Welcome to your Monday roundup of the best and worst of NFL Sunday — by which we mean the single very best thing and single very worst thing. Because the stuff in the middle doesn’t matter, really.
THE VERY BEST THING ABOUT THE NFL THIS WEEK: When it becomes obvious that the laughingstocks… just aren’t anymore. Parity in the NFL can be one of the worst things about the league. Not only is watching a bunch of 7-9, 8-8 and 9-7 teams fighting for a first-round playoff loss not a very compelling endgame to a season, but it keeps everyone treading in the same tepid water.
Better to have some truly great teams and some truly horrific ones — and, if they’re smart, even fans of those horrific teams would agree. That’s because there’s a chance all the awfulness will coalesce into something meaningful, and the perpetually ugly duckling will become something resembling a beautiful — okay, maybe not beautiful, but extremely effective — swan.
The Jacksonville Jaguars, Blake Bortles and all, are 5-3 and tied for the AFC South lead. The Los Angeles Rams — and ask Rams fans about 7-9 seasons under Jeff Fisher — are 6-2 and somehow leading the NFC West. Despite a loss to the Jets, the Buffalo Bills are now also 5-3 — just one game behind the Patriots — and somehow fans are clamouring for a Saints-BILLS game to be flexed into primetime next weekend.
But it’s the Jaguars and Rams who shined on Sunday, blowing out the Bengals and Giants by a combined score of 74-24. The Jaguars have the league’s best defence and scored another defensive touchdown.
And after scoring six TDs on Sunday, the Rams have… the league’s best offence?! Yeah, the league’s best offence, led by Jared Goff, who wouldn’t be playing for them if they hadn’t sucked two years ago.
Watching teams that have been laughed at for years bully perpetual playoff teams like the Giants and Bengals is one of the real pleasures in an NFL season otherwise in turns predictable and unwatchable. And full marks go to both front offices, both for conceiving of a blueprint and sticking to it, and for recognizing how close to a turnaround their clubs were and acquiring pieces — Sammy Watkins in L.A. and Marcel Dareus in Jacksonville — to reinforce their respective game plans.
When you look up at Red Zone on a Sunday and see a parade of Rams waltzing into the end zone or a series of Jaguars pouncing on loose footballs and cringing quarterbacks, something fundamental has shifted in the competitive landscape. And it’s about time.
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THE VERY WORST THING ABOUT NFL SUNDAY: It hurts when you see reminders that superstars are human. Especially in the biggest of situations. And it hurts when you realize that those same players might be heading down the other side of the hill… at 28 years old.
Julio Jones, for the past half-decade one of the men who has made football worth watching, has long been 1-2 with Antonio Brown for the Best Receiver In Football title. On Sunday, in Week 9 of a season with just one touchdown, this was what Jones was reduced to:
This isn’t the end of Julio Jones. But it is a reminder that he’s absorbed enough NFL punishment that he’s not the same player he was two or three years ago. The critical drop (it happened in the fourth quarter of a game the Falcons lost by three points to fall two full games behind New Orleans) is a nice, neat example, but the preponderance of evidence illustrates it, too.
Sunday was Jones’s second 100-yard game of the season, and he’s only got the one touchdown. He’s still frequently the best player on the field, but ask any of his fantasy owners or Falcons fans if they trust him to take over big games the way he did in his 1,800-plus yard season of 2015. If they answer honestly, their body language might look similar to Jones’s in the clip above.
