Packers, Patriots Top Santa’s Nice List

NFL Week 16 – And so this is Christmas. And what have you done?

Did your team compete for a Super Bowl this year? Did they start moving in the right direction? Did they meet expectations? Provide some excitement and memories? Or did they go through the motions, succumb to uninspired management/leadership, and waste the most valuable resource in the NFL and the world: precious time?

What follows are not power rankings, but Santa’s Nice and Naughty list, an informal ranking of which teams made the most of what they had, gave fans reasons to believe and/or cheer, or just set and achieved realistic goals and provided a satisfactory football experience.

We’ll start with the nice and work our way down to the naughty. Though judging from the team atop the list, “nice” is in the eye of the beholder.

When we kicked off this Walkthrough season with a Green Bay Packers/Beatles analogy (and a very sophomoric double entendre), we had no idea how prescient that metaphor would be. The Packers, like the Beatles in the Get Back documentary, are proving that Aaron Rodgers, Matt LaFleur, and Brian Gutekunst can be magical together, even when they are ready to slaughter each other. After all the bickering, egomania, miscommunication, and dysfunction, the Packers may yet be leaving us with an Abbey Road before breaking up. We cannot wait to hear the final medley.

The New England Patriots rebuilt, swiftly and efficiently. Oh sure, there are good reasons to remain skeptical about how thorough and complete a job they have done, especially after last Saturday night’s loss to the Colts. But there’s a clear path forward if Mac Jones continues to develop and Bill Belichick keeps changing defensive tires on the fly like he has done for the last 20 years. The Patriots’ future is much brighter than those of other perennial contenders such as the Steelers and Saints. Of course, their past is also much brighter.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have done everything possible to defend their Super Bowl championship. Can’t argue with that decision. Or, give or take the occasional matchup with the Saints, the results.

No team in the NFL took bigger risks in 2021 than the Los Angeles Rams. Perhaps those risks will result in a Super Bowl; perhaps not. But imagine the alternative: wandering along at 10-7 or so for another year with Jared Goff at quarterback and squandering another Hall of Fame season by Aaron Donald, all to guarantee another finish among the league’s second tier. From the moment they traded for Matthew Stafford, the Rams have had a compelling, unforgettable year, not to mention a largely successful one. Other NFL franchises should be so bold about seizing their opportunities.

The Kansas City Chiefs fixed their broken offensive line, then their broken defense, and ultimately prevented a “What’s Wrong With Patrick Mahomes?” storyline from swallowing their season. They have been magnificent, then terrible, then something close to magnificent again since the start of the calendar year. But to their credit, they have never been complacent.

Justin Herbert and Brandon Staley have pulled the Los Angeles Chargers out of the holding pattern the organization drifted into the day they announced they were leaving San Diego. Herbert gives fans in Southern California and around the world a reason to buy Chargers jerseys, and he gives all of us a reason to tune into Chargers games. Staley’s creative defense and aggressive fourth-down tactics may be turning the Chargers into true Super Bowl contenders, next year if not this year.

The Arizona Cardinals became the 2021 version of the 2020 Buffalo Bills. Their thrilling young quarterback came of age. They introduced us to some new stars, while providing a showcase for old ones such as Chandler Jones, DeAndre Hopkins/A.J. Green, and (briefly) J.J. Watt. And they proved that Steve Keim, Kliff Kingsbury, and Vance Joseph really do know what they are doing. Next year, the Cardinals must make sure they don’t become this year’s Bills.

The Dallas Cowboys find ways to simultaneously be pleasantly surprising and mildly disappointing. Their “just draft the big fast famous guy” tactics paid off with Micah Parsons, Trevon Diggs became the greatest cornerback in Super Tecmo Bowl history, and the Cowboys are cruising into the playoffs. And yet the whole still never adds up to the sum of its parts. Perhaps that’s the Cowboys charter as “America’s Team”—they point a mirror at our brilliance, our potential, and our capacity for distracted self-sabotage as we live our lives according to the whims of flighty billionaires.

The Buffalo Bills discovered that sustaining success is as hard as achieving it, if not harder, and that any team that assumes the next step is going to be easy is likely to stumble. Yet for all of their pratfalls this year, they remain on the doorstep to the Super Bowl.

Kyle Shanahan, Jimmy Garoppolo, and the San Francisco 49ers outlasted their critics. Some fans wanted to blow the 49ers up and start over from the moment Trey Lance was drafted through that inane little “Umm, actually, Shanahan has only really had one good year as a coach” narrative after the team’s 2-5 start. Lance wasn’t going to lead the 49ers on a climb into the playoffs by running QB Power, and Shanahan keeps providing blueprints for how to build a contender around a caretaker quarterback. Don’t think for a moment that this gritty wild-card run is a mere moral victory: when a more-prepared Lance takes over next year, it could be a little like when Patrick Mahomes replaced Alex Smith for the Chiefs.

The Indianapolis Colts may not have restored Carson Wentz to factory condition, but at least they patched him up enough to pass inspection, proving that they weren’t merely wishcasting when they traded for him. Jonathan Taylor and the Colts offensive line provided old-school thrills, and Frank Reich’s subdued brilliance provided plenty of memorable moments, from the gutsy/goofy Bomb Cyclone win to the Patriots upset. Had the Colts held on to beat the Buccaneers or defeated the Titans even once, this season would look very different. Yet despite those losses, the Colts are sleepers in a playoff field full of vulnerable opponents.

The Cincinnati Bengals gave themselves and the world Joe Burrow-to-Ja’Marr Chase, as exciting a pitch-and-catch combo as any football fan could ask for. It’s better for a team to be truly great than fun, but it’s better to be fun than irrelevant. And the Bengals were fascinatingly, frustratingly relevant in 2021.

The Tennessee Titans played chicken with the Curse of 370 and lost, though it’s hard to imagine this season turning out that much differently if they had won.

First the Baltimore Ravens‘ running backs all got hurt. Then their offensive tackles. Then their cornerbacks. Finally, Lamar Jackson. Yet this will be remembered as the season of the failed end-of-game two-point conversion. Maybe John Harbaugh was too aggressive at the ends of the Steelers and Packers losses, or he was aggressive at the wrong times. But the Ravens refused to use injuries as an excuse to sink to the bottom of the standings. And if you don’t like rooting for a team that takes controversial chances, there’s always the Vikings.

The Miami Dolphins set out to do too many contradictory things in 2021. They wanted to develop Tua Tagovailoa while keeping their other options open. They wanted to build on their 2020 success while tempering expectations and avoiding quick fixes. Their whole season nearly crashed against the rocks, but they are coming away with a chance to reach the playoffs, an exceptional draft class, over $70 million in cap space, and a young quarterback who at least is not headed in the wrong direction. The Dolphins need resolve and clarity of purpose for 2022. Don’t we all?

The Cleveland Browns had the year many of us at Football Outsiders assumed they would have: excellent by their standards, mildly disappointing based on their expectations, and wholly necessary for an organization for whom success came like a deluge on a parched desert, likely to get washed away before it can do any lasting good. The Browns’ COVID-depleted skeleton crew played hard on Monday night, and perhaps they have a Christmas miracle up their sleeves against the Packers, but they didn’t answer as many questions as they could have in 2021.

The Pittsburgh Steelers have made a lot of missteps over the last few years, and their unwillingness to reinvest in their offensive line or dabble in the quarterback futures market are paying ever-diminishing returns. But Old Man Roethlisberger was rarely as bad as the memes made him out to be and still provided some flickers of brilliance. Roethlisberger gave Steelers fans a very Steelers type of year full of mucky wins and (mostly) hard-fought losses on his way out the door. And at least when the rebuild finally begins, everyone will agree that it’s necessary.

The Philadelphia Eagles realized last January that things weren’t working out. They decided not to stay together for the kids. They salvaged what they could from bad decisions and relationships. They came away with their dignity, lots of future draft picks, and a little hope. And they had more fun along the way than any local fans expected. This may still turn out to have been a wasted season, but watching the Eagles on Sunday afternoons rarely felt like a waste of time.

The Detroit Lions are the lovable three-legged pit bull at the animal shelter. They got us to care about them, root for them, and discover what’s plucky and fun about them this year. Next year, they must prove that they can defend the house.

After so much early promise, and with all due respect to Teddy Bridgewater’s willingness to sacrifice his body for the game, this turned into yet another Veteran Caretaker Quarterback for Hire year for the Denver Broncos. At least George Paton began the housecleaning by trading Von Miller for draft picks so the organization could stop reminiscing about 2015 and start moving forward. Now it’s time for a new coach, a quarterback with real upside, and a modern philosophy to match an offense loaded with exciting young playmakers.

The New Orleans Saints keep foisting Taysom Hill on the public and themselves. They also keep manufacturing enough wins out of physical defense and offensive line play to stay in the playoff picture. It often looks like they are wasting time, living in the past, and indulging their head coach’s whims. Then again, that’s how the Patriots looked in 2020.

The Minnesota Vikings are a Salad Works in a league where the goal is to win Michelin stars, and their plan to take the next step involves spending even more money on romaine lettuce and chicken cubes.

The Atlanta Falcons may finally have exorcized the ghosts of 28-3. They’re no longer the team that loses winnable games, and they’re no longer a punchline. That’s progress of a sort.

The Seattle Seahawks slowly faded from power in 2021. Such is the fate of all empires that do not adapt with the times.

Jon Gruden’s absence from the Las Vegas Raiders hasn’t made much difference in the standings: the 2021 Raiders appear to be slightly more competitive late in the year than the 2020 or 2019 Raiders. (Monday night’s dreary win over a Browns scout team would easily have fit into their past late-season portfolios.) That’s a pretty clear sign that Gruden wasn’t worth the money the Raiders were paying him, nor the power they were granting him. While this has been a painful year off the field for the Raiders, at least it’s over, and the franchise has not been consigned to another half-decade of seasons just like it.

The New York Giants are fading aristocracy haunting the hallways of a dusty, decaying palace, unwilling to change with the times and unaware of how dearly they are paying for their stubborness.

The Chicago Bears stumbled into Justin Fields and then did everything they could to ruin him while indulging the overmatched cluelessness of Matt Nagy and Ryan Pace. They’re the definition of a team that mistook indecisiveness for patience.

Toxicity flows from the owner’s box all over the Washington Football Team’s organization like a sewage monsoon, and the franchise would rank dead last in the league and the galaxy if graded upon Dan Snyder’s malfeasance. But Ron Rivera is a swell guy, and the roster has plenty of exciting, easy-to-root-for Terry McLaurin and Chase Young types. On the field, Washington is just another dreary, mismanaged-at-the-top team struggling to gain traction. They are easy to ignore, which is a damning indictment in its own right.

The New York Jets changed coaches, changed quarterbacks, gutted the roster, flirted with the backup quarterback, and did lots of other little things (Joe Flacco trade; failure to resolve the Marcus Maye situation) to guarantee that 2021 was just another typical Jets year. The theme of this end-of-year segment is that every season is a gift, in the NFL and in life, yet the New York football teams seem to go out of their way to squander those gifts.

The 2021 Carolina Panthers are to film-junkie and early-adopter football fans what the Sashi Brown 2016-2017 Browns were to the analytics community. Those hoping for a thinktank instead got politicking, nest-feathering, and quarterback wishcasting. Some individuals take the wrong message away from not being expected to show immediate results. Matt Rhule is one of those individuals.

The Jacksonville Jaguars flung themselves at the guy at the bar with the fancy watch and plunged head-first into a serious relationship, ignoring all the warning signs that he was an insecure hustler and philanderer. They didn’t come to their senses until they saw him kick a puppy pup a kicker kick a kicker. Now they must find a way to raise Baby Trevor by themselves.

The Houston Texans discarded all pretense of professionalism. They did, however, give us the gift of not having to listen to broadcasters stammeringly whitewash Deshaun Watson’s “off-field, um, legal situations.” For that, and only that, Walkthrough thanks them.

TebowMania Ten Years After: A Midnight Clear

Once TebowMania converged with Christmas Eve, it became difficult to differentiate the sincerity from the irony.

Retailers around Denver sold out of Tim Tebow jerseys one week before Christmas in 2011, and Tebow jerseys passed Aaron Rodgers jerseys as the hottest sellers on the market that year. There’s nothing odd about that of course: he was an exciting new quarterback. Mac Jones jerseys are hot sellers this year.

But some folks also created custom No. 15 Broncos “Jesus” jerseys. That was a bit odd. The fact that CNN covered the Jesus jersey phenomenon also sounds strange in retrospect but was par for the TebowMania course.

It’s hard to tell if the jerseys were a winking joke, a crass marketing gimmick, or a genuine expression of something spiritual. Which, when you think about it, makes TebowMania a lot like our secularized American version of Christmas itself.

It’s unlikely that a new religious sect would have sprung to life if Tebow’s Broncos had defeated the Buffalo Bills on Christmas Eve in 2021. It’s very likely, however, that more folks would have leaned even heavier into that dangerous blurry border between faith and cynical consumerism. And it can be hard to differentiate between the true believers and the opportunists once a such a snowball starts to roll.

Luckily, we don’t have to think about such possibilities, because instead of a Christmas Eve comeback miracle, Tebow delivered a trio of interceptions that left the NFL Network crew cackling in a 40-13 loss to a mediocre Bills team.

Our Audibles at the Line coverage was rather light, as fits a Saturday afternoon game on what was a holiday for many of us:

Brian McIntyre: In case there was any doubt the wheels have completely come off the Buffalo Bills’ bus, on their first possession after a Tim Tebow touchdown run, C.J. Spiller breaks off a 38-yard run, putting the Bills in business at the Broncos’ 33-yard line. Next four plays: Tashard Choice slams it up the middle for a yard, Ryan Fitzpatrick underthrows Spiller, then throws a wobbly pass to [Tashard] Choice, who is blanketed by Broncos linebacker Wesley Woodyard. Dave Rayner then misses a 45-yard field goal attempt, a third straight game where he has missed his first field goal attempt.

The defense forces a three-and-out and Leodis McKelvin returns the punt 38 yards to the Broncos’ 28-yard line. The Bills pick up a quick first down, but a holding penalty by Andy Levitre and Fitzpatrick short-arming a third-down screen pass to Choice leads to Rayner shanking a 31-yard attempt.

Mike Tanier: The Broncos converted on a fourth-and-1 sneak. Tebow throws a touchdown a few plays later. Note on the replays of the wide-open [Daniel] Fells that No. 90 is flailing around in coverage. That’s Marcell Dareus, right?

Wait, No. 90 is [Chris] Kelsay. Not that bad in coverage for an endbacker. Where’s my head?

Bills keep marching downfield and settling for three. No way that bites them in the rump.

Vince Verhei: As usual, Denver hangs around, hangs around, and then Tim Tebow produces a couple of fourth-quarter touchdowns. This time, though, he’s producing them for the Bills—a pick-six to Byrd, then a sack-fumble by Kelsay leads to a touchdown by Spencer Johnson. The Bills have 40 points with one offensive touchdown.

One problem with Tebow’s mobility: He tends to scramble out near the line of scrimmage, then gets tentative. Receivers don’t know if they should be blocking or getting open, then the next thing they know Tebow is throwing their way. You’d have to mark it as a drop, but it’s hard to say it’s their fault when they weren’t even sure what their job was at that point. Michael Vick had the same problem early in his Atlanta career. (Actually, throughout his Atlanta career). Tebow needs to make quicker decisions.

Note my use of “endbacker.” The term “edge rusher” had not yet entered common parlance a decade ago. Vince Verhei’s criticism, meanwhile, proved to be the ultimate indictment of Tebow as a quarterback: he had no sense of when to pull the trigger, he scrambled when he didn’t need to, and he left lots of routine plays on the table in exchange for one or two highlights. Also, he threw the football like a linebacker goofing off before practice, which was a bit of a problem.

The Bills loss dropped the Broncos to 8-7. They were still in the mix for a playoff berth, but TebowMania was losing steam after two straight high-profile losses. The Broncos lost an excruciating 7-3 game on New Year’s Day to the Chiefs—Tebow went 6-of-20 for 60 yards and an interception passing while rushing for 16 yards and a fumble—but they won the AFC West with a .500 record.

Here are the lowlights of that Chiefs season finale for you completists.

Kyle Orton, whom Tebow replaced as the Broncos quarterback, had taken over for Matt Cassel and Tyler Palko as the Chiefs starter by that point in the year. And images of a disgruntled John Elway in the owner’s box became more common as television producers alertly began pivoting the storyline from “Tebow is the best thing since macaroni and cheese” to “the Broncos must soon make a difficult decision.”

As 2012 dawned, the Broncos were coming off three straight losses and slated to host a 12-4 Steelers wild-card team. TebowMania was dead, and it was time to toss all of the quasi-messianic stuff, sincere or snarky, into the back of the closet like a forgotten jersey. Right? Right?

Coming in Two Weeks: He is Risen.