Boy, do the Buffalo Bills look better with a healthy Tyrod Taylor at quarterback, LeSean McCoy at running back, and Sammy Watkins at wide receiver.
The Bills’ key offensive skill players have been unable to stay healthy this season, and injuries have played a major large role in the team’s mediocre play. But all three were in the lineup for the first time since Week 3, and Watkins’s performance in particular helped the sputtering offence get back on track in the passing game.
Shrugging off a sprained ankle after being labeled a player unable to play through injuries, Watkins exploded with eight catches for a career-high 168 yards in a critical division victory over the Miami Dolphins to snap a two-game skid and get back to the .500 mark. His 44-yard touchdown broke the game open for the Bills, and he found a rhythm with Taylor for the first time all year.
The Bills paid a steep price to get Watkins in the 2014 draft, but if the second-year receiver can have this kind of impact going forward, it will have been worth it.
Here’s what else we learned in Week 9:
What was Dan Quinn thinking? Defensive coaches are conservative by nature, and sometimes that can lead to some questionable in-game management. This week’s culprit: Atlanta Falcons head coach Dan Quinn.
We’ll remind you: The Falcons were down four points with three minutes remaining in the fourth quarter. The team had the ball at the San Francisco 49ers’ one-yard line on fourth-and-goal with just over three minutes remaining to play, but Quinn lost his aggressiveness at the worst time.
Instead of going for the win, Quinn preferred to trust his defence against 49ers quarterback Blaine Gabbert and called for a field goal rather than going for it on fourth down.
It was a hard decision to get behind. Plus, even if you wanted to trust your defence, doesn’t the risk of getting stopped on fourth down still put you in a more favourable position?
Hypothetically, if the Falcons don’t convert the fourth-day play, you still pin San Francisco deep inside their own territory and still have three chances to stop them.
Even without hindsight, it was a poor strategy and ultimately set his team up to fail.
“The fourth-down play, I chose to kick it there and thought we were getting the stops defensively,” Quinn said after the game. “We’d get the kick, get the stops, use our timeouts and then go attack on offence. We’re a really good two-minute team on offence. So, that was the reasoning for it. We didn’t stop them on the third down. They converted.”
Was Pep Hamilton the problem with Colts’ offence? At first, it looked like the Colts were completely scapegoating their previous offensive co-ordinator, Pep Hamilton, when they relieved him of his duties last week.
Was he to blame for a poorly designed offensive line? Or was he the reason Andrew Luck kept throwing the ball into double coverage? Hard to imagine, but after one game watching Rob Chudzinski co-ordinate the Colts offence you have to wonder if Hamilton was a large part of the Colts’ early-season issues.
There were immediate changes from Chudzinski, designing shorter passes to get the ball out of Luck’s hands quicker, and using more heavy packages and three–tight end sets to get the running game going and help provide Luck with more protection.
And the changes worked. Luck didn’t turn the ball over once against the league’s top-rated defence and the Colts quarterback only took one sack in 37 dropbacks.
The Colts offence finally looked like the unit that many expected to see heading into the season. Yes, it’s just one game but there were a lot of positive signs.
Vikings getting great play from interior defender: To league insiders, Linval Joseph is an ascending player in the middle of the Vikings’ defence, but he’s hardly a household name to the causal NFL fan.
Joseph had a quiet 2014 season after signing a lucrative free-agent deal with Minnesota, but the big defensive tackle is giving the Vikings a nice return on investment at the mid-point of the 2015 campaign.
The 27-year-old registered a career-high 10 tackles (including three for a loss)—a huge number for a defensive tackle—split a sack, and recorded three quarterback hits as he played a huge role in holding star running back Todd Gurley to just 3.7 yards per carry in their overtime victory over St. Louis.
Joseph dominated the line of scrimmage, which was crucial with fellow starter Sharrif Floyd out nursing an injury, and he is garnering a ton of respect inside the locker room of the surprising 6-2 Vikings.
“He’s having a Pro Bowl–type season,” defensive end Brian Robison said to reporters on Sunday. “I am going to lobby for him… He should go to the Pro Bowl. If he doesn’t, it’s a travesty.”
What’s up with Mike Evans? The Tampa Bay Buccaneers receiver is capable of greatness, as evidenced by his huge touchdown catch on Sunday or his impressive rookie season, but Evans had one of the stranger performances we’ve seen out of a receiver in quite some time in Sunday’s loss to the New York Giants.
While he recorded eight catches for over 150 yards, he also was credited with six dropped passes, which is the most by a single player in over a decade.
Rain might’ve been a contributing factor but even Evans seemed a bit dumbfounded after the game.
“I don’t know what it is,” Evans said, via the Tampa Bay Times. “I’ve got to work on wet-ball drills or something. I mean, the Giants receivers were catching them in the rain and I wasn’t and I live here. That’s unacceptable. I have to be better for this team. It was humid. It was wet, but it was humid and I kept sweating through my gloves. I put the rain gloves on and I dropped a third-down conversion and I had to keep changing them. The ball was too slick. That’s no excuse. I’ve got to catch those.”
No matter the weather, the Bucs need their prized wideout to be able to hold onto the ball.
Bears getting better: Their record might not show it, but the Chicago Bears are starting to show significant progress.
Coach John Fox has turned around franchises in the past and his coaching staff is making an immediate impact on his players, most notably quarterback Jay Cutler.
Cutler still has a knack for turnovers, as evidenced in Monday night’s road victory, but overall the Bears quarterback looked fantastic, going 27-for-40 for 345 yards while throwing for two touchdowns. Offensive co-ordinator Adam Gase has helped Cutler tighten up his game, and the QB is showing improvement out of the pocket. In Monday’s game he threw some perfectly executed jump balls to Alshon Jeffery against an undermatched secondary.
It was an impressive performance from one of the most engimatic players in the entire league.
