We’ll be getting you my Ten Takeaways earlier this season, publishing them late on Sunday nights. So here goes—with the rest of my usual reporting coming on Monday …
The 49ers are the best team in the league. This, of course, is always subject to change. But the complete suffocation of the Steelers—in Pittsburgh, no less—was something to behold. And the numbers really do tell you everything you need to know.
• At one point in the second quarter, the disparity in yards from scrimmage was 199–1.
• The Steelers picked up their initial first down with 1:16 left in the first half. By then, they were down 20–0.
• Through three quarters, the Niners had 334 yards to the Steelers’ 133, 19 first downs to Pittsburgh’s nine, and nearly 30 minutes of possession.
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The beatdown was so thorough that Nick Bosa, playing just three days after reporting to San Francisco to sign a brand-new five-year, $175 million extension (we’ll have more on that on the site Monday), was able to play every snap and adhere to the Niners’ plan to pace him a bit—simply because the Steelers had so few offensive plays that there was no need to pull him from the game in the first half.
And it’s not a mistake, either. Next to Bosa was big-ticket free-agent tackle Javon Hargrave and behind him was Fred Warner, who looked like a create-a-player in this game. The secondary has Charvarius Ward and Talanoa Hufanga, who both had picks. And the offense has the best left tackle of the last 10 years, in Trent Williams, and an embarrassment of skill-position riches (Christian McCaffrey, Brandon Aiyuk, Deebo Samuel and George Kittle).
“I kind of say this every year, just because of how confident I am in our [front office and coaches] and the players that we have,” Bosa told me after the game. “But adding [Javon] Hargrave and Clelin [Ferrell] and a few of the other guys, I just knew that we were going to be back talent-wise to 2019. Or, I think, better even with depth. It was tough to not be a part of it [during training camp], because every year we’re expecting to go the whole way.”
At least based on what you can take from one week, I’d say that’s a pretty fair expectation.
And especially if Brock Purdy keeps playing the way he did (a 111.3 QB rating) in Pittsburgh.
While we were all fretting over whether the Packers were going to be O.K. without Aaron Rodgers, there were a lot of players in green and gold who didn’t go anywhere. It’s easy to forget now, but the Packers’ rosters of 2020 and ’21 were regarded as being right there among the best the future Hall of Famer has ever played on—and the guys who made it up didn’t forget how to play, with all due respect to Rodgers, when he walked out the door.
David Bakhtiari and Elgton Jenkins, with five Pro Bowls between them, still anchor the offensive line. Aaron Jones is still the tailback. Rashan Gary, Jaire Alexander and Kenny Clark are still out there on defense. And all those guys had to listen as the Packers were dissected like a team that just got gutted, rather than one that lost one guy (great as he might be) and a few ancillary pieces.
“I don’t know how that affects them,” Packers coach Matt LaFleur told me, as the team was leaving Chicago and heading home. “I mean, you’re talking about some of the better players at their respective positions in the league, so I’m sure these guys have a lot of confidence. As far as it affects them? I’ll be honest with you, I don't know. I think they’re prideful dudes and they just love to compete and it really doesn’t matter. They’re just trying to put their best out there each and every day and let it show through on Sundays.”
We can say definitively now that it did in Chicago, in how sturdy the infrastructure around first-year starting quarterback Jordan Love was.
Now, Love was plenty good Sunday, throwing for 245 yards, three touchdowns, and a 123.2 rating against the Bears. But he didn’t carry the Packers—mostly because no one asked him to, or needed him to. Solid punt returns gave him short fields for two scoring drives. Quay Walker had a pick-six. Aaron Jones took a choice route on a fourth-and-3 for a 35-yard touchdown.
And there’s no shame in any of this, for the quarterback or anyone else. It’s actually how it should be, with a young quarterback stepping in as his team is ready to support him in so many ways.
Of course, eventually, there’ll come a time when Love has to do more.
But there’s no need to rush that. Especially since, around him, there are a bunch of guys who’ve had plenty of success and, now, suddenly have something brand new to prove.
It’s at a point where I’m not sure there’s a historical comp for Tyreek Hill. Eight years into his career, the Dolphins’ star still plays like a podcast stuck on 1.5x speed, with the rest of the NFL world at 1x—and it’s no less remarkable watching him make just about everyone else look slow than it was when Alex Smith was throwing to him in 2016 and ’17.
You saw what he did Sunday. You saw how helpless J.C. Jackson looked on Hill’s 35-yard touchdown, and how impossible it was for Ja’Sir Taylor to keep up with him on the crucial 47-yarder in the fourth quarter. You saw the numbers—11 catches for 215 yards and two touchdowns—that came even with the Chargers having to know what was coming. So you should see how remarkable it is, in a league full of freakishly fast people, that one guy keeps showing how he can roll in game action like no other player can.
SHEESH 😮💨😮💨😮💨@tua x @cheetah pic.twitter.com/W4GEvmZ8tJ
— Miami Dolphins (@MiamiDolphins) September 10, 2023
TUA AND TYREEK ARE DIALED IN.
— NFL (@NFL) September 10, 2023
📺: #MIAvsLAC on CBS
📱: Stream on #NFLPlus https://t.co/G4uoYVOqQn pic.twitter.com/XtaJZDwKhA
Which is to say in the afternoon’s wildest game, a 36–34 barnburner of a win for Miami over the Chargers, and as good as Tua Tagovailoa was as his quarterback, one star stood alone.
"Obviously, he’s just gifted,” Dolphins edge rusher Jaelan Phillips, who had a game-saving sack Sunday (we’ll have more on that Monday), told me. “He’s just different than anybody else. It’s also his work ethic. Somebody like him who has all the talent in the world could get comfortable and take it easy and not feel like they have to work as hard. He’s somebody who comes into work every day and gives it his all. That’s a testament to him and what he’s done his whole career, his whole life really. He’s just different.
“That’s the only way to describe it. He’s different.”
That’s a pretty big reason why these Dolphins, so long as they keep Tagovailoa healthy, might be different, too. The offense is the NFL’s fastest, because of Hill and Jaylen Waddle. Maybe by a healthy margin. The defense now has Vic Fangio at the controls, who, to say the least, is a pretty good play-calling counterpoint to what the offense has in Mike McDaniel. That group will eventually get Jalen Ramsey back.
And over time, the two units have tested each other, which is one reason why the defense could roll with the bodyblows the Chargers dealt it, and keep swinging until Phillips landed the knockout blow. It’s also why, truth be told, the defense saw what Hill and the offense did Sunday coming.
“Honestly, none of us are surprised,” Phillips says. “This is what they’ve been doing day-in and day-out for the last two years. We talk about victory, the game isn’t won on Sunday. The game is won in all the preparation that we do. We weren’t surprised at all. But every time we see it, it’s just amazing. Really proud of them and glad they could come through for us.”
Next up for the Dolphins? A trip to Foxborough next Sunday. Hill, for what it’s worth, has gone over 100 yards twice against New England—in his first two games facing Bill Belichick. In four games since then, he’s had 62, 64, 94 and 55 yards against the Patriots, though he won three of those four (he’s 4–2 all-time against the Patriots).
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Sunday was a really awesome day for Commanders fans. That the home team won was a nice bonus, of course—mostly because losing to the lowly Cardinals would’ve been a pretty brutal buzzkill for a crowd drunk on change after a quarter century of Dan Snyder. That said, to those there at FedExField, this felt like a lot more than a win. It felt like the sleeping giant that once was a regional fan base reaching well into the South shaking off the cobwebs and coming awake.
Eventually, of course, it’ll take more for new owner Josh Harris to keep the masses engaged.
But Sunday did show that those folks are more than willing to show up like they used to if Harris can prove that he’ll be a lot more than Snyder-in-nicer-packaging.
“That was the best crowd I’ve seen in my career at Washington,” says seventh-year Commander Jonathan Allen, who spent parts of his childhood in Maryland and Virginia. “So I’m glad we were able to pull a win for them. They really showed up in numbers and made it hard on the other team. I’m glad we were able to get our act together and get the win really for them, for the city. Being one of the longest senior guys, behind Tress [Way], it just feels good to be able to play in the city that I went to high school in and grew up in and was a fan of.
“I just love it,” he told me. “So it is really special every time we get a win at home and it was a good feeling today.”
It wasn’t close to perfect, to be sure. The Commanders were down 13–7 in the final minutes of the first half and 16–10 going into the fourth quarter, and only took the lead after a Montez Sweat strip-sack led to a Da’Ron Payne fumble recovery that put the offense at the Arizona 29. That set up a modest seven-play, 29-yard drive capped by a six-yard scramble by new starting quarterback Sam Howell for a touchdown.
But, again, after all these fans have been through, they’ll take the celebration the day was, and the celebration even this style of win led to, if only because the promise of so much more is now out there in a way it wasn’t as long as Snyder owned the team. And that promise, by the way, sits on a two-way street, with the D.C.-area native Harris well aware of what’ll follow from the fans if he holds up his end of the bargain.
“People don’t understand how crazy our fan base is,” Allen says. “[When] they talk about the NFC East, people think of Dallas and Philadelphia. People don’t understand how crazy our fan base used to be. So it feels good to slowly work to get that back to our former glory. Obviously it’s one win, there’s a lot of room to clean up, a lot of plays that we need to make and not give up. But it’s a good start.”
And certainly better than the alternative folks there got for 24 years.
One potential underrated story line of Week 1: The difference Jim Schwartz could make on the Browns’ defense. And, yeah, I know. The weather in Cleveland was dreadful. Joe Burrow had barely practiced coming off his calf injury. The Bengals were ushering in a new left tackle, with the old one flipping to the right side. It’s the first game.
So take all this with a grain of salt. But …
• Burrow finished 14-of-31 for 82 yards and a 52.2 rating—which is the first passer rating of lower than 60 he’s posted over his four-year career.
• The Browns held Ja’Marr Chase to 39 yards on five catches and Tee Higgins, targeted eight times, out of the box score altogether.
• Cleveland held the Bengals to three points, their lowest total since Burrow’s rookie year (2020), which was also the last time Cincinnati failed to score a touchdown in a game.
And all of that was capped with a Myles Garrett sack on fourth-and-4 in the fourth quarter with Cleveland up 16–3. The Browns scored again three plays after that to make it 24–3, and after another three-and-out, Zac Taylor pulled Burrow and most of the rest of his starters.
O.K., so we already gave you the reasons why this might be fool’s gold. Schwartz, to me, is the reason why it might not be—and if you talk to the players, they’ll tell you. They believe a group that already had talent is playing a lot faster, and swarming, now that it has a simplified scheme.
“It’s just playing more aggressive, just super aggressive, trusting our guys out there to make plays and not trying to overcomplicate anything,” corner Greg Newsome II, a linchpin of the effort to slow the Bengals’ star-studded receiver group, told me after the game. “That’s the biggest difference that he’s had. … We game plan people, but at the end of the day, we know how talented we are. That’s what we try to do, is focus on our talents.”
And that worked like a charm Sunday. Will it be sustainable? Schwartz’s track record—from being the boy-wonder DC in Tennessee to building the groups he did in Detroit to winning a Super Bowl with the Eagles—would suggest it sure might be. Which could change the dynamic a little in what might be the toughest division in football.
The Rams’ complete evisceration of the Seahawks might be the biggest surprise of the weekend. I say that, of course, as somebody who was surprised. As somebody who thought Seattle would be (and is) really good—I had Pete Carroll’s crew in the NFC title game. But also as somebody who thought the Rams would be a little better than some of the doomsdayers out there who idiotically thought the team was tanking for a certain quarterback who plays for the private school across town.
USC’s Caleb Williams won’t be a Ram, to be clear, because a team is going to have to be the worst in the league to get him and, so long as Sean McVay’s the coach, the Rams won’t be that.
That said, Los Angeles is a team that’s carrying $75 million in dead money for 2023, meaning roughly a third of its spending limit is devoted to players no longer on the team. The team also counts 19 rookies on its 53-man roster, which is more a necessity with that numbers crunch than it is any sort of youth movement. The Rams were also a team faced with a rising, loaded Seahawks group on Sunday in one of the NFL’s most hostile environments.
And somehow, the Seahawks didn’t stand a chance, getting outgained 426 to 180 in a 30–13 Rams rout. Afterward, McVay told reporters, “There was a grittiness, there was a toughness, there was a resilience on display from this team. And I loved it.”
Left unsaid was how foolish it was for anyone to bet against him, or his once-again-healthy quarterback, Matthew Stafford, who threw for 334 yards in Seattle. Remember, the Rams were decimated by injury last year, and went 5–12, yet they blew out the Broncos and hung tough with the Packers and Seahawks in the last month of the season. And so, again, the idea that anyone there was tanking on the watch of those two never made sense.
But what we saw Sunday? I didn’t see that coming either.
Brad Rempel/USA TODAY Sports
That said, I’m not really stunned that the Buccaneers showed up the way they did. Like the Rams, Tampa Bay may be cleaning out its cap this year, and the Bucs may be younger in a lot of key spots because of it, but there are simply too many people in that operation who’ve accomplished too much for the franchise to roll over for a season.
What’s more, I actually think that makes Baker Mayfield the perfect quarterback for the team Tampa’s got. Here’s what the former Brown, Panther and Ram said to the Tampa Bay Times after Sunday’s game in Minnesota: “The key pieces that were a huge part of that Super Bowl run, and their success recently, they’re all still here. It’s a different hunger because, unfortunately, the narrative is that Tom [Brady]’s gone and we suck.”
Lucky enough for those guys, they now have a quarterback who basically made a brand of being doubted or dismissed, and come back at that with the heat of a thousand suns.
So it makes sense that it’s Mayfield who replaced Brady, and Mayfield who got the Bucs to a gritty 20–17 win in Minnesota. And to me, there were two fourth-quarter plays that illustrated it. One was a fourth-and-1 conversion on a sneak from the Tampa 32 with 8:18 left and the game tied at 17—a big gamble from Todd Bowles—to extend a drive that led to a game-winning, 57-yard field goal. The second was a four-yard scramble on a third-and-4 on the next possession, where Mayfield tight-roped the sideline and willed his way past the marker to put the game away (a third-and-10 connection with Chris Godwin three plays later would clinch it).
Now, I have no idea how far the Bucs, or Mayfield, are going to go with this. But they showed Sunday that they have a little something, sort of like the Rams do, with too much pride to just go away because of the circumstance that they’re in.
The Eagles didn’t quite look like the Eagles. That, first, is a credit to the Patriots, who showed some real upside on Tom Brady Day at Gillette Stadium, with a defense that should be among the league’s best and a quarterback, in Mac Jones, who looked reinvigorated under new OC Bill O’Brien. After that, we can get to what Nick Sirianni said after Philly survived a wet, ugly day in Massachusetts.
And specifically where he thought the problem was for his offense in the Eagles’ 25–20 win.
“I’ll definitely re-evaluate some of the preseason stuff next year,” he told reporters. “Maybe I should have played [Jalen Hurts] a series or two this preseason, and I already wrote that in my notes. You know, second thought, if I had to do it over again right now, I would say, yeah, I would have played starters one or two drives in the preseason.”
It’s an interesting concession after Philly failed to hit 200 yards passing or 100 yards rushing.
The Eagles, of course, are too good, both on the line and at the skill positions (and that’s before you even get to Hurts) for it to look like this for much longer. But the way the Eagles played was indicative of the way a lot of offenses played Sunday—and that does make you wonder whether all these efforts to pace guys through the summer, and avoid injury risk at all costs, have finally reached the point of diminishing returns.
We won’t know whether teams really feel that way until next summer. But there was a lot of sloppy football, and there were underperforming offenses out there, and it wasn’t all because of the weather.
I’m buying all the way in on Trevor Lawrence. I don’t know whether he’ll be a top-five quarterback by the end of the year—just because there are a handful of really established guys in that category right now. But a few of the throws he made in Indianapolis on Sunday (the touchdown to Calvin Ridley was a missile), and the way the Jaguars took command in the fourth quarter really showed, to me at least, who he’s becoming as a quarterback and a leader.
In particular, there was a two-play sequence in there that stands out. It happened with the Jags down 21–17 and facing third-and-12, with a little over 8 minutes left. Lawrence took a shotgun snap, calmly checked the ball down to Travis Etienne, who then churned out 10 yards. From there, there was no hesitation from Doug Pederson to go for it on fourth-and-2 and, like clockwork, Lawrence delivered a strike to Zay Jones to convert that.
Three plays after that, the Jags scored the go-ahead touchdown. Two plays after that, Tyson Campbell picked off Anthony Richardson. Three plays after that, Etienne scored to make it 31–21. Ballgame.
In one fell swoop, you could see a very real belief that team has now, in large part because of who the quarterback is. I thought it was pretty cool, especially considering where these guys were two years ago.
We’ve got 15 games in the books, one to go in Week 1, which brings us to my quick-hitters for Week 1. Let’s go …
• Jimmy Garoppolo deserves credit for piloting an impressive six-play, 75-yard touchdown drive to give the Raiders the go-ahead points in their 17–16 win in Denver on Sunday. But honestly, I was just as impressed with how he closed them out on the drive to follow, and definitely with how he scrambled to get eight yards on a third-and-7 with two minutes left. He took three knees after that to send the Broncos home with a loss. Garoppolo’s always been a really good player when he’s been healthy. And if Las Vegas can keep him healthy, look out.
• While we’re there, Derek Carr had a pretty awesome debut himself in New Orleans, and we’ll have more on as part of my Monday stuff in a few hours.
• Patriots rookie corner Christian Gonzalez had a really nice pro debut—and his emergence as a real factor is, as I see it, what could push the New England defense from a really good one to a unit capable of challenge the league’s best offenses (something the Patriots struggled to do last year).
• Ridley looks like the real deal (eight catches, 101 yards and a TD), and a potential No. 1 for Jacksonville. But you knew that.
• Of the three rookie starting quarterbacks (and we should draw no conclusions after one week), I thought Indianapolis’s Anthony Richardson had the best debut. He looked comfortable, and like a freak among athletic freaks out there. Yes, he threw the pick. But he basically was the Colts’ run game (10 carries, 40 yards) and was relatively efficient (24-37, 223 yards, TD, INT) in an offense that Shane Steichen tailored for him.
• A note from my editor Mitch Goldich (who’s the man for staying up with me on Sunday nights)—the NFC went 4–0 against the AFC this week. It was Lions over Chiefs, Saints over Titans, 49ers over Steelers and Eagles over Patriots … So I guess the NFC’s actually better, then?
• Bijan Robinson’s touchdown catch was probably my favorite play from the weekend. His role will continue to grow. And his Falcons will continue to be a tough out.
• Somehow, the Cowboys’ first offensive touchdown of the season put their 26th point of the night on the board in New Jersey. Which goes to show you what a sideways game that was and how we should all be careful in how much good or bad for either team we take from Dallas’s 40–0 beatdown of the Giants.
• I love how creative Todd Monken was in getting Ravens rookie Zay Flowers the ball in his first game as coordinator. And Lamar Jackson looked pretty good throwing it in the new scheme. My questions, then, would be with the run game—which only went for 110 yards (low by the Ravens’ standards) and 3.4 yards per carry. Say what you will about former OC Greg Roman, but the Baltimore run game was very difficult to deal with for defenses, so it’ll be interesting to track whether Monken can match its production.
• Finally, I feel terrible for J.K. Dobbins, and his apparent torn achilles is a perfect example of why I’ll never, ever criticize a running back for drawing a hard line in a contract negotiation. The window to earn is too short for those guys and the injury risk is too high. It sucks that Dobbins didn’t get to his second contract before this, and it should be a cautionary tale for others, for sure.
