already looks more hopeless than his first.
I’m old enough to remember when two hundred yards passing was the base expectation for an NFL offense, now over half the league can’t eclipse that figure in week one. The afternoon games didn’t get much better (as a Broncos fan I am still not ready to speak publicly about the calamity I saw from new rookie quarterback Bo Nix in Seattle), as proven by the fact that middle of the road quarterbacks like Baker Mayfield and Derek Carr posted some of the best statistical outputs in week one.
What the hell is going on? Why were so many quarterbacks so aggressively mediocre yesterday? Even Dallas’ Dak Prescott, who got paid just before kickoff and routed one of the league’s best defenses in Cleveland, posted a very pedestrian and inefficient passing line of 19/32 for 179 yards. Deshaun Watson, the aforementioned uncuttable and untradeable sex pest, is a shell of his former self and he has single-handedly closed Cleveland’s championship window. A washed up Joe Flacco was a revelation by comparison to him last year.
Look around the league for explosive plays and all you’ll find are two high safeties suffocating the life out of most offenses, and some quarterbacks like Russell Wilson and Deshaun Watson have proven they simply cannot deal with this new conservative NFL reality, and those who can have accepted life under the 200-yard passing mark as something of a new norm.
The sea change in the NFL over the past few years to make defense legal again is real, and yesterday indicates that it is continuing unabated. Football’s pendulum had swung far too hard against defenses, and now in these new, more balanced conditions it seems impossible to recreate that famed 54-51 Chiefs-Rams game from 2018 that seemed to hearken a new future for football.
It did, but not the way we all thought. Defenses learned to take the big chunk plays away and force quarterbacks to be far more patient and take smaller gains, and it produced results like the Bengals holding a hobbled Patrick Mahomes to only ten second-half points at home in the AFC Championship just four years after that era-defining Chiefs-Rams game. It turns out that while many NFL quarterbacks are great at airing it out and taking advantage of miscues, if defenses don’t make mistakes and force them to be patient, a lot of them are bums!