We were due one of these weeks—we have blowouts and no-shows to cover in Week 10. And even still, a ton of fun story lines. As we’ve been doing all season, we’ll publish the takeaways Sunday and update them live through Monday morning. So come back again if not all 10 are here yet …
Pittsburgh Steelers
This Pittsburgh Steelers team is different. People in Pittsburgh know the facts here. As great as Mike Tomlin’s been—he’s now two wins from an 18th consecutive season at or above .500—the team hasn’t been what it was in his early years. The Steelers’ last playoff win was in 2016. Their last AFC title game was that year, too, and that’s the only trip they’ve made to the NFL’s final four over the past 14 years.
Now, that’s holding the Steelers to a higher standard than most franchises. But as Tomlin likes to say, The standard is the standard. And he may, finally, have a team to meet the standard again.
His players, after Sunday’s scintillating 28–27 over the Washington Commanders in D.C., are starting to see it that way.
“I just think the biggest difference is we’re finishing where we need to finish,” three-time first-team All-Pro safety Minkah Fitzpatrick told me over the phone after the game. “Even though we gave up 27 points, which is unacceptable on the defensive end, we’re still finishing out the fourth quarter. We’re holding guys to minimal gains when they need points. We’re getting the ball back to the offense. The offense is driving the ball down the field and getting points at critical times.
“That’s the difference, is we’re playing really well in got-to-have-it moments.”
Two of those moments stood out for Pittsburgh in beating a very game, very tough Commanders team.
The first came with Pittsburgh down 27–21, and facing third-and-9 from the Washington 32. There was 2:27 left, and the Steelers had two timeouts, meaning they could, in theory, kick a field goal and still get the ball back after the two-minute warning, down 27–24. So there was a safe play there. And then there’s what Pittsburgh actually did.
Steelers offensive coordinator Arthur Smith had the call in for such a situation, but the idea was to throw it to Calvin Austin. The bet was, in that situation, the Commanders would either double George Pickens, or send a five-man pressure, creating a one-on-one for Austin, who was running a go route on the backside. But Austin had to come out of the game, and that meant the Steelers had to lean on Russell Wilson.
That’s because it was Mike Williams, on the roster for all of six days, coming in for Austin.
Wilson effectively drew it up in the dirt for the ex-Jet/new Steeler—telling he’d put the ball up. Smith lined up Pickens in the opposite slot to try to ensure the one-on-one. Williams then cooked Benjamin St-Juste on the initial part of the route, and Wilson put up a dime to cover the 32 yards to Williams to put Pittsburgh up 28–27.
“As a quarterback, there’s not too much he hasn’t seen,” Fitzpatrick says. “There’s not too much that he hasn’t come across. He just has that experience.”
The second finishing blow from the Steelers came just moments later, with Fitzpatrick, a pretty experienced guy himself, delivering it. The Commanders were in fourth-and-9, and the star safety, and his coaches, anticipated Zach Ertz getting the ball. What’s called a “middle read” route—where if the middle of the field is open, Ertz would run a seam route; and if it was closed, he’d sit his route down at the sticks.
“Usually, I lean away from it and then drive on it once he throws the ball,” Fitzpatrick says. “He sat kind of far. Usually, they sit it in between the hashes. He sat down on the far hash. I was reading the quarterback. Once he threw it, it was make the break and get there.”
Fitzpatrick then says, “Ideally, we want to try to get our hands on the ball before he catches it.” He and Damontae Kazee didn’t quite get there in time to do that—but they did arrive with so much decisiveness and force that Ertz, a 250-pound tight end with his back even to the first-down marker, lost all his momentum when they hit him.
“We all knew where the line to gain was,” Fitzpatrick says. “We’re trying to peel him back to the line of scrimmage and not let him fall back toward the chains.”
They didn’t, and that was that.
And between that play, and the one to Williams, it was abundantly clear that not only is this a Steelers team with a powerful defense and a growing offense, it’s also one that’s showing itself now to be capable of winning on the margins, with, as Fitzpatrick says, the have-to-have-it plays that matter most at the end.
With the 7–3 Baltimore Ravens up next, it’s a good bet they’ll need those plays, too, in a matchup that’s shaping up as the kind that’ll harken back to the Ray Lewis–James Harrison days of one of the NFL’s most heated rivalries.
“They have all their talent, and we have all our talent,” Fitzpatrick says. “It’s going to be a physical game. It’s gonna be who smashes the run, and who allows the least amount of splash plays. It’s gonna be fun.”
If the games these teams just came off are any indication, it should be for the rest of us, too.
Kansas City Chiefs
There’s a nuance to the Kansas City Chiefs’ miraculous win over the Denver Broncos that I think says a lot. Go back and watch the blocked field goal that preserved the 16–14 win. You’ll see Leo Chenal got his hand on it. You’ll see George Karlaftis was right there, too. You’ll realize both are defensive starters.
You should know there’s some real meaning in that. You could argue the Chiefs’ win actually came down to that meaning.
Inside the bowels of Arrowhead Stadium, the words “The Formula” are painted onto walls. If you ask Chiefs players or coaches how Sundays like this one, or Mondays like last week against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, keep happening, they’ll point to that slogan. And while that explanation is abstract, there is something to the idea that you’ve got guys such as Chenal and Karlaftis going pedal to the metal on special teams—and it wasn’t just on the game-defining play.
In fact, Chenal would tell you he was so close to blocking the first PAT of the game—it grazed his finger—and he beat his man so badly on another field goal attempt thereafter, that he figured the way this game ended was possible all along.
“Sometimes field goal blocks are overlooked,” Chenal told me after the game. “A lot of starters are in there. Sometimes, you’re tired. Defense will stay on punt return. It’s those same guys, too. We have a group of guys that are going to push themselves and go max effort no matter what. You don’t see that on punt return, the safe one. You don’t see the way our guys are blocking. It’s pretty awesome to see the way they give effort even when you might not be expected to.”
And that, in turn, raises the level of expectation for everyone.
Which, in this case, caused the coaches to decide not to settle.
The temptation to settle was there for the Chiefs with 1:46 left, after Denver converted third-and-6, with a 13-yard bullet from Bo Nix to Courtland Sutton. Kansas City burned its last timeout right after the play. It was first-and-10, and the Broncos could spend three downs centering the ball and draining the clock, which is just what they did.
“Towards the end there, we were thinking, We got to carry this guy into the end zone [and let them score]. Whatever we got to do to give our offense a chance to get back on top,” Chenal says. “Coach Spags [Steve Spagnuolo], the legendary coach he is, he just said No. Let’s not here. From there, it was trusting that, trusting each other.”
It was trusting, most of all, that with the effort they were giving, the right result would come. Once again, that’s exactly what happened.
Of course, there’s more than belief and experience and effort that goes into getting this sort of outcome so often—there’s good fortune, too. But there’s certainly a lot more to what the Chiefs are doing than just getting the breaks.
"It’s definitely miraculous,” Chenal says. “It’s pretty insane, the things that our team has been able to do, with all the guys, the coaches. You see it the past few years, just being in certain situations down 10 points, up a certain amount. You see it in the playoffs. We have a cultural resilience that everybody has bought into. The coaches talk about it all the time, keeping your cool when things don’t go our way.”
It keeps serving the Chiefs well. They’re 9–0. They’ve won 15 straight. The chance to make history is right in front of them—they’re six games shy of having the longest winning streak ever, and becoming the first team to win three Super Bowls in a row seems in their sights.
But for now, getting to those places isn’t what’s important. It’s how they’ll get there.
“That’s sitting out there—you think about it,” Chenal says. “But it’s a thing as old as time, that you can’t get stuck looking too far ahead before the race is over. The big thing with us is staying in the moment. That’s another thing that makes it so good with our coaches and players, buying in is staying in the moment. This game, this is the one that matters.”
And every snap does, too, to Chenal. Which, again, is probably how days like Sunday keep happening for the Chiefs.
New Orleans Saints
I hope the New Orleans Saints give Darren Rizzi a real run at keeping the head coaching job. Now, I know it wouldn’t excite many Louisianians, who saw their franchise turned around nearly two decades ago by an offensive mastermind, to have a special teams coach get the job full-time. I also know that, yes, Rizzi has been there for all the team’s fits and starts, since Sean Payton left town.
But what I know best is the way players, and people in general, respond to Rizzi.
Go back and look at the clips of Rizzi coming off the field in New Orleans, after the Saints edged the NFC South–leading Atlanta Falcons 20–17 at the Superdome on Sunday. You’ll see how genuinely happy they all were for him. You’ll see how they responded to him, something that happened during the week when no one was watching, the same way it did when we all had eyeballs on it Sunday.
All that energy? It didn’t come by accident.
“This is the biggest takeaway,” Rizzi told me. “If you make the offensive coordinator the head coach, he doesn’t know the defensive players. You make the defensive coordinator the head coach, he doesn’t know the offensive players. The special teams coach knows every single guy in the building, has a personal relationship with every position group, including the quarterbacks, because I’m doing the game management.
“We work with every single guy.”
So in that way, in making Rizzi the interim coach last week, owner Gayle Benson gave the players someone, not just something, to believe in. But that doesn’t mean anyone could snap their fingers and make work what Rizzi made work.
It had to start last Monday, when the bleep hit the fan.
GM Mickey Loomis came down to Rizzi’s office that morning to let him know Dennis Allen had been let go, and asked him to take the reins on an interim basis. Rizzi agreed. He asked for a special teams hire to take his spot on the staff, got the go-ahead, and brought Marwan Maalouf aboard to work with Rizzi’s old assistant special teams coach Phil Galiano.
Then, he actually talked to Allen himself about the defensive staff. Allen helped him come up with a plan where former Browns DC Joe Woods would call the defense, as he once did in Cleveland, and defensive line coach Todd Grantham would elevate into a sort-of assistant coordinator role. The Saints then backfilled by promoting Byron Young to a defensive line coach role. From there, Allen helped Rizzi with the scheme on defense. Which adds up, if you’re Rizzi, to a pretty generous amount of help from the guy you’re replacing.
“At the end of the day, we’re friends,” Rizzi says. “He’s going to keep coaching. Someone’s going to hire him as a defensive coordinator. Who knows, we could be together on staff one day. When he left, we both said this isn’t a goodbye. It’s, I’ll see you around.”
After that, it was go time. Rizzi reshuffled the lockers—clustering position groups back together (they were separated during COVID-19)—and changed the practice schedule, taking the guys out of pads all week to try to save their legs (Rizzi felt like the team’s Monday-Sunday-Thursday turn to kick off October killed the players) and letting them come in later.
“The guys loved it,” he says. “They bought in.”
And that, really, was what Rizzi saw as the key to every bit of this. Rizzi joked that he used the Dunkin’ Donuts “Time to Make the Donuts” mantra to keep himself going—with the idea to just keep going. Rizzi did right through until Friday night. Sold on what Rizzi was telling them (“I said, This is what I’m going to do, I need your f---ing support. … They were like, Done.”), the locker room’s leadership council made sure the players did the same.
And then Sunday came. The first possession was affirmation for the Saints. They drove from their own 12 all the way down to the Atlanta 6, where they went for a fourth-and-2 and didn’t get it. Their next possession was a grind that resulted in a field goal. Then, came a missed field goal, giving the hosts the field position to set up Marquez Valdes-Scantling’s first touchdown (he had two in the first half).
“The sideline needed that: boom, big play, great throw, great catch,” Rizzi says. “We needed a little boost from the receiver room because we had [Rashid] Shaheed out. We had [Chris] Olave out. To Scantling’s credit, he brought a couple big plays today. We needed the receivers to step up.”
Rizzi then pointed out that, with the injuries factored in, Valdes-Scantling was probably the only of the five receivers New Orleans dressed that anyone had heard of.
That was O.K., though. Because at least for this one week, Rizzi got things more valuable than name recognition.
“Just as I said to the team after the game, I’ve never been a part of something like this,” he says. “I said to myself, You’re going to change all this s---. You’re going to have all these guys lined up out your door, b----ing and moaning. Not f---ing one guy.”
Which is why, really, the biggest mishap Sunday actually came before the game. Last Monday, the Saints’ equipment guys asked Rizzi whether he wanted the head coach’s office at the stadium. Rizzi told them it was the last thing he was worried about. But after meeting with Loomis and Benson, he agreed to take it. And then, after he arrived at the stadium, his first action in the new digs didn’t go as planned.
“I got to go to the bathroom, I come here early, It’s like 8:30,” Rizzi says. “I go in the bathroom. And I get up, the toilet’s clogged. You got to be kidding me. This is how the day starts. I’m thinking to myself, Not a good start.”
The rest of the day, suffice it to say, went a whole lot better. And my guess is, if he keeps it up, he’ll give the Saints’ upper management a lot more to discuss.
New York Giants
There’s a lot of focus on the New York Jets, but at least for a little while on Sunday, it was the other team from New York all alone with the league’s worst record. Yes, the New York Giants were the first team to hit eight losses this season. And they got there in losing to a team that’s arguably been the NFL’s worst over the past several years.
If they weren’t ringing already, the 20–17 overtime loss to the Carolina Panthers is going to sound alarms on the state of Gotham’s proud old flagship franchise.
And it’s hard to look anywhere else here before the quarterback. Brian Daboll conceded after the game that the Giants are “evaluating” Daniel Jones with the bye week following their return from Germany. At 2–8, the playoffs are beyond a long shot and, as it stands, there’s plenty of risk to keeping Jones in the lineup.
This is similar to Russell Wilson last year in Denver, where contractual injury guarantees motivated the Broncos to take the veteran quarterback off the field. In this case, Jones has a $23 million injury guarantee for 2025, with $12 million of that vesting as fully guaranteed in March. So to save the $12 million, they’d have to cut him at the start of the league year in March. To save the other $11 million, he has to be gone before September when that money vests.
And to cut him at those junctures, he has to be able to pass a physical. So at this point, the risk far outweighs the reward of playing him. The Giants will want to cut him before any of the money vests, so keeping him healthy is paramount … so … step right up, Drew Lock.
It’s obviously unfortunate that Jones and the Giants are in this spot. It means they’ll have paid, in the end, a staggering $82 million for 16 starts, over which Jones went 3–13 and threw 10 touchdown passes and 13 interceptions. But it has to be done, with the vision of Jones being a high-end bridge quarterback shattered, and the evidence that they’d have been better off going with Baker Mayfield or Sam Darnold.
Jones, of course, isn’t the only problem. The Giants have plenty of other ones, too. But they do also have an intriguing core of Brian Burns, Andrew Thomas (who’s injured now), Kayvon Thibodeaux, DPOY candidate Dexter Lawrence and Malik Nabers to build around going forward. I do believe owner John Mara when he says the plan is to have GM Joe Schoen and coach Brian Daboll as the ones to go forward with that construction project.
That said, it’s pretty apparent now that the Giants have some complicated issues to deal with moving forward. And one, at the game’s most important position, demands their attention right away.
Dallas Cowboys
The Dallas Cowboys’ season is effectively over. I don’t know how much more there is to say. Dallas is 3–6 now. Cooper Rush may be the quarterback for the rest of the season. And somehow, accounting for that, Sunday’s 34–6 loss was even more discouraging than you’d have expected, just because of how methodically a good Philadelphia Eagles team took Dallas apart.
The third quarter wasn’t over yet when Philly went up 28–6, making these Cowboys the first team in NFL history to trail by at least 20 in five consecutive home games. Worse, the Eagles seemed to have what’s normally a big rivalry game on cruise control.
They rushed for 187 yards. Jalen Hurts threw for 202, on 70% passing and with two touchdown passes against an interception. The Cowboys’ longest pass play of the day was good for all of 10 yards. They did have a 19-yard run from Rico Dowdle, but if you take that one out of the equation, Dallas rushed for 78 yards. Rush and Trey Lance compiled a combined passer rating south of 50.
So what does this mean longer term? Well, the information they have now on where the team stands, if Dak Prescott doesn’t come back in 2024, won’t change much between now and the expiration of Mike McCarthy’s contract. And that leaves Dallas two months to mull over what’s next, barring a big turnaround.
After Sunday, it’s pretty hard to see that happening.
Cincinnati Bengals
The Cincinnati Bengals are approaching a critical stretch of the Joe Burrow era. After Thursday’s heart-wrenching loss to the Ravens, the Bengals are now 4–6. In the next two weeks, they have the Los Angeles Chargers, then their bye week. Looking at their schedule, if they can hit the break at 5–6, they still have a chance.
That said, bigger questions are coming down the pike for the team. And it goes well beyond getting Ja’Marr Chase signed (Cincinnati should’ve already done that, and has to soon).
In Baltimore, the Bengals’ defense failed again. It was the third time this season that Cincinnati scored in the 30s and lost. It was the fourth time in five losses that the defense gave up 35 or more points, with the two instances of that not happening coming in Weeks 1 and 2. So, if you’re blaming Burrow, or the offense in general, for the Bengals’ problems you’re, either not paying attention or being intellectually dishonest.
So what’s the problem with the defense? Sam Hubbard, Vonn Bell and Mike Hilton—foundational pieces of the AFC title team of 2021—are really feeling their age. High picks such as Myles Murphy and DJ Turner II aren’t playing to their draft position. Cam Taylor-Britt’s shown promise but isn’t consistent, and just when it looked like Dax Hill seemed to be turning it around in his transition to corner, he got hurt.
In short, the unit has aged, and the young core drafted to step in simply hasn’t been good enough. Which, in turn, puts a heavy burden on an elite quarterback and his offense.
Now, this isn’t a hopeless situation. Burrow’s good enough to dig the Bengals out of this hole, if they can just get a little bit more from the defense and a few things break their way. I also wouldn’t ever count out a Burrow-led team in the playoffs. Even so, the team’s position organizationally will be in focus after the season.
Burrow’s cap number jumps nearly $20 million next year, to $46.25 million. Trey Hendrickson, the best player on the defense by a significant margin, will be going into a contract year in 2025, and he turns 30 years old in December. Chase has to be paid. Tee Higgins will likely be gone. And so the Bengals will have to retool their defense, mostly with draft picks and perhaps some mid-level signings.
The good news is Duke Tobin has shown that he’s very capable of doing just that—and building/fixing things through the draft. And it puts Cincinnati in a spot not unlike the one the Kansas City Chiefs and Buffalo Bills once found themselves in—where it was on the GMs, Brett Veach and Brandon Beane, to start reworking the roster on a narrower path financially than the one they took with quarterbacks on rookie contracts. So, it has been done.
That said, there’s work to do that’ll require the Brown family to invest back into the roster, giving Tobin and his staff everything they need to pick the right guys.
Arizona Cardinals
And all the same, the focus from the Jets’ game Sunday will be on the Jets, but it shouldn’t be. The Arizona Cardinals have now won four games in a row. The first two were close. The last two weren’t, and came with increasing dominance. This week’s 31–6 rout showed, above all else, that Arizona is still very much ascending.
“We just want to be a team on the rise,” veteran tailback James Conner said from the winning locker room. “I’m not surprised. It’s just earned. You got to earn it week in and week out. We keep coming to work and it’s showing up.”
Here’s what showed up against the Jets …
• A 126.7 passer rating for Kyler Murray, and 266 yards and a touchdown on 22-of-24 passing (which is a wild level of efficiency for any quarterback).
• 147 rushing yards, at nearly 5 yards per carry, with Trey Benson (10 carries, 62 yards) working in tandem with the venerable Conner.
• Another beautiful touchdown catch from Marvin Harrison Jr., who finished with five catches for 54 yards.
• A defensive effort that limited Aaron Rodgers to 151 yards and didn’t allow any of his receivers more than 41 yards (Garrett Wilson hit that total on five catches).
• Scores on the Cardinals’ first five possessions, and touchdowns on Arizona’s first three possessions.
• A second straight game in which the opponent didn’t make it into the end zone.
Doubt it, or even ignore it, all you want. Arizona’s playing like a very real contender. The Cardinals are also now all alone in first in the NFC West, heading into next week’s game in Seattle. And, again, based on the amount of young, ascending guys they have playing, it’s not too difficult to envision this being just the start.
“It’s a young, hungry group,” Conner says. “I think we’re all playing together. It’s the ultimate team game, so special teams is doing their thing. Defense is playing lights out. Offense, we execute. When we put all three phases together, you come to work and put it all together and enjoy the process, you get the results.”
The results, right now, are pretty undeniable in Arizona.
Detroit Lions
There are lots of great things you can say about Dan Campbell and the Detroit Lions right now—and I’ve got one you probably haven’t heard. And that one is good on him for sticking with his defensive coordinator, Aaron Glenn, back in 2022.
It’s easy to forget now, but at the end of that October, it felt like all of Michigan was calling for his head. The Lions had gone 3-13-1 in Campbell’s first season, and Glenn had fielded the second-worst scoring defense, and a unit that was ranked 29th in total defense. Things didn’t get much better to kick off 2022—the Lions were 1–6 and allowing more than 32 points per game as November approached. Folks wanted their pound of flesh for it.
But Campbell stayed true to Glenn, who’d come over from New Orleans with him and who, almost by design, had been dealt a tough hand to play early in their time in Detroit. See, Campbell and Brad Holmes were left more in the way of a foundation, particularly along the line, on offense than they had been on defense. So it was always going to be easier, and correct, to build up the offense first, which is what the Lions wound up doing.
They drafted Penei Sewell No. 7, dug Amon-Ra St. Brown out of the fourth round, traded for Jared Goff and got competitive on that side relatively quickly. Meanwhile, building up the defense was simply a slower burn, and Glenn had to be pinata taking the hits for it their first two years.
Since then, the story has changed, and Sunday’s movie of a win in Houston showed just how far Glenn’s unit has come. Coming out of halftime, a taped interview Campbell gave to NBC’s Melissa Stark aired, and on it Campbell said his defense needed to create more turnovers. As the sound played over the first live game action of the second half, veteran corner Carlton Davis jumped in front of Houston’s Tank Dell to pick off C.J. Stroud.
Davis picked off Stroud again later in the third, as Houston drove into Detroit territory, the Lions created two three-and-outs after the break, and the defense stiffened up one final time to force Houston to trot out Ka’imi Fairbairn for a 58-yard field goal in the fourth quarter, which Fairbairn wound up missing.
With a revamped roster, and after a couple of years of drafting guys such as Aidan Hutchinson, Alim McNeill, Brian Branch and Terrion Arnold, those things are possible now.
So good on Campbell for understanding why when they weren’t.
Baltimore Ravens
While we’re here, the Ravens deserve so much credit for doing just that, too. Lamar Jackson, of course, is now on a big-money second contract, just like Burrow, Mahomes and Josh Allen. And the Ravens have shown how capable they are of handling it.
How? Well, it’s by having the confidence to walk away from accomplished veterans such as Kevin Zeitler, Morgan Moses, John Simpson and Patrick Queen, because they had faith in their ability to identify, then develop guys such as Daniel Faalele, Roger Rosengarten, Patrick Mekari and Trenton Simpson to replace them. Baltimore also has anchors to those units (OL and LB) such as Ronnie Stanley, Tyler Linderbaum and Roquan Smith to captain the transition.
That’s why, as I see it anyway, the Ravens should keep getting better.
Adding Tre’Davious White as a high-character dice roll—former Bills DC Leslie Frazier’s son is on Baltimore’s scouting staff, and John Harbaugh and Frazier worked together in Philly, so they had good info—made sense at a position of need. White wanted to come east from the Los Angeles Rams bad enough that he was willing to wipe out play-time incentives on his contract to facilitate the trade. And bringing in Diontae Johnson before that brought insurance for a banged-up receiver group, to ensure they retain the pick-your-poison problem the offense poses.
Now, there were a couple of trades that didn’t work out. They offered a third-round pick for Marshon Lattimore and got outbid by the Washington Commanders. They worked on a deal to bring Calais Campbell back from the Dolphins in the days leading up to the deadline, and the Dolphins pulled away from the table at the last minute.
That said, the Ravens, clearly, deserve everyone’s trust.
It’s November, and they’ve got a quarterback in the MVP race and a team playing for playoff position. Yet again.
Quick-hitters
We’ve got one game left this week, and plenty to hit in the quick-hitting takeaways. So let’s dive in on those …
• Jim Harbaugh’s Chargers keep chugging along. True Harbaugh fashion: Star quarterback Justin Herbert threw for 164 yards (albeit a hyper efficient 164), and L.A. still won going away, 27–17 over the Tennessee Titans.
• Finally, my Jets minute: All those fears the Jets’ players had—that the defense would fall apart after Robert Saleh was jettisoned, in part because of the void it created, and also because Saleh’s absence would spread Jeff Ulbrich thin—now seem to be well-founded.
• Drake Maye clearly outplayed Caleb Williams on Sunday, for what it’s worth.
• The Chicago Bears’ possessions over their last six quarters: punt, turnover on downs, punt, safety, turnover on downs, end of game, punt, punt, punt, field goal, punt, punt, punt, punt, punt, turnover on downs, turnover on downs.
• The Travon Walker penalty to end the Jacksonville Jaguars–Minnesota Vikings game was incredibly dumb.
• You have to win your clunkers to make the playoffs, and Minnesota did that Sunday. I’m not overly concerned with how the Vikings played on a sleepy afternoon in North Florida, though Sam Darnold has leveled off a little.
• Bryce Young looked fine against the Giants, but no one needs to turn that into more than it was.
• While we’re there, no revelations from Mac Jones on Sunday either.
• Good resilience from the Bills on Sunday, in surviving a turnover-fest with the Indianapolis Colts.
• Overcoming five picks to win a game is a nice feather in Jared Goff’s cap. And it, again, shows how complete the Lions are.
• Terry McLaurin remains criminally underrated.
• Are the San Francisco 49ers poised for a big run? I talked to Brock Purdy about that Sunday, and you’ll get to read it on the site in the morning.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Week 10 NFL Takeaways: Steelers Living Up to Franchise Standards.
