Our Morning Aftermath feature has been, like so many other things that have appeared on the site over the years, a work in progress.
For the first several weeks, the key word has been “work.”
We’ve been putting a lot of time each Monday into cobbling together an analysis of every game played on Sunday -- an exercise that keeps me away from being fully engaged in the flow of news that emerges the day after a bunch of NFL games.
So we’re going to try something different this week, especially since I’m getting on a train out of New York at noon and I don’t have the luxury of spending nine non-stop hours to take an in-depth look at 14 contests, less however many I could have “delegated” to MDS and Rosenthal.
In past years, I’ve done a “10-pack” of takes on Mondays. Since I’ve exported that title to SportingNews.com, where it’s used on Fridays during the season and whenever else a topic can be broken up into 10 parts, I won’t call this a “10-pack.” But we’re breaking the thing into 10 parts. And we’re putting it in one pack.
They’ll be popping up one at a time until all are posted. Before posting “change it back, asshole” in the comments, we ask that you at least give it a quick read.
Then you can post “change it back, asshole” in the comments.
1. Broncos need smelling salts.
Early in the third quarter of Sunday’s game between the Chargers and the Broncos, a CBS camera captured images of receiver Eddie Royal taking multiple whiffs of an ammonia packet.
While waiting to return a punt.
But he hadn’t just been knocked out or otherwise popped in the melon. The punt came at the end of the first drive of the third quarter. So while Royal might have banged his hat while getting shoved around on the sidelines by Knowshown Moreno and/or Brandon Marshall, Royal didn’t need the ammonia for anything that had happened in the game at any point since the second quarter.
Perhaps Royal, like Seahawks coach Jim Mora during his time in Atlanta, uses the ammonia to get that extra pop, sort of like a deux deux deux. With Royal’s team now in a full-out free fall after a 32-3 loss at home to San Diego, they all could benefit from sucking the stuff into their lungs -- it might be the only thing that wakes up a slumbering franchise that has lost four in a row after winning its first six.
After the game, Marshall generally called out some of his teammates for playing like they need to be huffing ammonia. (Or taking copious amounts of Canadian aspirin.)
“There were guys on the sideline that weren’t angry, who didn’t have a lot of emotion. And they need to look at themselves in the mirror,” Marshall said after the game, per Nancy Gay of AOL’s FanHouse. “This is a game where you’ve got to have it. And none of us can make any terrible plays.”
Marshall and Moreno’s moment of jostling occurred because Moreno, in Marshall’s estimation, made a “terrible play,” fumbling on the goal line during quarterback Kyle Orton’s first drive of the game, which came after the Chargers had extended the lead to 13-0.
The fact that Orton, who didn’t take a snap in practice all week with an ankle injury, even played shows that coach Josh McDaniels realizes the team is desperate. Ultimate proof of that mindset came from an onside kick after the Broncos managed a field goal on the drive that began with Royal’s ammonia-enhanced 10-yard punt return. The Chargers then took the ball down the short field for a touchdown that pushed the lead to 20-3 and, as a practical matter, put the game out of reach.
As it turns out, McDaniels’ ill-advised decision to call for an onside kick wasn’t the dumbest thing he did on Sunday. Reports emerged last night that the first-year head coach taunted the Chargers defense before the game.
Maybe, in McDaniels’ defense, it was the ammonia talking.
2. Last year’s Cinderellas are headed for possible pumpkin status.
The remarkable 2007 turnarounds from a trio of downtrodden franchises helped bolster the sense that anything can happen in the NFL -- on any given Sunday and in any given season.
This year, however, the bottom could be dropping out for the Ravens, Falcons, and Dolphins. A season after each made it to the playoffs, all three are 5-5 with six games to play.
Though the Dolphins should be feeling good about themselves because they’ve climbed to .500 via a two-game winning streak, the Ravens and Falcons both started the year strong and then faded. And both had a chance to pull off a big win against teams led by one of the Manning brothers not named Cooper on Sunday.
After a sluggish first half in a game played without starting tailback Michael Turner, the Falcons scored 24 points on only four second-half drives, losing in overtime after losing the coin toss. (More on that later.) For the Ravens, an interception by Indy linebacker Gary Brackett inside the Colts 15 with less than three minutes to play cemented the two-point margin, and sent the Ravens to yet another close-game defeat.
Though there’s still a long way to go before the dust settles, the road won’t be free of talking potholes. The Ravens play the Steelers twice and visit Green Bay. The Dolphins play the Patriots, Steelers, Texans, Jaguars, and Titans.
The Falcons seem to have the cleanest path to a turnaround, with four of six games at home including the two toughest matchups -- visits from the Eagles and Saints.
Either way, three teams that made big splashes in 2009 are now forced to scramble for a chance to get back to the postseason, and it’s possible that none of them will make it.
3. The Bengals aren’t ready for prime time.
We’ve been sounding the alarm for weeks now.
The Bengals, despite showing up and kicking tail whenever scheduled to play the Ravens and Steelers, cannot be trusted to perform like an elite team when facing a not-so-elite team.
Just ask the hapless Browns, who took the Bengals to the final seconds of overtime in the Sunday sandwiched between three-point Cincy wins over the other two AFC North teams.
And so after sweeping four games from last season’s conference finalists, it’s fitting that the Bengals fumbled away a prime opportunity to gain even more separation from Pittsburgh and Baltimore, both of whom lost during Sunday’s early action.
It appeared that Bengals would take care of the Raiders easily, after building a 14-point lead against a team that had given the quarterback job to Bruce Gradkowski, whose only prior experience against a Mike Zimmer defense, back in 2006, resulted in a 38-10 loss and a passer rating south of 30.
But the Raiders methodically chipped away at the lead, ultimately pulling off a Heidi-style finish (the folks in Oakland missed the final seconds . . . along with the rest of the game) via a last-minute, game-tying 29-yard touchdown pass from Gradkowski to Louis Murphy, followed by an Andre Caldwell fumble on the kickoff, followed by a game-winning field goal from the other bald-headed Raider of Polish ancestry.
If the Bengals were as good as their 7-2 record and 4-0 mark against Pittsburgh and Baltimore indicated, Cincy would have won that game -- and they would have won it handily. The real question is whether, with the Browns and Lions looming, the Bengals can finally play like a great team when facing a franchise at the other end of the spectrum.
Until further notice, we don’t think they can.
4.Dusting off the overtime debate.
We despise the current overtime rules in the NFL. The notion of sudden-death is bad enough; the idea that one team gets the exclusive shot at delivering the death blow via the arbitrary tossing of a coin makes the approach wholly unacceptable.And since we can’t articulate the situation any better than Bob Costas did during halftime of Sunday night’s game, we’ll yield the remainder of our time to the Senator from Missouri.
The “epic Super Bowl” to which Costas referred could have been the most recent Super Bowl, if Santonio Holmes hadn’t managed to get his second foot down in the back corner of the end zone. (Then again, most Arizona fans still insist he didn’t.) I was at the game and rooting for overtime, in the hopes that the ridiculous nature of the current system would be exposed to the millions of non-football fans who watch the Super Bowl because they feel socially obligated to do so. If either team had won the game via a three-pointer on the first possession after winning the coin toss, the outcry would have been defeaning -- and the rule would have been changed, possibly in time for kickoff of the Pro Bowl.
We continue to believe that an outcome like that would result in a change to the rule. So why not recognize what would happen if what happened in New York on Sunday ever happens in a Super Bowl game, and then fix the situation before the worst-case scenario unfolds?
5. Cartwright! . . . Cartwright!
We’ve always liked Redskins running back Rock Cartwright. Not for substantive reasons like the quality of his play or any of the charitable off-field projects in which he’s involved or because he’s not a big jerk, but because his name is “Cartwright,” and whenever we mention it we then can run a link to the “Cartwright! . . . Cartwright!” scene from the Chinese restaurant episode of Seinfeld.
But Cartwright (Cartwright!) gave us something more to discuss than his name on Sunday. With starter Clinton Portis gone, again, due to a concussion and Ladell Betts lost early in the game with multiple knee ligament tears, Cartwright was the bright spot for a Washington offense that managed only six points on Sunday, and yet somehow almost stole a win.
Cartwright contributed 140 yards of total offense (67 rushing and 73 receiving). Though not as potent as the three-headed Dallas monster of Marion Barber, Felix Jones, and Tashard Choice, the Portis-Betts-Cartwright combination is a strong one, even if one or more of them will be gone in 2010, when a new coach -- and possibly a new front office -- is in town.
A big part of the problem is that, by running back standards, they’re all getting brittle in the cartilage. Betts is 30, Cartwright will join him at that number before the end of the year, and Portis is an old 28, with 2,418 career touches.
Still, with Portis still recovering and Betts possibly gone for multiple weeks, we could be getting a heavy dose of Cartwright! over the balance of the season.
6. There’s hope for Thanksgiving.
The good news about Sunday’s overblown none-of-the-above one-point win by the previously 1-8 Lions over the currently 1-9 Browns is that, as the Thanksgiving tilts (unfortunately typo narrowly avoided) approach, there actually might be some mild interest in the early game, which features Green Bay at Detroit.
Throw in an Oakland upset over Cincinnati and a subpar performance by the Cowboys in a one-point win over the Redskins, and the afternoon game becomes more interesting (or, as the case may be, less uninteresting), too.
Not that it matters. We’ll watch the Thanksgiving games because, on Thanksgiving, we gather in a room of family members and stare at a television until the tryptophan kicks in.
So save the good games for Sunday night or Monday night, and put the crappy ones on Thanksgiving. It’s tradition.
More importantly, it’s good business.
And who knows? Maybe a game that was expected to be crappy, like Browns-Lions, will end up being not so crappy, after all.
7. What if Saints and Colts don’t lose?
For the first time since 1990 -- and only the third time ever -- two teams have made it to 10-0.
Last time around, the Giants and 49ers were on a collision course to meet on a Monday night. Both lost before they got together in the regular season, and then they got together again in the NFC title game, with New York ending San Fran’s bid for a third straight Super Bowl win.
This time, the Saints and the Colts won’t be playing each other, until the Super Bowl. So what if they both continue to win?
The Colts have had to resort to luck the past three weeks, scraping out close wins against the Texans, Patriots, and Ravens. Chances are it won’t continue. But who knows?
The Saints looked great on Sunday, and Sean Payton thinks they’re getting better. They’ll need all that and more next Monday night, when the Patriots come to New Orleans.
We wouldn’t recommend wagering anything of value on a meeting of 18-0 teams in Miami. Until one of them loses, however, it remains possible -- and with each passing week the prospect of Peyton Manning’s team facing Archie Manning’s team becomes more and more interesting.
8. AFC’s starting to look like the NFC
In past years, the NFC playoff field has been only slightly more exclusive than a public golf course, with nine wins being good enough for admission and with 13 of 16 teams playing at least one round in the past three years. The AFC, in contrast, has had a country-club quality for most of the decade, with 11 wins often the mandatory minimum. Last season, the Patriots showed up with one donut short of a dozen -- and they were turned away at the door.
This year, the AFC could be slumming it. Apart from division leaders, no team has a record of better than 6-4 through 10 games.
Though one of those 6-4 second-place teams (Steelers, Jaguars, Broncos, and if they win tonight the Texans) could get hot down the stretch, that would still leave a spot for someone to staggers in with nine wins.
In the end, there could be a cluster of 8-8 teams who qualify only after the application of various tiebreakers, with the extremely remote possibility of admission being determined by the flip of a coin.
Hey, if it’s good enough for determining who’ll get exclusive possession of the ball in overtime of a Super Bowl, it’s good enough to determine which team will grab the last ticket to the AFC postseason party.
9. Eagles dodge a cannonball.
Last year at this time, the Eagles had fallen to 5-5-1, in the game that resulted in the highly-publicized benching of quarterback Donovan McNabb.
This year, the Eagles could have slid back to 5-5 again, if the Bears didn’t seem to be generally ambivalent regarding the concept of winning football games.
It was a flat, uninspiring affair, with flashes of high-end ability (and Devin Hester’s bare ass) that were too few and too far between. (The high-end ability, not the rear-end images.) And while, thanks to the two Seans, the Eagles found a way to keep pace with the 6-4 Giants and the 7-3 Cowboys, Philly simply doesn’t have the look or feel of a team that is destined to get back to the NFC title game, or beyond.
But as we learned last year, via a 9-7 Cardinals team dubbed by many as the worst franchise ever to qualify for the postseason, any team that finds a golden ticket in a box of paper could get hot at the right time, and then ride that momentum all the way to the playoffs.
Assuming that the Eagles can’t score a seat at the tournament table or look dreadful once they get there, look for speculation to commence regarding a possible house cleaning -- or at a minimum an involuntary passing of the baton from McNabb to Kevin Kolb.
10. Vikings won’t be going away quietly.
Though the Saints currently seem to be preparing for a date with destiny, there’s a team in Minnesota that could do to the team in New Orleans what the team from Atlanta did to the team from Minnesota eleven years ago.
In 1998, the Vikings were the toast of the league, finishing the season 15-1 and sporting one of the best offenses the game ever had seen. Quietly (relatively speaking), the Falcons built a 14-2 record, but they were still regarded as inferior to the immediate precursor to the Greatest Show on Turf.
And so in three-plus hours on a Sunday in January 1999, the Vikings saw the Falcons derail their dream season.
This year, it would be far less shocking if the Vikings find a way to fell the Saints.
The biggest difference comes from a quarterback with extensive postseason experience, who at age 40 generated a career-best display of accuracy on Sunday, completing 22 of 25 passes for 213 yards and four touchdowns.
The best news was that the Vikings were able to give Brett Favre some extra rest on Sunday against the Seahawks, removing him from the game once the outcome was no longer in doubt. Down the stretch, rest for Favre will be critical; they need him to be as fresh and as healthy as possible come January, especially with two teams of destiny apparently destined to collide at some point in the playoffs.
