The Top 12 Worst Games of 2021: III

Saints at Seahawks, Week 7: Geno-Jameis Tilt Worse than Almost Anything

Almost anything. Almost. There are 2 games left on this list, so it can’t be the very worst thing we’ve ever seen, but the noisome quarterbacking of Jameis Winston and Geno Smith – it’s 2021, mind you!!! – was a game that could have turned someone off of football forever. These teams have played some fun games in the past – this wasn’t one of them.

The BeastQuake in the 2010 Wild Card. A tense, hard-fought near-comeback in the 2013 Divisional Round that featured a mini-BeastQuake of its own. A 34-7 beatdown in primetime earlier in 2013 that announced to a national audience that the Legion Of Boom had arrived. These are all indelible images of the 2010s in football that will stick forever in the minds of we who saw them happen. But you would find yourself positively perspiring if you attempted to find a single memorable moment from this game. There was a DK Metcalf touchdown for 84 yards early, yeah – that was kind of cool. But it wasn’t even a fun 84 yard touchdown. He beat the first defender and broke a tackle by the safety, but that was it. No swerving, no dodging, no slaloming through Saints defender or anything of that nature. Just a straight line to a dimly-lit endzone on a dark, unattractive night in the Pacific Northwest. The field was illuminated but barely, and the emotionless spasmodic coloration of navy, white, black and lime green did nothing to keep bored viewers’ eyes screenward.

You want incomplete passes? We’ve got incomplete passes – 26 of them. You want unhelpful runs that go nowhere? We’ve got those too – there were 49 rushing attempts in this game combined, and the furthest any of those wended was 14 yards (by Travis Homer on his lone rush); Saints offensive focal point Alvin Kamara went 20 for 51, about two and a half yards a clip. You want exciting offense or defense? There was hardly any of either – by some stroke of outrageous fortune, neither Winston or Smith threw an INT. Kamara, easily the best player in this game, did catch 10 passes for 128 yards, transmogrifying one inadvisable-looking Winston dumpoff into a score. Outside of Kamara’s electric night through the air and the early 84-yard touchdown for Metcalf, though, this game had nothin’. The sloppy penalties and undisciplined extracurriculars on both teams were the most notable point of this game. It was a stupendously ineffective (but, ultimately, victorious) evening of pass-throwing by Jameis Winston, and he somehow did not throw one of his signature interceptions. But when you stack up his non-exhilarating 19-for-35 for 222 and one Football Follies-esque touchdown off a bad snap to Alvin Kamara against the irradiated graveyard of hospital balls chucked up by Geno Smith, he looked like 2006 Colt Brennan at Hawaii.

How to describe Geno Smith in this game? Well, to begin, we can safely say this is the worst quarterback performance of all time that saw the same QB play the whole game and also included a touchdown of 80+ yards (excluded from that criteria due to small sample size is current Washington TE Logan Thomas, who once went 1-for-8 with an 81 yard touchdown to Andre Ellington. Those early Bruce Arians Cardinals were weird, man.) Smith went 12-for-22, somehow, and those other 21 passes that weren’t 84-yard touchdowns were nightmarish creatures from a terrifying dream world that looked like the result of Stephen Gammell drawing football art instead of Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Any pass Geno was asked to attempt that wasn’t between the hash marks and within 7 yards of the line of scrimmage looked like it was traveling to its destination by hot air balloon. He threw up numerous arm punts, including one on the final pass of the night that should have been a pick six and may have been the first bullet-pass arm punt in NFL history, and another on an aborted scramble that conjured images of Jay Cutler’s quote-unquote Hail Mary attempt against these same Saints in London five years earlier. He does seem to have some footspeed left – a good trait in a backup quarterback who has limited time to get up to speed on the playbook and limited reps in practice to hone passing patterns – but this only helped him gain 12 rushing yards, which wasn’t good, but did put him squarely above the truly ridiculous 2.18 yards per attempt average that golden oldie and Celtic demigod Alex Collins put up on his 16 attempts for 35 yards (what does Travis Homer have to do to get on the damn field, Pete?) The one thing that Geno probably looked better at than Jameis was in the broken play scrambling department, especially on a night where every play looked not just broken but effing bankrupt. Yes – optically, Geno displays more orthodox, normal-looking running form than Jameis, so he’s got that going for him. Jameis was better on the ground by the numbers, though – 8 for 40 yards, including a prancing if slow-mo joyride up the far sideline near the goalline to set up an easy field goal for Brian Johnson to valiantly cut the Seattle lead from 7 to 4 points. Winston has a certain way of running that just looks, well, funny – it’s like he’s a Fall Guys character come to life, with his chest pointed authoritatively forward and his legs gamboling underneath him like a 2020s Elroy Hirsch. But he has an odd, oozing, otherworldly ability to make would-be tacklers grasp at air instead of jersey, as evidenced by a leaden Eurostep-esque cut that made Jordyn Brooks look boundlessly foolish.

The issue with Winston, of course, is not how whimsical he appears as he stumblingly scrambles downfield. It’s the fact that he takes too many sacks, throws too many interceptions, and seeps a mist of misguidedness and poor decisions making all over the field. This game could have easily gone to overtime with the score knotted at 10 (mercifully it ended 13-10 after another Brian Johnson field goal at the 2-minute warning) had Winston thrown a catchable pass to the back of the endzone on the 3rd and goal before the first Johnson FG. Had Winston thrown that pass lower than the NFL equivalent of a Blackhawk’s cruising altitude, it would have been easily intercepted by Jordyn Brooks. Thankfully for the Saints, Winston threw a wretchedly overpowered cruise missile pass that was only tipped by Brooks, preventing it from denting the crossbar. Winston was guilty of several sacks that he could have probably escaped, or at the very least prevented from incurring lost yardage by throwing the ball away, but on at least two occasions he was engulfed by one Seahawk pass rusher before a second came and delivered a coup de grâce to the play. One of these did result in a roughing the passer call. Bully for them.

As our descent delves deeper and more depressingly into the penumbral underworld of bad football, there is less and less to call out with these games. The same applies here. You can tell the story with the stats better with this game than in some of the former ones: these teams just could not run the football, and that’s a recipe for disaster when the two QBs are Jameis on a Saints team without any promising pass catchers and Geno Smith on literally any team. There were too many avoidable sacks, there were not enough interceptions to punish these buffoonish ball throwers, there were too many penalties. And Geno Smith threw for 83 yards total after his 84 yard TD.

Fly like a G. Smith.