Full Blown Flukes

Summary: Current storylines the media is feeding fans that I ain’t buying or things that simply must be said 

The Cardinals are a real contender and Kyler is a special quarterback. Really man. Seriously.

Whoever concocted this idea that the Cardinals are contenders simply because their divisional race is neck and neck is an absolute lunatic to put it nicely. Kyler Murray as a passer this year has been one of the more uninspiring quarterbacks in the entirety of the NFL. Let’s do a little exercise here called how well did the Cardinals play in their winning contests? So first off is the game against the Rams with no offensive lineman, no Puka, and no Cooper Kupp. Nice blowout Cards! The second win came from a culmination of things. A Brock Purdy disaster class, Kyler’s legs, and the main determining factor which was the Niners being unable to kick the football with Jake Moody out. The Niners lost by one point, missed an extra point, and were unable to kick a field goal all game. If Moody played that contest the win was automatic for the Niners. The next win comes against the Chargers and boy did the Cardinals offense look inept in that contest. The Chargers had no wideouts that game as Will Dissly led the team in every major receiving statistic, which is not a recipe for success for any quarterback although Herbert passed for 350 yards. They lost the contest from a Jalen Reagor fumble at the Cardinals one yard line and a blown tackling angle on a Kyler scramble from Chargers rookie linebacker Junior Colson. The Cardinals won this contest by two points at home. Three insanely impressive wins so far due to Kyler’s prowess. Moving on to the next game against the Miami Dolphins the Cardinals eked out a win against Tua who did everything in his power to lose the football game. The Dolphins blew a big lead and the deciding factor of the contest was a Tua Tagovailoa fumble for a twenty yard loss that resulted in a Dolphins safety. This game was by far Kyler’s best, but as I mentioned the Dolphins got in their own way all contest. The Dolphins defense hasn’t looked good all season, which is why Kyler sliced them up so easily. Their last win just came against the Bears who gave up six sacks to a bottom three Cardinals pass rush. Man do the Bears suck. After the Caleb Williams led Bears offense punted four times and the Cards dominated Chicago on the ground for four quarters they walked out of the contest with an easy win. Now it’s time for Kyler to do his thing. Choke. People want to make fun of Baker and even created a cycle making fun of Baker’s shortcomings that highlights how people always get their hopes up and get let down by him, but Kyler should be the one Twitter memes makes fun of. Aside from the Call of Duty Curse the one thing you can always count on with Kyler is that he disappears at the end of the year when the lights get the brightest. Look at every year in his career and you’d realize this guy fades more than McQueen did as he exited his prime from being one of the best racers in the Cars circuit. All jokes aside, Kyler is a bad pocket passer, can’t really push the football down the field, and becomes an awful QB when you take away his ability to scramble with a stout scheme. He seems like a college player to me because his game isn’t anywhere near as polished as people would like you to think. He is not a top 15 quarterback. I said it. 

Mahomes is the second Tom Brady and the Chiefs are on top

Mahomes has managed to just do the simple things to keep the Chiefs afloat as an undefeated team, which is weird to say for an undefeated team. I say this because their offense is rough. Very rough. Kelce putting up historical 13 catch 100 yard performances, Kareem Hunt taking 20+ carries, and nothing else of note on this offense. Yes, DHop just destroyed a shabby Buccaneers cornerback room, but do we really think DeAndre Hopkins is going to make the Chiefs an unstoppable force as the season progresses towards the postseason. I don’t know about that. What I do know is that the Chiefs offense is not good whatsoever. In fact, it’s actually worse than just a season ago, yet the announcers calling Chiefs games are not allowed to slander the Almighty Patrick Mahomes. He’s amazing, spectacular, cute, quirky, glorious, and any other swell adjective you can think of. In all honesty though the Chiefs without Spagnuolo dialing up the league’s top defense would be near .500 this season and his scheme has single handedly kept this team afloat as Mahomes continues to check the ball down and protect the football. That is all he has needed to do in the regular season, but come postseason the firepower of this team, to me, isn’t enough to three-peat. It’s an ugly brand of football in comparison with previous unscathed teams in the history of the NFL to start the season. The Tom Brady led undefeated teams looked a lot better on offense than this current Kansas City squad that now has one wide receiver the team can lean on and a solid ground game. This team reminds me more of one of those Mike Tomlin defensive squads that unraveled as the season reached its conclusion and with the Ravens heating up, the Bills putting things together, Joe Burrow hungry for scraps even with a wild card spot, and the NFC looking formidable nowadays, the Chiefs might not even be a top three team in my personal power rankings when accounting for postseason projections as well. The Ravens biggest kryptonite was an abysmal receiving core. Now they have two great wideouts for the first time in Lamar’s career. The Josh Allen led Bills haven’t gotten a run and pass game going simultaneously over the past few seasons, now they have. That is the point I’m trying to make. Addressing the places where the Chiefs can exploit the AFC’s top teams will make for a finish where it isn’t just the Chiefs dominating once again. It’s far closer than ESPN and other media outlets act like it is. The Chiefs won’t make the Super Bowl this season. I promise you that. 

Caleb Williams is a generational quarterback.

Coming into this draft Caleb was touted as a plug and play quarterback for any franchise immediately upon entering the NFL. There were posts by the NFL with superstars and Caleb that said “NFL stars show out for fashion week!” Can we definitively say he’s an NFL star? No shot. The biggest knock against Justin Fields was his ability to process the field and his tendency to hold on to the football for too long. Caleb does the exact same thing, yet he’s just a rookie so people act like things will magically change after one offseason. This year Caleb has led an offense that has punted the ball at a top seven rate, has only eclipsed two hundred passing yards in four of Chicago’s eight contests, and has only had decent performances against bottom five defenses in the NFL. Go through it for yourself if you don’t believe me. Caleb ripped apart the Colts defense who has the worst secondary probably in the entirety of the NFL for 353 passing yards, the Panthers dumpster fire of a defense with 300 yards, and then limped to 200 yards against the Jaguars and Cardinals defenses that are both bottom ten units to be generous. There were people entering the year worried about the Bears winning the NFC North. Nick Wright said himself that the Bears will win this division, are a top five roster, and also have a shot at the Super Bowl. The thought being that an average QB would allow for the Bears to dominate against one of the easiest schedules in the entirety of the NFL. Wishful thinking, but their defense is something quite special. The only problem was that fans forgot the Bears have no offensive line whatsoever and that their receiving core wasn’t as formidable as people at home had thought. Keenan feasted off of unlimited opportunity in a Chargers offense last year that saw the field a million times due to their defense getting shelled, which is why people shouldn’t have been so scared of Allen coming into the season. Rome Odunze was a guy with solid talent, but was most definitely overhyped as a can’t miss superstar coming out of this year’s draft. DJ Moore. Nothing bad to say about him. The guy is an absolute stud who can dominate defenses in every single realm of an offense. Deep ball extraordinaire, running after the catch, breaking tackles while doing so, and running routes as well as any other receiver in the league. I’m not trying to say Caleb is an all time draft bust already, but I am squashing the narrative that he’s blooming into something special this season after the Bears routed the embarrassingly atrocious Jacksonville Jaguars in London a few weeks back. I mean c’mon. The touchdown to Kmet in that game where Caleb pump faked to each side of the field and hit Kmet for the most wide open touchdown you’ve ever seen definitely didn’t impress me all too much when it came to Caleb’s play. It looked like a high school trick play. And it worked perfectly against a high school level defense that is coached incredibly poorly in Jacksonville. Just let the guy play football and earn his stripes. Sick and tired of how the media shoves QB stardom down everyone’s throat even when the truth is far from what they pedal out to the consumer, us NFL fans. I ranked Caleb as my third QB in the draft behind Daniels and Maye at the top. Caleb was incredibly raw coming out of college, yet ESPN made it seem like he has played three seasons of NFL ball already. Another interesting development in the Williams saga is that it appears that DJ Moore doesn’t get along with the rookie all too well with his stats suggesting the narrative might be true. If Chicago finishes abysmal down the stretch here I’m curious to see the organization’s next step. 

Bengals entire coaching staff.

What have I witnessed this year with this current squad they have in place in Cincy? I mean how does a team blow the first game of the year by getting destroyed on the ground by Rhamondre Stevenson. This along with the team not being able to break a two high shell in coverage that New England threw at them all day was simply mind boggling. Then the next week the Bengals come out and blow a game to the Chiefs in the worst way imaginable. Outplayed them on every down except for two, which were a Joe Burrow fumble six when the offensive line missed three blocks, killing their QB, and a pass interference penalty on Rashee Rice that was such a pitiful penalty to commit. The ball was going over his head anyway and as a secondary player you decided to go and hit him early. It was one of those plays that made zero sense watching it live and the DB just let adrenaline get the best of him in a crucial moment for Cincy. How do you blow that play on 4th and 14? It really comes down to coaching. The next week the Commanders rip your defense to shreds in a home loss where your team was the biggest favorite of the entire week in the NFL. The next topic here that needs to be addressed is what the Bengals have done against the Ravens this year. It is seriously appalling. In their first matchup the Bengals and Ravens were going toe to toe in a shootout that went into overtime and Lamar immediately got the ball to midfield. After he moves the ball here he gets stripped, the ball rolls around, and the Bengals pounce on it around the Ravens forty yard line. Burrow has been absolutely unstoppable all day so the Bengals coasted to victory, right? No, instead Zac Taylor’s bunch opted to not get the team into better field goal range with a single passing attempt, but rather run the football three straight plays for a combined total of about four or five yards to set up a long field goal attempt. Botched snap, shanked kick, absolute nightmare, grounds for a coach to be fired, and lots of opinions from fans after the Bengals just punted away a free win in a massive game for their season. Then these two teams just met again two nights ago in a game where the Bengals once again pieced up a Ravens secondary, got out to a 21-7 lead early, and their defense looked a lot better than it has been. But, what do ya know the Bengals once again imploded on plays that were just embarrassing. The first one was Chase Brown fumbling on a routine run where Marlon Humphrey simply stole the ball from him leading to a Ravens score. As an NFL running back you’ve got to have better ball security than that. You can get hit with a surprise punch out and it makes sense, but this way, not so much. Then the Bengals blew three opportunities to tackle TYLAN WALLACE on an 84 yard touchdown. Who is that? These tackles were at the catch point, along the sideline where the linebacker decided to give Wallace a light shove instead of actually trying to wrap him up, and a safety who got stiff armed into oblivion after taking a miserable angle of pursuit. The effort level on this play would warrant benching in high school ball so I can only imagine what coaches would have to say in film after rewatching it. The play springboarded the Ravens comeback, but Joe Burrow scored a touchdown with 38 seconds left to give the Bengals a chance once again. Instead of kicking the extra point though Zac Taylor made one of the dumbest decisions of the season quite frankly. Why on earth would the Bengals go for two to go down by one point in a game they must win when they could get the ball in overtime and just end the game then and there? Even if Cincy scores Lamar would have nearly forty seconds and one timeout to move the Ravens into field goal range. That’s why the Lamar being unstoppable argument doesn’t hold too much merit. If your defense had zero shot of stopping him in overtime then how would the team shut him down with a forty yard field to get the Ravens into winnable field goal range. Zac Taylor’s days should be numbered, but somehow aren’t.

Bo Nix is a gamer!

This narrative is foolish, silly, and downright not true. He played well through a quarter of the Broncos vs Ravens game last week against one of the worst secondaries, if not the worst, in the National Football League. His play largely consists of tucking the ball and running it against some of the worst defenses imaginable or checking it down within a five to seven yard range and relying on his receivers to make huge plays after the catch. I haven’t seen him make one throw where I’m in awe and after hearing Tony Romo talk about Nix’s bright future it was a must to write about him. Nix has had two full games where he’s averaged under 3.5 yards per completion. Are you kidding me? This guy is up next? Against the Jets he won a game where he averaged 2.4 yards per completion, had a below 50% completion percentage, and led his team to ten points. It’s so terrible that people genuinely try to convince an avid football fan that Nix possesses a skillset whatsoever. If someone asked what his best attribute was it would have to be grit. Grinding away games against the Raiders, Saints, Panthers, and his only impressive win came against the Buccaneers. The only reason Denver has been in games is their defense. Beyond that they have no receiving core on offense, an alright run game, and Sean Payton is doing his thing coaching up his offense of checkdowns all day every day. Bo Nix has never been a quarterback that has been a polished passer or a guy who can even throw the football down the field at an average or slightly below average level. That’s why I can’t stand rhetoric of him being a serious football player considering his main appeal came from his physical tools and his above average athleticism as a QB. He made a phenomenal grab against the Ravens last week, but beyond that Bo Nix was completely ineffective all day through the air. That’s been a common occurrence in every Broncos game. It’s uninspiring to watch him play the game and his only successful year in college came from a scheme of checking the ball down to some of the fastest and most explosive players in college football. He was never asked to do much besides play in the system and take care of the football. Those were his only two obligations. Stop it. Stop it now. Don’t care that he is a rookie. He doesn’t even have a Blake Bortles ceiling.