If you’re under the impression that NFL special teams have been particularly nervous this season, you’re completely and utterly right.
Still, as strange as teams have been through the first 11 weeks of the season, nothing compared to what happened on Sunday. There were a lot of kicking failures and mistakes, but on Sunday there were a lot more mistakes than usual.
Most notable of all was Austin Seibert of the Washington Commanders. The seven-year veteran entered Sunday perfect on extra points and 25 of 27 on his field goal attempts this season.
And then came the utter disaster Seibert faced against the Dallas Cowboys in the Commanders’ 34-26 loss. With 48 seconds left in the first quarter, Seibert missed a 51-yard field goal. No wonder, as his only two misses this season have come from 50 or more yards. After Jayden Daniels scored a touchdown on a 17-yard run with 9:59 left in the third quarter, Seibert missed his first extra-point attempt of the season. It didn’t seem like a big deal: Washington still went 9-3 against a Dallas team that had been woeful all season.
Seibert suffered another blow when his kickoff was returned 99 yards for a touchdown by KaVontae Turpin to give the Cowboys a 27-17 lead late in the fourth. That was bad news for the Commanders in the playoff race, but the touchdown had a lot more to do with Turpin’s skills than Seibert’s shortcomings. Seibert even kicked a 51-yard field goal with 1:40 left to cut the deficit to seven points and give the Commanders a faint glimmer of hope. And there is always hope against these cowboys. First, Dallas recovered Seibert’s onside kick, but was forced to punt. With 33 seconds left, Daniels hit Terry McLaurin for a miraculous 86-yard touchdown in which Dallas, as has become routine this season, forgot how to tackle.
The score was 27-26 and Seibert had no choice but to get the extra point and almost certainly send the game into overtime. You can guess how that he went.
However, more pain awaited Seibert. On the very next play after his fumble, he attempted an onside kick and Cowboys safety Juanyeh Thomas returned the damn thing for a 34-yard touchdown to put the game completely out of reach. Two straight games from Seibert cost his team a victory over a hated foe in a season where they began to reverse their recent reputation as a hapless franchise. It also condemned the 7-5 Commanders to their third straight loss, just as their NFC East rivals, the 9-2 Philadelphia Eagles, are on a seven-game winning streak. It’s hard to imagine a more painful stretch of the game for one player in NFL history. Seibert’s haunted expression told the story in a single image.
Give Seibert credit – after so many debacles, some players would rather drop something heavy on their leg than face the media, but he was defiant. He refused to pin the blame on the second missed extra point and refused to blame the hip injury that had caused him to miss the Commanders’ previous two games.
In a season where special teams have been anything but, Seibert will become the unfortunate personification of those struggles with one of the most painful games a player has ever had.
MVP of the week
Saquon Barkley, RB, Philadelphia Eagles. As if things weren’t bad enough for the 2-9 New York Giants (more on them in a minute). Barkley, a linebacker seen as replaceable this offseason, steamrolled a highly competent but very young Los Angeles Rams defense for 255 rushes and two TDs as the Eagles ran the Rams 37-20 on Sunday night. Pending the results of Monday’s game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Los Angeles Chargers, Barkley passed Baltimore’s Derrick Henry for the NFL lead in rushing yards with 1,392 yards to Henry’s 1,185. single game in NFL history.
Before Giants fans wonder where this was before, there’s no way to imagine this version of Barkley in New York — or anywhere else. He’s playing behind the best offensive line he’s ever had and has a quarterback in Jalen Hurts who amplifies Barkley’s rushing threat with his own mobility. It’s a prime example of a perfect player in a perfect situation and another personnel hit for Big Blue.
Video of the week
The Carolina Panthers played the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs much closer than anyone expected. In fact, it was 27-27 with 1:49 left after Carolina converted a two-point attempt.
So the Panthers gave the ball back to the Chiefs and hoped Patrick Mahomes didn’t do something ridiculous. This hope, of course, was in vain. With 48 seconds left, Mahomes went on a 33-yard run that got the ball to Carolina’s 22-yard line and set up Spencer Shrader’s game-winning field goal as time expired.
If you think you’ve seen something like this before… well, you pretty much have. In last season’s Super Bowl, the score was 22-19 in favor of the San Francisco 49ers before Mahomes’ 19-yard scramble set up his game-winning touchdown pass to Mecole Hardman three plays later.
As has been the case with most of the Chiefs’ 10 wins this season, it wasn’t pretty … but a win is a win.
Status of the week
Aside from Seibert, there were few kicking offenses on Sunday, and it’s been that way all season (along with a few heroics). But before you think this is happening at an unusual rate in 2024, let’s not let recency bias steer things in the wrong direction. Through the first 11 weeks of the 2024 season, players have made 84.9% of their field goals and 96.5% of their extra point attempts. Over the past decade, field goal percentages have been lower in every season from 2014 through 2020, and the success rate is just one percentage point lower than last season’s 85.9%. And the extra point rate this season was the highest since kickers hit an amazing 99.3% in 2014.
Pro Football Reference tells us there has been an increase in field goal attempts of 50 or more yards this season, which would explain some of the misses, but it’s not a massive change from the last decade. It has always been said that kicking is an inconsistent and unpredictable art.
Elsewhere in the league
Late in the third quarter of Minnesota’s 30-27 win over the Chicago Bears, Vikings quarterback Sam Darnold appeared to hit Jordan Addison on a 69-yard play.
The question was whether Addison stepped off the board before completing his trek for the catch. According to the replays, it looked like they had — but after the officials reviewed the play, the original decision was upheld.
Normally, most people would chalk this up to another instance of the officials making the call, but this and other replay decisions have a subversive and incomprehensible context. As former NFL VP of officiating Mike Pereira explained, the league isn’t allowed to use sideline cameras when viewing tapes because not all stadiums have them, and if such tapes were allowed if there were those in the stadium that didn’t have them, it would be throwing parity out. through the window.
In 2023, the NFL’s total revenue will exceed $13 billion. Even the most technically impressive cameras available for the NFL tend to come in under $10,000: we’re guessing NFL teams could easily pool their money to cover the cost of putting them in each stadium. Price is not a problem. Income is not the problem. Why the NFL hasn’t standardized their technology in this regard is beyond me.
— No quarterback ever wants to be benched, but there’s something to be said for the practice of benching a young signal-caller so he can spend time processing the intricacies of NFL playbooks and the speed of NFL defenses. Bryce Young, who looked like one of the worst early draft picks in the league during his rookie season in 2023 and throughout this campaign, found himself benched for Andy Dalton three games into the Panthers’ season. He didn’t get the starter’s job back until Week 8.
But Young has started to look more comfortable in his role off the bench, and he absolutely was in Carolina’s loss to the Chiefs. Young completed 21 of 35 passes for 263 yards, a touchdown, no interceptions and a 92.9 passer rating. Lead defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo repeatedly attacked Young, and Young threw those blitzes right in Spags’ face. Young impressed on a season-high 40.0% of his dropbacks and completed 11 of his 14 passes for 123 yards and a touchdown against multiple disruptors. The tape matched the metrics; Young looks like a different quarterback now.
— Of course, benchbacks don’t always work. If you thought things couldn’t get any worse for the New York Giants after they benched and then released Daniel Jones … well, think again. In Big Blue’s 30-7 embarrassment to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday, backup Tommy “Cutlets” DeVito completed 21 of 31 passes for 189 yards, no touchdowns, no interceptions and an 83.9 passer rating. In the first half, before things got out of hand and the Bucs played more relaxed coverage, DeVito completed just three of five passes for 31 yards.
Malik Nabers, a 2024 first-round pick, wasn’t targeted until the third quarter and wasn’t thrilled about it at all.
“It’s not about the quarterback,” Nabers said after the game. “The same thing happened when DJ [Jones] was a quarterback. Go there, first quarter and second quarter, don’t get the ball and goals at the end. You can’t do that. We started to win the ball when it was 30:0. What do you want me to do?”
Nabers said the media should “talk to Dabs” [head coach Brian Daboll] about it. Nabers also called the performance “soft,” and he wasn’t the only one. All-time defensive leader Dexter Lawrence said the Giants “played soft and [the Buccaneers] he’s going to beat the shit out of us today.”
The Giants are 2-9 in a season that disappeared no matter how they circled before, and Daboll is 17-27-1 in his Giants career. The numbers are bad enough, but with your best players openly questioning the coaching and effort, it looks like Daboll will be the next Giant looking for a new job.
Oh … and aside from Barkley’s effort on Sunday, it was a very good day for the rest of the former Giants. Defensive end Leonard Williams had 2.5 sacks for the Seattle Seahawks in a 16-6 win over the Arizona Cardinals and safety Xavier McKinney had his seventh interception of the season for the Green Bay Packers in a 38-10 loss over the San Francisco 49ers. If it wasn’t the worst day in Giants history, it was certainly on the shortlist.