SUPERCUT: The Top 12 Worst Games of 2021

Introduction

We all know what the good games from last season are. Baltimore-Kansas City in week 2 was an instant classic, as was LAC-KC in Week 15, KC-CIN in Week 17, and, arguably, KC-CLE in Week 1. If you can keep pace with the Chiefs, you usually get a pretty good game. And that should come as no surprise: excluding the once-in-a-decade teams that are so dominantly unstoppable that they are boringly good (think the 1991 Washington team, 2007 New England Patriots or 2013 Broncos), good teams with good offenses tend to make for good television and good viewing experiences. The Bengals, who beat the Chiefs and went to the Super Bowl, were also mostly a good team, and they played fun, interesting games for the most part: a thrilling overtime victory over the Vikings in Week 1, an equally exciting if low-budget action flick against Jacksonville in Week 4, a disappointing but nail-biting overtime loss against their Super Bowl almost-opponents, the San Francisco 49ers, in Week 14. These teams were good in a way that made them exciting – they were high-powered enough on offense to make their games enjoyable, but they had enough flaws that they played a lot of close games. That tends to make for a more interesting viewership experience than outright dominance; even though it may have been exciting to watch Cincinnati mash their black-and-purple division rivals in Baltimore to a corvine-colored pulp twice, sweeping the Ravens for the first time since the 2015-16 season, the Bengals’ dual beatdowns in which they stacked exactly 41 points on an outmatched John Harbaugh squad don’t really qualify as “great” games in our book. We’d call them “good,” if anything. But these weren’t “bad” games. Nor were games where the Chiefs slaughtered their opposition with pitiless pigskin precision. It was relatively entertaining to see the Chiefs annihilate the Las Vegas Raiders twice in much the same way that Cincinnati annihilated the Ravens, dumping a disgusting 41 and 48 points on the tempest-tossed Gruden orphans to concoct an intriguingly easy sweep of an overwhelmed opponent (Raiders fans will naturally disagree). These were displays of destructive offensive power, and this is fun stuff to watch when you have exciting, daring, swaggering playmakers like Patrick Mahomes and Joe Burrow – they can win convincingly, but when they do, they’re fun.

Games can be exciting in more ways than just these, though. Thankfully for us Average Football Enjoyers, there is almost always some kind of redeeming aspect to the typical NFL game, whether it’s exhilaratingly exciting offense, pleasingly stifling defense, or some combination of these elements. The hallmark of quality competitive sports, after all, is that one doesn’t know what will happen, but can anticipate compelling developments during the game.

This list is not about games like that.

No, no, no. This list aspires to analyze the bottom of the barrel waste, the most unappetizing chaff, the most hard-to-watch garbage that the NFL could throw at us in 2021. It won’t be pretty. It won’t be inspiring. It won’t be uplifting or optimistic. But much like Joe Burrow and Patrick Mahomes, they’ll be fun to reminisce about. These are the Twelve Worst Games of 2021. Roll the tape.

The List

The criteria for this list will be, as with all lists written by Personal Vowels, intensely subjective, formidably unscientific, and in more than a couple places, outright beguiling. That’s how we do things here. We are gridiron nihilists, and the only object sought by we PV acolytes is compelling narrative that can be at least somewhat substantiated by fact and statistic. We think we were able to do that here.

That said, we should offer some helpful disclaimers first. We have not included a few games that you may expect to see here – namely, a few games involving one Buffalo Bills. Their Week 13 trench warfare reenactment with New England where Mac Jones threw three passes and their now notorious tilt with Jacksonville in Week 9 have not been included, because, well, come on – those games were unique enough that they do not deserve to appear here. We have enough 48-45 games in our lives. We can stand for a random 9-6 upset or bonesnapping 14-10 divisional deathmatch every now and then. And we’re sure there are a couple contests sprinkled throughout the NFL’s marathon season that meet all possible criteria for badness that we’ve excluded. Please forgive us if your favorite worst game failed to live up to the exacting standards of sloppiness to which we subscribe.

The table of wretched contents lurks below, and as you will no doubt see once you’ve perused the rankings, you should prepare for football nausea and athletic miasma. We can’t promise you’ll agree with all our entries, but we can promise this: we have PhDs in watching & recognizing bad football. We’ve put those tools to use here. Read on if you durst.

The Disastrous Dozen

Dishonorable Mention: Giants at Dolphins, Week 13

XII. Giants at Bears, Week 17

XI. Packers at Chiefs, Week 9

X. Raiders at Browns, Week 15

IX. Dolphins at Saints, Week 16

VIII. Football Team at Broncos, Week 8

VII. Browns at Vikings, Week 4

VI. Jets at Texans, Week 12

V. Lions at Browns, Week 11

IV. Vikings at Bears, Week 15

III. Saints at Seahawks, Week 7

II. Jaguars at Jets, Week 16

I. Lions at Steelers, Week 10

Dis-Honorable Mention

Giants at Dolphins, Week 13: Why You Shouldn’t Hire Belichick Protégés

Front offices just don’t learn. We’ve now seen former Belichick assistants with every conceivable coaching background fail at the NFL level: offensive coordinator (Charlie Weis, Bill O’Brien, Josh McDaniels), defensive coordinator (Romeo Crennel, Eric Mangini, Matt Patricia), special teams coordinator (Joe Judge), linebackers coach (Al Groh), wide receivers coach (also Joe Judge?), sort-of-everything? coach (Brian Flores), even college head coach (Nick Saban – though he was originally Browns DC from 1991 to 1995). In that spirit, let’s talk about two of these Belichickian tough guys who admirably masqueraded as culture changers before being shown the door this offseason. Enter Brian Flores and Joe Judge, two key pieces of the worst Patriots team to win the Super Bowl since 2001, who each endeavored and succeeded in imitating the Patriots’ Super Bowl 53 offense.

It's truly amazing how similarly former Belichick coaches seem to fall from grace once their tenure as HC of insert-troubled-new-team-here starts to sour. Just look at these two: after promising moments in their first seasons (or two, in Flores’ case) that saw their largely undermanned defenses put up surprisingly stifling performances that spoke to solid coaching and opportunistic turnover generation, they tumbled in their final seasons, with their corresponding offenses not only failing to develop alongside their defenses but actually plummeting to league cellar levels. The Dolphins managed to at least tread water with Tua and a fairly respectable receiving corps, finishing 17th in total passing and a not-great-not-terrible 20th in point differential. But that’s the only good thing you can say about this Dolphins squad offensively, as they finished behind teams like the Steelers, Browns and Saints in total points for and behind rebuild merchants Chicago and Detroit in total yards. However bad the Dolphins were when you stack them up against other mediocre teams, though, they look like the 2004 Colts compared to their fellow former Pats patsies in New York. Joe Judge’s Giants squad was disgusting on offense, finishing with more turnovers than touchdowns. They threw 15 touchdowns to 20 interceptions, scored 8 rushing touchdowns and lost 10 fumbles, and finished with fewer total yards than the Buccaneers’ passing yardage total. 345 fewer yards, in fact.

Much of this repellent material is due to a hideous 6-game losing streak the G-Men embarked on to end the season, during which they scored more than 10 points only once (they lost that game, 37-21, to the Chargers) and averaged 232 yards and nine points a game. It should come as no surprise that they kicked off this ill-fated HMS Terror-esque expedition with a voyage down to South Beach where they met Judge’s old buddy Brian Flores. The results were predictably sickening, and led to one of the most boring games you are likely to ever see. The reason this game sucked so bad is simple: Patriot-style football, which both of these teams were trying to play, is inherently boring if you don’t have a good quarterback, and not only did these teams not have good quarterbacks, they had barely average and pitifully far from average passers in Tua Tagovailoa and Mike Glennon (sorry Tua – that’s the last time we’ll mention you and Glen Non in the same breath). The comparison ends there though – these were two quarterbacks on the same field at the same time, and they shared nothing else in common this day. The gameplan for Tua looked sound, if not adrenalizing – the Dolphins largely nickeled-and-dimed their way down the field, Tua’s longest pass being only 25 yards. But he was on the money all day long, going an outstanding 30 for 41 against a Giants defense that at least on paper had a solid secondary. Flores did not ask his young QB to annihilate the Giants deep downfield, and despite averaging below 6 YPA he looked more than effective. Glennon did not. It looked like his coach was asking him to win the game by himself, a fact evidenced by a bizarrely low amount of called HB runs by NY – only 17 for the whole game. In contrast, Glennon dropped back 47 times – MIKE GLENNON! – and failed to crack the 200 yard mark. Subtracting the 3 sacks he took for 28 yards (he’s great at wringing every possible lost yard out of sacks), that clocks in at a deeply meager 4.25 yards per attempt, a figure about as far from the 2021 league average of 6.6 YPA as South Beach is from the dimly-lit Giants meeting room where someone decided that going pass-heavy against one of the league’s better defenses while fielding one of the NFL’s worst offensive lines was a bright idea. This was not a Professor Moriarty-level ingenious master plan on offense, to say the least.

            At least Kenny Golladay showed up in this game. By “showed up,” we mean caught a pass. That can’t be said about all of his games in 2021. But even if he did go only 3 for 37, he fared better through the air than Saquon Barkley, who somehow caught 6 passes for 19 yards. How in God’s name? And his long catch was 11 yards! The Dolphins receivers fared far better, with Jaylen Waddle and Devante Parker each catching at least 81% of their targets and cracking at least 62 yards (by contrast, Evan Engram caught 4 for 61 and led the Giants in receiving). We hate to put it all on the Giants’ passing game, but the Dolphins’ running game was doing their own team no favors, with their 25 carries for 68 combined yards failing to truly provide a counterbalance to Tua’s tactful, controlled aerial attack. If we learned nothing else from this game, we learned that Tua is better than Mike Glennon. Not exactly news. But what else can you say about a game where the teams were even in 3rd-down conversions (6 each), almost even in first downs (16 for New York to 19 for Miami), and even in penalties (3 apiece)? Flores may not have accomplished all he wanted in Miami, but he proved one thing beyond a shadow of a doubt: he can play winning Belichick ball when his opponent is another mediocre Belichick ex-disciple. May we all be so fortunate. And just to throw one more doomlike Jared Harris reference in:

Jared Harris, probably describing the Mike Glennon Giants.

XII

Giants at Bears, Week 17: Giants Honor 100th Anniversary of NFL Football by Setting Offense Back Centuries

The NFL used to be called the “American Pro Football Association,” a clunky name that they ditched in 1922. There wasn’t a whole lot of extravagant fanfare around the league in 2021 honoring the 100th anniversary of the NFL being called the NFL, but the Giants put on a little ceremony of their own by rolling out a performance worthy of 1922. It was a thoughtful gesture, but it was revolting to behold.

There appears to be some disagreement as to just how far in the red the New York Giants’ passing offense dared to delve on January 2nd, 2022. Pro Football Reference, our database of record, lists the toxic total at -6 passing yards, courtesy of 5 sacks for 30 lost yards. But ProFootballTalk disputes this, listing the grand grotesque total at 4 sacks for -34 yards, putting Mike Glennon’s incredible numbers through the air at a round -10 yards, which feels like a nicer, more digestible total. Is it a huge deal if he threw for -6 or -10 yards? Would the extra 4 yards deleted in the ProFootballTalk calculation have altered the outcome of a game that ended 29-3? Maybe. (Probably not).

The question is, ultimately, academic, and would move the Giants’ unbelievable aerial atrocity from “a” bad game to THE worst passing performance of the 21st century (to find the last time a team did worse than -10 through the air, you have to go back to Ryan Leaf and the 1998 San Diego Chargers’ infamous first loss of the season versus Kansas City, which saw Leaf go an incredible 1 for 15 for -19 yards and then outdo his pathetic showing on the field with an even more egregious outburst the locker room – you know the vid we’re talking about. RIP Junior Seau). At the end of the day, the Giants put forward a memorably inept performance at every level, and the statistically ridiculous passing numbers were only one component part of this travesty. Almost as bad was the performance of Devontae Booker, who ran the ball 18 times for 46 yards (with a long run of 5 yards) and caught 2 passes for 0 yards. That’s 20 touches for an average of 2.3 yards per touch. And since the Giants only ran 55 plays, that means that a running back who was performing far beneath the informal Mendoza Line of 3 YPC made up 36% of New York’s offensive plays. Outrageous.

Saquon Barkley fared far better than the rest of his bush league backfield, tallying 102 yards on 21 carries. But this did essentially nothing in the grand scheme of things. And that’s one of the big issues with Saquon Barkley (and basically every running back not named Derrick Henry) – even when he plays well, his effect on the outcome of a game is pitifully minimal. He wasn’t even that good in 2021 – he and Devontae Booker both finished with precisely 593 rushing yards, and Booker actually managed to reach that total with 17 fewer rushes. For Joe Judge’s uninspiring gameplan – namely, continuously pounding the ball into a scrum of human wreckage and hoping one of your backs breaks a long one – to work, you need to have at least a semblance of a passing game, which the G-Men (G for Glennon) did not possess. It’s not all Glennon’s fault, of course, nor Barkley’s or Booker’s. Where the hell are these pass catchers we were told so much of? Kenny Golladay exists primarily as a concept on the Giants, barely averaging 2 catches per game in his disastrous first season with Big Blue (Big Blew?) and totaling 0 touchdowns. Rookie receiver Kadarius Toney, who was supposed to provide a desperately needed big-play threat to Daniel Jones and Co., also failed to reach paydirt in his first season with the Giants, meaning a whopping zero points emerged from the NYG’s supposed top two pass catchers. For perspective, no Giants player caught more than 3 touchdowns, and no wide receiver caught more than 2. All told, there were five wide receiver touchdown receptions by the Giants in 2021, a horrible season outing that just barely puts the ’21 Giants ahead of the 2014 Kansas City Chiefs for wideout disappointment (that team famously did not manage to record a wide receiver touchdown all year). It goes without saying that neither Golladay or Toney managed to register in a meaningful way in this game – Toney was inactive and Golladay was targeted once, not making the catch.

Though the box score was marginally more beautiful, the actual onfield product from Chicago was not much more palatable. That may sound surprising, given that they did end up scoring 29 points on offense, but that’s due in large part to the serial foot-shooting New York inflicted on themselves on offense. Chicago QB Andy Dalton played fine, more than fine enough to win going away, but this game was a classic example of Dalton “taking what the defense gave him” and not attempting anything of greater daring. His numbers say as much: 18 of 35 for 173 yards with one touchdown and one interception apiece for a passer rating of 63.2. That statline is more than bad enough to lose most NFL games, which is what has usually happened to Dalton when he’s played like that in the past. The difference with this game was that unlike in Cincinnati, this defense was good enough to propel his pedestrian passing to a victorious result.

And speaking of defense, was Chicago even that good on defense on this day? Not really. They only registered four QB hits on the day – it’s just that Glennon was positively magisterial at turning hits into play-ending sacks, going a perfect 4-for-4 in this dismaying department. They picked him off twice in 15 dropbacks, which is pretty bad, but the first of these was off of a tipped pass, which is usually a combination of bad luck and good defense. The Bears’ best defensive play of the game was probably their very first snap, when Trevis Gipson nailed Glennon for a sack-fumble that Bilal Nicholas returned to the Giants’ 2-yard line. Chicago promptly scored on a short David Montgomery touchdown run. On New York’s next series, Glennon threw aforementioned tipped interception – coincidentally, or perhaps understandably, the first and only time Glennon targeted Kenny Golladay. This pass was snagged by Gipson – Tashaun Gipson, that is (no relation to Trevis – sometimes there’s symmetry in football sorrow). The game was essentially over after Dalton turned this second Giants blunder into a touchdown pass to make it 14-0 CHI. Some other fun nonsense occurred, like a safety after Devontae Booker failed to escape the endzone on a handoff. But the silliest part of this game was the game’s final interception, which came, no joke, off of a halfback pass from David Montgomery on fourth down and four from the Giants’ 9-yard line with 1:55 left in the fourth quarter while the Bears were leading 29-3. I guess at 5-10 with your imminent firing a fait accompli, you might as well pull out all the stops, Matt Nagy.

Marquise Goodwin (left), Andy Dalton (middle) and David Montgomery (right) basking in the warmth of a very easy day on offense, with Dalton’s expression saying something to the effect of “Haha, this is cool.”

XI

Packers at Chiefs, Week 9: Love Lost

It started bad, it continued to be bad, and it ended bad for Jordan Love in his regular season Packers debut. It was inauspicious enough that his first start for the Pack had to come because of Aaron Rodgers’ dumbfounding “immunization” fiasco, but to have to play against Patrick Mahomes, the Platonic Ideal of quarterbacks who all young quarterbacks will be compared to and judged against, while also having to more or less extemporaneously prove that he was worth a first round pick the year before? Love can be excused for being nervous in this challenging spot, but he cannot be excused for teaming up with Mahomes to produce one of the most tortuous, distended, and ponderously uninteresting games ever played by either of these teams. 

This poor guy Jordan Love. The comparisons between his entry into the NFL and Aaron Rodgers’ 2005 draft day odyssey and the ensuing awkwardness at GB headquarters with Brett Favre have been done to death, so we won’t belabor that analysis. What we will belabor is the morass of mistake-ridden play that ensued after Kansas City’s first and Green Bay’s second drive – i.e., after the scripted plays ran out.

Awesome though the Andy Reid Chiefs are, they are expert at this sort of thing: looking like offensive dynamos for 15 or so plays and then going into protracted competitive hibernation. We’ve seen it so often from the Chiefs that we probably do not ascribe as much penalty to these instances as we should. Think back to two different 21-3 leads the Reid Chiefs built on hallowed Chiefs Kingdom home turf before squandering their leads to palpably overmatched opponents, both in the playoffs: the 2017 Wild Card versus the Tennessee Titans and the 2021 AFC Championship versus the Bengals. In both instances, the Chiefs scored three fast touchdowns before halftime before losing their way entirely in the second half and, thanks to equal parts offensive befuddlement and defensive chicanery, losing to inferior adversaries. The same happened here, but the fall was expedited, occurring after the Chiefs’ very. first. drive. Ew. But they still won.

Following a marathon 8-minute 16-play march featuring 4 3rd or 4th down conversions, Mahomes found Kelce in the endzone on a nicely-faked play action pop pass. From there…well, the final score was 13-7, so you can imagine how such a game might unfold when one of the 2 touchdowns scored occurred on the second drive in the first quarter. The Packers, near fatally crippled by an under-prepared quarterback visibly struggling to synchronize timing with his targets, did not score on offense until it was far too late, only reaching the endzone with 5:05 left in the fourth quarter. At one point, they went 17 straight plays without reaching Kansas City territory, and when they finally did, they somehow lasted 9 plays before a Jordan Love pass was seized out of the air by L’Jarius Sneed, effectively terminating a 16-play, 68-yard drive with nary a point being added to the GB section of the scoreboard.

But there was gruesomeness glowering on the opposite side of the scoreboard as well. For as unwatchable and disjointed as the Green Bay offense was on this day, Kansas City was hardly much better. Perhaps the game plan was scaled back towards a more ball-control-oriented strategy to shorten the game while an inexperienced and ineffective quarterback was manning the enemy’s backfield, you may be thinking. But this was manifestly not the case, as Patrick Mahomes threw 37 passes on this day (and was sacked once), finishing just a pass and change short of his 38.7 attempts per game average for 2021. These cumulatively accounted for 166 yards at the meager average of 4.48 yards per attempt. Derisory as those numbers are, the Chiefs’ running game may have been even more horrible, with their team total of 25 attempts netting 77 yards, barely 3 yards per attempt. 25 attempts isn’t that much, so could they have pressed the issue and wrung a few more hard-fought yards out of their ground game on this day? Maybe, maybe not. When you’re just eclipsing 3 yards a clip, it’s hard to blame them for throwing the ball as much as they did. It seems fair to assign even blame to both components of the KC offense on a day when the air-ground partnership equated to 237 total, unenlightened yards, a patently un-Mahomesian sum. Still there’s only one way to win a football game, and that’s by outscoring your opponent. In this effort, the Chiefs succeeded; they will not win any style points for this, though (and they won’t win their bettors any money, either – their failure to stop the lifeless Green Bay offense from producing a late Allen “Lazarus” Lazard resurrection touchdown meant Kansas City failed to cover their lofty -7.5 spread. No one went home happy this day.).

The poor offensive play and shocking lack of scoring from both teams cannot be fully ascribed to offensive inefficiency on this day, however. This was one of those games upon whose countenance the Football Gods saw fit to mark with the sigil of special teams tomfoolery. Contributing to this game’s discomforting length were numerous, lengthy procedural deliberations following unsightly confusions on special teams, including two straight Green Bay drives that ended in a missed field goal and then an Alex Okafor blocked field goal that stopped Green Bay from scoring before halftime and a muffed punt that grazed a supine Packer which was recovered by Kansas City. It was all par for the course in a game that started out looking like a 45-7 drumming but wound up a ho-hum 13-7 snoozefest. Even the exciting plays were boring – a miraculous bobbled catch by AJ Dillon was overshadowed by the fact that it came directly after Tyrann Mathieu nearly jumped the route and returned a bad Love decision for 6 points. This would have made it 14-0 early and would have really ended the game early; instead it registers as just another notch in a game that wound on and on until, mercifully, it ended with KC running out the clock and successfully avoiding a wild upset at home against a Rodgersless Packers team.

It's sad that we haven’t been able to see Mahomes versus Rodgers yet, which this game promised us up until November 3, just 4 days before this high-octane matchup of recent MVPs was set to ignite. Recall that these teams’ 2019 matchup was itself sabotaged by the sorrow of a missing starter at QB, as Patrick Mahomes was out with a short but scary patellar dislocation. That game, though, was greatly exciting, with senescent stand-in Matt Moore battling Rodgers in a thrilling back-and-forth primetime affair. It’s usually fun when Andy Reid has to make do with a backup QB – he’s done it many times before, with AJ Feely, Koy Detmer, Jeff Blake, Jeff Garcia and Michael Vick (especially Michael Vick) enjoying unexpected success as Donovan McNabb fill-ins in Andy’s Eagles days and the occasional Chase Daniel, Matt Moore or Chad Henne sighting on the Chiefs. Reid rarely limits the playbook for his backup QBs, which we love to see. Matt LaFleur could learn a thing or two about that, as evidenced by Jordan Love’s excitement-dousing debut. He could also learn a thing or two about going for two when you’re down 13 and have just scored a touchdown – but that’s a conversation for another time.

L’Jarius Sneed after intercepting Jordan Love, gesturing to the Arrowhead Crowd as if to say “Are you not entertained?” The answer, of course, was no.

X

Raiders at Browns, Week 15: Surprise, Mullens-Carr Was Not Fun For Anyone

To the most gullible of football optimists, it looked like it could be a sneaky fun game on paper. With the nastier bloodhounds in Cleveland’s Dog Pound dissatisfied and uninspired by Baker Mayfield’s streak of un-good play, and with the run-heavy approach with a backup QB proving effective against a blindsided Denver team having dazzled Browns Nation in Week 7, this double-header opener (we’ll return to the atrocious abomination that was the second game this night later in our list) figured to be a mildly amusing changeup contest. It wasn’t. It looked like what you think of when I say “Raiders-Browns.”

You remember Nick Mullens’ first start in the NFL. Everyone does. It was beautiful to behold, and impossible to forget. Mullens, an undrafted college peculiarity out of Southern Miss that the 49ers took a chance on in 2017, had about as good a debut as any quarterback in NFL history: 16 for 22, 262 yards, 3 touchdowns. Not only was it possibly the best quarterback debut ever, it was also essentially the ideal game for a quarterback through the eyes of a coach: he only threw 22 passes but completed 16 of them for over 10 yards a clip and tossed a trio of touchdowns in the process. Almost any coach would sign off on such numbers, but Kyle Shanahan especially would. Nick’s future looked, against all odds, bright. And his victim on this fortunate night? The Las Vegas Raiders, and one Derek Carr.

Fast forward 3 years. The scars of age have wounded Mr. Mullens. A once glimmering prospect who some anointed as the best undrafted quarterback since Kurt Warner (for those of us who don’t remember Austin Davis, anyway) has seen some additional action in San Francisco when Jimmy G was injured, but has failed to live up to the lofty billing he set for himself when he threw those 22 passes on his Hello World performance. He’s now on the Browns, pressed into duty following a catastrophic COVID-19 breakout that incapacitated depth chart superiors Case Keenum and Baker Mayfield. It fell to erstwhile Saint Nick to deliver Thursday Night NFL fun.

Did he disappoint? Well…sort of. He played a game that was in some ways very similar to the stunning debut he authored in his first year with Kyle Shanahan, who is himself a composer of gameplans very similar to Browns coach Kevin Stefanski: he eschewed liberal downfield daring, taking few chances, deciding not to force balls into tight coverage (even though, you know, this was the Raiders he was playing), remaining conservative, and generally playing within himself. Unfortunately, because this is Nick Mullens we’re talking about, “playing within oneself” makes for somniferous football. By the numbers, that means 20 of 30 for 147 yards, a tick under 5 yards per throw. But he didn’t take a sack, didn’t throw an interception, and executed the straightjacket gameplan devised for him admirably.

But if the play of Nick Mullens was somniferous, the Browns and Raiders’ running games were positively sedative. On Cleveland’s side, the bruiser stylings of Nick Chubb were the unabashed focus of the entire evening, with Chubb handling 23 of Cleveland’s 24 carries on the night for an okay-ish 3.9 yards per carry – 91 rushing yards altogether. What those numbers fail to reveal, though, is that 24 of those hard-begotten yards came on one run, meaning that his other 22 rushes totaled a Trent Richardsonian three point zero yards per rush. D’Ernest Johnson, meanwhile, who like Nick Mullens had shot to meteoric if powerfully temporary glory during the aforementioned game where Case Keenum started in place of Baker (22 for 146), received the lone other carry, and lost two yards. To round out this now overlong examination of a largely starless night for the Cleveland offense, let’s look at the people who caught passes for the Browns in this game: Johnson, Demetric Felton, Harrison Bryant, Rashard Higgins, David Njoku, Donovan Peoples-Jones, and Nick Chubb. Their running backs alone caught 8 passes…for 35 yards. Vegas’s Josh Jacobs didn’t do any better: 4 catches for THREE yards.

It’s not enough that just the shorthanded home team had to put forth a dizzyingly disenchanted effort on offense, though. Their guests from Las Vegas observed the ways of their hosts and decided, When In Rome.  The best receivers for LV this night were Zay Jones and Foster Moreau – you fill in the blanks from there. From a purely numerical perspective, Derek Carr looks like he clearly outplayed Nick Mullens, but this isn’t true. Whereas Mullens eschewed any turnover-courting risks, Carr threw up numerous attempted arm punts, the last of which, coming with only 2:52 left in the game, was intercepted by Greedy Williams and should have ended the game. On the drive right before this, the only genuinely intriguing substance of this game transpired, as  a wending and winding 16-play 80-yard drive culminated in a 4th-and-goal touchdown pass to Harrison Bryant, who, surprised as he was that they’d located the endzone successfully, promptly fell flat on his back despite no defenders being anywhere near him. Now the Browns had picked off Carr and could salt the game away. But Chubb chose the poorest possible time to run completely out of steam, gaining only 7 yards on 3 carries. Carr then completed 6 straight passes, spiked the ball, and allowed Daniel Carlson to kick a very challenging 48 yard field goal to win the game. Stefanski tried to ice the lanky Scandinavian, but DC sailed the first one beautifully for a warm up make and nailed number two as well. Could that have been the highlight of the evening? Well, maybe – it isn’t very often you see a kicker make the same field goal in two completely different ways before and after being iced. You look for little sparks of quasi-excitement like kicking nuance during games like this.

We would like to confer additional negative energy on this contest for another reason: this is the second straight wet thud of a game these two teams have played. Inspect your recollections of 2020, if you have any, and flip to the mental file containing memories of the game these two teams played in Cleveland just a year prior. That game finished 16-6. That’s barely 3 touchdowns worth of points, mind you, and 15 of those points came on field goals. The only touchdown in that game came from Hunter Renfrow on the second play of the fourth quarter after he performed one of his patented triple moves and barely – just barely – slid between Browns zone coverage to break the plane on what was effectively a concealed slant. That’s the extent of the excitement in that game, unless you want to include a functionally pointless goal line stand the Browns defense authored later in the fourth that simply kept the game from being 20-6. Thus, the judgment we render on the 2021 version of this once highly exciting matchup (they played a lights-out 45-42 overtime thriller in 2018, coincidentally Mayfield’s first start) is that of Tenth Worst Of 2021. Hopefully the next time these teams play it will be a touch more electrifying – if, perhaps, sleazier, with the next meeting likely being in Las Vegas and with a new, less virtuous Browns QB at the helm.

An abject Nick Mullens despairing at how this game ended; or, alternatively, an abject Nick Mullens emulating the position assumed by most of America throughout most of this game.

IX

Dolphins at Saints, Week 16: Ian Book is the Necronomicon of Bad Quarterbacks

When you envision teams in transition, something akin to the 2021 editions of the Saints and Dolphins come to mind. The Fins were 2 years removed from an accelerated denuding of their pre-Flores roster, and absent a real identity on offense were trying to make do with Tua Tagovailoa, Jaylen Waddle, and what in football terms can be referred to as “some guys.” The Saints, themselves removed from an equally interesting if more successful 2019, were without Drew Brees and Michael Thomas. In a sense, this was a game featuring one team with a serviceable passing game versus one without. The outcome was eye torture. 

When reviewing some of the repellent material vying for this list, it occurred to me that a couple of these games somehow snuck into primetime or an equivalent window where it was the only NFL game on. How could that be? To be sure, some of the other primetime games here immortalized looked like they could be interesting, either because they promised matchups of good-on-paper teams or represented typically competitive divisional rivalries. This one, however, was neither. This one made absolutely no sense. These teams should never play each other in primetime. Can you remember any other Saints-Dolphins games? My good man, some of you may say, what about that 21-point comeback the Saints authored in 2009? Okay, fair; even if that game had its fun moments, for a 21-point Saints comeback to be possible, they still needed to fall behind by three touchdowns to a post-Wildcat Tony Sparano football team, which is very sad. Ignoring that game, these teams have played each other 12 times – in 7 of those, one of the teams involved failed to score more than 10 points, and 8 of them were decided by at least 2 scores. Get this garbage hence!

But the national audience would not be spared on December 27, 2021. The manifold mysteries of post-Brees New Orleans had been swirling furiously late into the season, with three different quarterbacks having notched starts before Ian Book got the call in Week 16. These Saints had an odd trait that we’ve observed before in, for instance, Mike Tomlin’s Steelers: a weird ability to play exceptionally, suffocatingly, unbeatably well against good teams while looking like awful offal against bad ones. Put another way, they had an exceptionally high ceiling and an arrestingly low floor. What else could explain their opening day demolition of Green Bay, in which they smashed the Packers 38-3 while Jameis Winston threw 5 touchdowns in 14 completions (with only 148 yards!), or their second straight regular season sweep of Tampa Bay, in which they beat Brady and the Bucs once with Trevor Siemian in a 36-27 shocker and again in a wild, 9-0 defensive haymaker effort with gadget passer Taysom Hill outplaying Tom Terrific? These were shocking, unforeseeable results, and were clearly outliers when you consider that between these two victories over defending champs Tampa they lost five straight before beating the Jets the week before NOLA-TB Round 2. But hey, you say, they held Thomas Edward Patrick Brady, Jr. to 0 points – surely they can best Tua and the lowly Dolphins. This team was 1-7 at one point for God’s sake! This Saints D would surely wreak humiliation on Miami. Right?

Wrong. Taysom Hill and Trevor Siemian, QBs 2 and 3 for the Saints, presumably following a long evening of trading stories about how hard they partied at Northwestern and BYU while in college, landed themselves on the dreaded COVID list, and Ian Book was ushered into the lives of millions. After a short drive full of short passes for Miami, Book took the field and ended the game. No, seriously: he handed off to Alvin Kamara, completed a 4 yard dump to someone named Ethan Wolf, then on 3rd and 3 targeted perennial all-name teamer Lil’Jordan Humphrey but failed to get the ball up enough to avoid an Andrew Van Ginkel tip. The deflected pass fell straight into the arms of Nik Needham, who waltzed unobstructed to the waiting endzone. Jason Sanders PAT, 7-3 Dolphins. Thus ended the drama of the evening. The rest of the game was spent in a largely formless but monotonously predictable cadence, with the Dolphins managing to sustain drives with all manner of low-risk dumpoffs and rollout completions. They won time of possession 34 minutes to 26, but this doesn’t quite do justice to what it felt like. The Dolphins, who have already appeared on this list once, find themselves twice singled out for infamy because of just how uninteresting their offense is. One can only behold so many pre-snap man-in-motion shotgun passes that inevitably result in flat route checkdowns to Jaylen Waddle or Myles Gaskin before the novelty of such fare wanes. But the Dolphins’ offense can’t be too severely chastised for their boringness – they have, after all, had 5 offensive coordinators in 4 years (they were on their 3rd and 4th under Flores alone by the time this game was played; yes, they had co-offensive coordinators in 2021), and building a passing game from scratch each year probably does not allow for overmuch creativity. Plus, the running game has been stuck in something worse than neutral for the entirety of the Flores regime, and this game, while not as bad as the year Ryan Fitzpatrick led the team in rushing, was another annal in the tome of terrible ground games during the Flores Epoch, with the runners combining for 30 carries and 86 yards. Not even three yards a carry! That partially explains, perhaps, why this one slew the brain cells so deftly: the Saints defense was dominant against the run and competent against the pass, yet the Saints never had a chance in this one. And the reason NOLA had nary a chance this night – at home with the Bourbon Street crowd, no less – was because they were on QB 4.

It’s not all Book’s fault. He was a rookie on a Michael Thomas-less Saints team who was frantically trying to decipher a disjoint maze of blitzing Fins while aiming for such targets as Adam Prentice, Tony Jones, Ethan Wolf and Nick Vannett. But he deserves some blame, and he shall be apportioned his due. Here’s some stats to illustratively provide the needed brickbats: He had 12 completions that collectively traveled 54 yards through the air but took 8 sacks that negated 56 yards. He had 12 completions on 28 dropbacks – 10 of those resulted in a sack or interception (he threw 2 of those for 36 return yards). His longest pass, a 56 yard curiosity to Lil’Jordan Humphrey, was entirely the doing of Humphrey – the pass, the highlight of the night on offense for the Saints, was into double coverage and required Humphrey to twist backward, make a diving catch, and somehow stay on his feet to temporarily outrun the bested Fin DBs. But, we say again, it is not all his fault – he was pressured on an incredible 56.7% of dropbacks! He also had a lower Bad Throw Percentage than Tua (16.7% to 23.1%), but as with a lot of bad quarterbacks, those Bad Throws were punished with inordinate misfortune by the Football Gods. That said, Book authored page after page of ball that was bleachlike to behold, and even with allowances made for the Saints’ understaffing, trying to compare middling first-stringer Jameis Winston to Ian Book is like comparing Ulysses to milk and honey.

This is how this game felt to watch.

VIII

Football Team at Broncos, Week 8: The Least Eventful Game of All Time 2021

An absurd end to a destructively uneventful game provided some gridiron gallows humor to a game that was the elemental epitomization of what happens when you queue up Taylor Heinicke and Teddy Bridgewater squaring off. The other 58-ish minutes were what the psychosurgery ward plays on loop during lobotomy operations. 

You could look at this game as a “quarterback duel,” if you wanted to. You would be mightily disappointed if you chose this route, though. Neither Taylor Heinicke nor Teddy Bridgewater clock in too loftily on the QB wattage ranking scale, for various reasons: watching Taylor Heinicke, he seems like a QB with a lot of “tools” but not a ton of “polish,” whereas Teddy Bridgewater seems a lot like a guy with a lot of “polish” but not a lot of “tools.” It’s hard to explain the quintessence of Teddy to someone who hasn’t watched him play, but let’s put it this way: he reminds this viewer of the Warren Beatty film Heaven Can Wait, in which a star quarterback is plucked from this mortal plane before his time on Earth is up and then re-inserted into a new body, possessing the faculties of his old self but the physiology of an athletically disinclined multimillionaire who was recently the target of an assassination attempt. That analogy will work for Teddy B, whose 2021 salary was indeed in the multiples of millions (4.25M, to be precise) and who, playing behind PFF’s 19th-ranked offensive line after suffering a career-threatening knee injury earlier in his career all while operating a cataclysmically unimaginative Vic Fangio Broncos offense, underwent every Sunday the closest possible thing a quarterback can experience to an assassination attempt.

And a convincing argument was made for the unworkableness of this Bronco offense during this game. Played fittingly on October 31, the way these teams tried and failed time after time to stick the prolate spheroid into the endzone or even to kick the thing through the uprights was blood-curling. How blood-curling? Well, to give you an idea, there were 55 short passes in this game. That means that of the 65 throws authored by Heinicke and Bridgewater on this day, 10 traveled 15 or more yards through the air. And that’s just attempts – only five of them were caught! The saddest part about this game was probably how many chances this game had to be a thrilling affair. The Washington offense went for it on fourth down FIVE TIMES in this game – but they converted only once. The Washington Football Team kicked three field goals – two were blocked. The odds of that happening are…well, they’re low, and one blocked field goal is usually enough to slake our thirst for special teams tomfoolery for an afternoon.

Worse, at least from the perspective of the Washington Football Team, was that they lost by 7 and had three different end of half/end of game chances to score – the issue for these maroon-clad misfortunates, though, was that a touchdown was the only option in each of these scenarios. Heinicke went 0-for-3 in achieving the desired result when these situations arose. Not only that, but he messed up each one in a novel way. It was peculiar in a depressing way. Let’s review these, shall we? After a Teddy B touchdown pass to Melvin Gordon (remember that name), the Washingtonians had 1:11 left in the first half to match the Broncos at 10 points. At the very least, they could have kicked a field goal to make it a 4-point game. But following four Heinicke completions (you guessed it, short passes to the likes of J.D. McKissic, Ricky-Seals Jones and Deandre Carter), a bad snap on 3rd and 3 on the frontiers of field goal range forced Heinicke to retreat, allowing Broncos DE Stephen Weatherly to beat his blocker and sack the QB ten yards back. Heinicke probably had enough time to get rid of the ball, which someone like Tom Brady, or fellow TB-initialed passer Teddy Bridgewater, would have done. Heinicke didn’t proving the paucity of “polish” we touched on earlier. On 4th and 13 with 3 seconds left (Rivera decline to take a timeout until there was only time for 1 more play in the half), Heinicke heaved a Hail Mary toward the endzone that was intercepted by Justin Simmons, throwing the ball just a bit too short to find the deepest receiver in the endzone. This wasn’t the end of the game, though, just a yawn-mongering first half. Heinicke did succeed in throwing one of the prettier over-the-shoulder touchdowns of the season to Deandre Carter with less than a minute left in the 3rd quarter to tie the game. But much like Heinicke’s temporarily legend-making effort against the Buccaneers in the 2020 Wild Card game, none of his positive moments seemed to come at the right time. With a quarter left, even a low-voltage attack like the Teddy B-Vic Fangio brain trust was capable of putting themselves ahead. This time, it was once again the man of the hour, Melvin Gordon (again, remember this man’s name), running it in from 7 yards out with four and a half minutes left. Now the Football Team really needed a touchdown. But a touchdown was not to be theirs. A relatively impressive if cautious drive from Heinicke and the Washington offense got the Football Team to the Denver 11-yard line, the threshold of pay dirt. But the drive had expended its excellence by this point. Heinicke threw a wasteful pass to Antonio Gibson for only 3 yards, then Terry McLaurin caught a pointless pass for 1 yard. On 3rd and 6, Heinicke held the ball for far too long and was once again bagged by Stephen Weatherly, who may be the hero of the game. This time Heinicke did fumble, putting the Football Team in an all hope is lost 4th and 19 situation. Once again, Heinicke’s desperation toss was short of its mark, and landed once again in Justin Simmons’s waiting hands. But still the game was not over. Unbelievably, Melvin Gordon fumbled the ball on the Broncos’s 3rd down play on the ensuing drive (Rivera, smartly, had not spent any timeouts on silly delay of game annulments or things of that nature – take note, dumb coaches! – forcing Denver to actually run plays instead of kneeling), and even more ridiculously, Washington recovered. The third time, Rivera hoped, would be the charm for Heinicke’s hazards at a Hail Mary. But, overcorrecting from his previous two disasters, Heinicke sailed the ball out of the damn endzone on 4th and 16. They got to 4th and 16, fittingly, by Heinicke taking yet another sack on what amounted to a touchdown-or-nothing set of downs. In sum: three attempts at touchdowns at the half or end of game, three sacks taken, three 4th and 13+-yards to go, three Hail Marys, two interceptions, one overthrow, 0 points. And those two blocked field goals. They lost by 7. Sam Howell SZN can’t get here fast enough. Lol.

I guess the Broncos deserved to win this one. But did they really? Precedent says otherwise. Vic Fangio’s formless, dysmorphic Broncos wound up 9-16 in one score games from 2019-21, and could have easily finished 8-17 and thus below a win percentage of .33 had Washington capitalized on literally any of several golden opportunities in this game. But when you’re talking about the least eventful game of the season, the boringest team tends to win. Let’s bury this game film in a Rocky Mountain cavern and not think about it anymore.

Quite possibly the single most exciting moment of this game. Thrilling, isn’t it?

VII

Browns at Vikings, Week 4: Final Score: 14-7. You Figure Out the Rest.

If the Heinicke–Bridgewater tilt was a “low wattage” affair, and if Brady-Manning circa 2007 would be the highest voltage possible for a quarterback duel, then this game would be expected to fall somewhere right in the middle. Like, maybe exactly in the middle. And not only were these quarterbacks average or a bit better than average, but their respective teams were good enough to promise excitement and exhilaration. I mean, look at how these teams made out in 2020 – the Browns won their first playoff game since their 1999 resurrection, and the Vikings seemed to put things together after a horrendous start, all the while sporting the best rookie receiver campaign since Randy Moss colored defenses purple back in 1998. Did we receive anything approaching what this game’s potential could have lived up to? Well, it’s No. 7 on this list. Do the math. 

Any game where you hear C.J. Ham’s name called twice on the opening drive can only be so good. And a game where the Browns go for it twice on 4th down inside the Vikings’ 10 and fail to convert twice (one ended up resulting in a new set of downs due to penalty, not because of any special play from Baker Mayfield or his merry band of Browns) can only be so good, too. Neither of these facts illustrate just how stunningly drowsy this game was as well as this one, though – the Browns got to 14 points not by scoring two touchdowns, but instead by scoring a touchdown, a two-point conversion, and two field goals. What universe are we living in where that’s enough offensive production to win on the road in Minnesota? The answer: this universe, which is far crueler and far stranger to watchers of America’s game than you’d think or hope. The Vikings marched straight down the field on their first drive, going on a vintage Vikes rampage for 14 plays that included three 3rd down conversions and one 4th down conversion, the playcalling showing a healthy and balanced mix of Cousins passing and Dalvin Cook rushes (Alexander Mattison got an attempt in, too, as did aforementioned beefy stalwart C.J. Ham, who thundered forth to keep the drive alive on 4th down and 1 at the Browns’ 9-yard line). Ham’s heroics preceded a Cousins illegal forward pass, which sent the purple boys back a few yards, but Kirk eventually found all-galaxy WR Justin Jefferson in the endzone for 6. PAT, 7-0, Vikes. They were on pace for about 56 points or so, if you cared to extrapolate. And they were at home. And their opponents were the sad sack Browns. It was practically in the bag.

Ah, but like their ancestral late-eleventh-century forebears, this conquest was to be far less Lindisfarne and far more Stamford Bridge. From that point on, the Viking thrust was powerless, with only 180 yards gained from that point forward. Even worse may be the total plays they ran – after 14 total plays on their first drive, the purple gang ran a measly 49 plays the rest of the game. They were hardly on the field. Which is surprising, since their opponents were just about as bad, if not worse, than they were. Ask any Browns fan who watched this game with intent and they will tell you – this was one of the low points of the Baker Mayfield Experience in Cleveland. Not only because he was really, really bad, but also because even his most devoted zealots seemed to in unison feel the need to offer disclaimers, explanations, and straight up apologies about his performance. “This was a bad Baker game” was an utterance commonly to be heard following this contest’s conclusion, and it escaped the lips of even the most exemplary defenders within the Oklahoma passer’s cadre of supporters. One must wonder at which point the Browns front office decided to forgo the finest quarterback in franchise history to pursue embattled and controversial passer Deshaun Watson – perhaps this was the game. Baker was visibly, if not statistically, putrid, racking up a sorrowful 155 yards on 33 attempts for zero touchdowns. At least he didn’t throw an interception, the reader will declaim, but he did the next best thing, taking a sack on 4th and short in the opponent’s redzone. It was very probably a rough, rough watch for former quarterbacks who wanted these (admittedly unheralded) passers to step up. Step up, they did not – this was maybe the worst quarterback game that featured two deeply entrenched starters of the entire 2021 season. This issue might be symptomatic of the style of ball these coaches want to play, though. Think about it – how many defensive coaches end up with as good a quarterback as Kirk Cousins? Assume that Cousins is good, of course, but truly ponder the question. Someone like Mike Zimmer – i.e., a defensive coach who has a truly good quarterback – does not come around often. Equally worth our contemplation is someone like Kevin Stefanski who, hilariously, was Kirk Cousins’ offensive coordinator for a couple of seasons before getting the job in Cleveland in 2020. It’s funnier the more you think about it: the guy who was hired in Cleveland because he maximized the abilities of Kirk Cousins barely concocted a serviceable gameplan for a first overall pick with Odell Beckham, Jr., Jarvis Landry, Austin Hooper, Nick Chubb and Kareem Hunt on the roster, but managed to hold his former protégé to such a bad performance (Cousins tallied 203 yards with one touchdown and one pick) that his own, even worse quarterback managed to succeed. It’s like a perverse ouroboros of NFL coaching acumen.

But, ultimately, it may be unfair to judge this game against so punishing and opprobrious a standard. After all, even though they are largely serviceable quarterbacks, the Browns and Vikings do not channel primarily through Baker Mayfield and Kirk Cousins – they go through Nick Chubb and Dalvin Cook, so maybe we should judge this game on the meritorious moiling of those two superstars. This was their sort of game, after all. But even when we brandish this measuring stick we have to take pause and gawk at the ugliness of the content – Chubb was solid, going 21 for 100 with a long of 13, meaning he was doing good stuff on most rushes (if he’d had a long of, say, 50 yards, one might look with suspicion on the other 20 rushes). But Dalvin was potently silent in this game, going only 9 for 34 and failing to deliver the impact the Vikings needed to steal this game. His long run was 13, too. Not good enough!

As with a whole lot of bad games, this one ended with a sad Hail Mary attempt. But not just any Hail Mary attempt – for whatever reason, the Vikings decided to run what was tantamount to a spread formation on the last play, meaning there were only two receivers on either side of the line. How does that make any kind of sense? The whole idea of a last ditch Hail Mary is to “overload a spot,” as Jim Harbaugh would say. Instead of this long-odds but time-tested method, what does Kirk do? He tries to bullet-pass a touchdown to a slot receiver with 3 seconds left. C’mon, man. A WTF end to a WTF game – fitting, I guess. Let’s give this game a short Viking funeral and let’s not think about it anymore.

C.J. Ham receives the handoff. This is commonly regarded as one of the landmark moments in the history of pro football by true students of the game.

VI

Jets at Texans, Week 12: Sadness Bowl Goes to Plan; These Teams Kill Their QBs

If you were wondering what it would look like if Rex Burkhead was a four-down back in an NFL offense, then this is the game for you. This game did not merit much more than a few glances to check the score and maybe see if a hideous parlay involving this wretched game were on track. But for Houston and New York fans, it was like wearing sunglasses with iron maiden lenses. 

On its face, this looks like a rather traditional football score. There have to have been thousands of football games that have finished 21-14 in the history of the sport. But much like Vikings-Browns in week 4, the way the Jets reached 21 points was silly enough that it deserves examination: a field goal, a touchdown and 2 point conversion, a touchdown and PAT, and a field goal. It should not take so many disjoint scores to broach the 20-point barrier. But that level of effort in getting to a score that 15 other NFL teams reached or exceeded in week 12 was par for the course in a game that lacked basic hallmarks of well—played pro football. This one looked and felt like a preseason game for much of this contest. One of the things that bad teams that have experienced a lot of turnover typically struggle with in the preseason is protecting their quarterback, figuring out protections, and limiting sacks – there were 9 combined in this game, and they all looked avoidable if these teams and quarterbacks were further along in the journey towards competitiveness. But as things stood in Week 12 of 2021, these teams were probably the two worst in the NFL along with Jacksonville. New York had been spiraling on defense, giving up 430+ yards in 5 of their previous 7 games (the two where they didn’t were the legendary Mike White win over Cincinnati and a loss to the Dolphins’ typically limp offense, who put up a not-unrespectable 388 yards the week prior). Houston, meanwhile, was probably the worst offense in the NFL, and was making a convincing case as one of the worst offenses of all time: after Tyrod Taylor’s injury in week 2 against the Browns, the Davis Mills-led Texans proceed to put up 9, 0, 22, 3, 5, 22, and 9 points before their much-needed bye. If you’re counting, that’s 70 points in 7 weeks. Bad offense, meet bad defense.

Something had to give. The way things played out, you’d be hard-pressed to guess which of these teams had the worse passing offense. New York actually ran the ball well, putting up 157 yards. That sounds like a pretty productive day on the ground – in a vacuum, it is – but it’s concerning when you realize that, even without accounting for the 4 sacks New York took for 36 yards, they outrushed their passing game by 12 yards. When you factor those sacks in, Zach Wilson wound up with 109 net passing yards. But Houston was so bad on dropbacks that it didn’t matter – they themselves ended up with only 106. Two teams combining for 215 net pass yards is a rare, rare sight. Tyrod Taylor did throw for 158 yards and two touchdowns (with sack yardage removed from that calculation), but that doesn’t tell the story of how horrendous he was. All 5 of his sacks were on him and provided a cautionary tale of the consequences of holding the ball too long. But his worst play of the day (which Tyrod probably wishes had been a sack) came on a play action fake reverse screen pass dripping with far too much frippery that took as long to develop as this sentence took to type. Trying to parabola a ball to David Johnson with the NYJ pass rush bearing down on him, Tyrod’s under-arced pass was tipped and intercepted by John Franklin-Myers and returned 32 yards, ending Houston’s first drive of the day after 12 plays and 0 points. Even though New York took the ensuing drive to the Houston 4, though, Zach Wilson took a very avoidable sack on 3rd and 4, losing 9 yards and eliminating the possibility of a 4th down attempt and forcing the Jets to settle for a Matt Ammendola field goal, proving that he was the better of the two people named Amendola that played in this game (the expatriate ex-Patriot named Danny also played in this game, but his greatest contribution was catching Tyrod Taylor’s desperation dumpoff with 6 seconds left). But it was on the next Jets drive that Wilson authored a forceful response to Tyrod’s terrible DL interception, throwing what definitely looked like an illegal forward pass (he was very close to being beyond the line of scrimmage) that got intercepted by DB Tavierre Thomas. What’s worse, Wilson could have scrambled for a solid 5 to 10 yards. What’s double worse, it was a shovel pass. Having a hopelessly unsupported rookie passer and a middling dual threat passer on a torn-down roster is how we arrived at a game that saw fewer combined net passing yards than 22 other teams in Week 12. Somehow, though, neither of these teams were the worst in terms of net passing yards this week: that disgrace went to Tennessee, who only put up 85 against New England. For one shining, ephemeral moment in time, the 2021 Houston Texans and New York Jets were more formidable offensive juggernauts than the eventual number 1 seed in the conference. Quite an afternoon for the Texans, who were probably trying to lose as many 2021 games as possible.

Even though this was a game featuring two teams in the very early stages of what promise to be long rebuilds, there were bright spots here and there for New York and Houston fans to enjoy. The issue is, they might be moot points for these two teams going forward. Tyrod, despite his morbid numbers, did flash some of the signs that prove why he continually gets chosen as a band aid quarterback for teams with rookie quarterbacks (or angling for future rookie quarterbacks): he only ran twice for 30 yards, but he showed mobility on rollouts and recovered a poor snap while minimizing lost yards on the inevitable sack. He threw a really pretty deep ball touchdown to Brandin Cooks (seriously, is this the 2017 Patriots?) and seemed to read the field well at times. But there’s no future with Tyrod – he’s on the Giants now, and it looks like Davis Mills will be The Guy for at least a little while in Houston. As for the Jets, Wilson didn’t look great, but he wasn’t JaMarcus Russell bad. He showed velocity, if not touch, on a few throws, and escaped a couple sacks that would have enveloped lesser running QBs. He even ran a touchdown in from 4 yards out, atoning for his earlier faux pas at the Texans’ 4. He didn’t throw any touchdowns, though; the other touchdown came from running back Andrew Walter, who combined nicely with veteran Hoosier back Tevin Coleman and former Lion Ty Johnson for 157 yards on 30 running back rushes. But those names just listed are not “Michael Carter” or “Breece Hall,” who are the running backs that the Jets have actually drafted in the last two seasons & who figure to be the metaphorical right and left hooks of this offense’s ground game in 2022 and the future. So basically, forget this nice performance from the triple-headed hydra of Coleman, Walter and Johnson. You’ll probably not be seeing suchlike again. As for these teams’ protracted builds back towards contender levels, well – there’s probably more sadness coming before the joyful moments arrive. Texan and Jet fans, here’s to hoping your respective divisions remain the seismic epicenters of instability they’ve been for the last 20 years.

In a game full of offensive moments, the most offensive of them all may have been C.J. Moseley’s sleeves visibly conflicting with the rest of his uniform, They look to be just a few decimals off of the proper “Gotham Green” hex code.

V

Lions at Browns, Week 11: Bad Good Team + Good Bad Team = Bad Football

When the Browns win, they win ugly. When the Browns lose, they lose ugly. You’ll have deduced this conclusion if you’ve read this far since this is the third time the Browns have appeared on this list (they’re 1-1 in Worst Games of 2021, if you care to know). And no, I don’t hate the Browns. I just know boring football. And the Browns are prolific boring football merchants.

See the headline. How else to describe these two nigh-unwatchable garbage truck fleets of football teams in Anno Domini 2021? The Lions made it clear from the very outset that they weren’t particularly interested in competing this year: flushing out the psychic detritus Matt Patricia had permitted to cluster above the rafters of Ford Field would not take only a few weeks or a few months (hopefully for the state of Michigan’s sake it doesn’t take more than a few seasons), and with the timeframe of a probably long rebuild in view, new head coach Dan Campbell made it clear from as early as the construction of his assistant coaching staff and first draft that the goal early on would be to accumulate as much grittiness and FOOTBALL GUY mentality as possible: Campbell’s entire offensive coaching staff is made up of previous NFL players, including former Chargers head coach Anthony Lynn and former Super Bowl champion passers Mark Brunell and Antwaan Randle El, and is anchored by another former player on defense with Aaron Glenn acting as DC. Their first three draft picks in the 2021 NFL Draft, an offensive tackle and two DTs, weighed a combined 956 pounds! This decisively old-school team, which was interesting if not good (coming into the contest with Cleveland at 0-8-1), provided a study in contrast to Cleveland, whose pairing of Andrew Berry and Kevin Stefanski has been lauded for its nouveau approach and embrace of analytics in team building. This isn’t to say that you can’t be a smashmouth football team who also embraces analytics; that’s basically what the Browns were trying to be. Given that they barely hung on to win this game 13—10, though, it looks like the “smashmouth” side of the equation is winning out, and the 2021 Browns were not a convincing argument in favor of the combined arms new wave + old school approach.

But an ugly win is still a win, and even if Cleveland’s plodding offensive tedium didn’t win them a playoff berth in 2021, it was more than enough to outlast the Lions, whose foundations of competitiveness were hardly lain even well into the second half of the season. On paper, the teams looked pretty even in the rushing department, both performing fairly well against tough front 7s to the tune of 168 yards for Detroit and 184 yards for Cleveland. Both scored one rushing touchdown, but Cleveland managed that by virtue of a wildcat scramble by Jarvis Landry, who despite being held to 26 yards on 4 catches provided the game’s sole true highlight, turning a blown-up trick play where he lined up at QB into a Mike Vick style speedrun up the middle between flatfooted defenders. The creative plays were working for Cleveland on this day, and they were not for Detroit: Two of the best plays of the day on offense for Cleveland were the Landry runaround and a tight end screen to Austin Hooper, who caught the ball almost 10 yards behind the line of scrimmage but rumbled forth for 20 yards with perfect sprinter posture. By comparison, the Lions were trying out crazy plays not out of artistic vision but instead necessity. How do we know this? They tried throwing a screen pass to Jason Cabinda. You can be the judge of that.

The Lions’ quarterback on this day was Tim Boyle, who had been press-ganged into service after an injury (and, let’s be honest, a winding stretch of perceptibly ineffective play) sidelined starter Jared Goff. Even though Campbell had said that “they would not be handicapped” by having Boyle instead of Goff as a starter, actions speak louder than words, and based on the playcalling demonstrated by offensive coordinator Anthony Lynn (who even on a good day is one of the conservative and by-the-book playcallers you’re likely to find) they were playing in the offensive football version of a Red Cross field hospital. Forget “handicapped,” the Lions were playing maimed. They only ran 46 plays, and half were runs, half were passes. Racking up 168 yards on 23 rushes is actually a pretty good afternoon, so in fairness to Mr. Boyle, it’s possible that Campbell, Lynn and Co. just wanted to keep the productive rushing attack going. On the other hand, Boyle had not even exceeded 60 yards passing by the time the Lions’ final drive of the afternoon came around (coincidentally this is when his longest pass of the day, a strike to T.J. Hockenson for 24 yards that preceded a loss of 4 on a Godwin Igwebuike screen pass that fixed his total at 77 pass yards, happened). Boyle, simply put, did not pass the eye test: despite only 8 incompletions, every missed throw looked humblingly bad, and every completion had the appearance of a receiver going all-out to make the catch. He had 39 passing yards in the second half. At least it showed growth: Boyle only had 38 passing yards in the first half. But let’s consider the unreality of that figure for a second. The Lions, who entered halftime trailing 13-0, actually attempted fewer passes in the second half than in the first half. When losing by two scores! How? This is how: the Lions were sneakily tanking. Maybe it wasn’t even sneaky – most people who followed NFL goings-on knew what Detroit was up to, but even with the knowledge that the Lions were heavily leaning into their status as the worst team in the NFL, it was arresting to see how they managed their deficit in this game. “Show a little fight right now!”, implored color commentator LaVarr Arrington at a point when the Lions were down by 13. To the credit of the Lions defense, they showed fight; the offense, beleaguered with inexperience though it was with Boyle at the helm of the points machine, did not. Instead, they tried a smorgasbord of low-risk, low-reward plays, hoping that one or two broke a ballcarrier loose and put them on the scoreboard. Thankfully for them, one did – a disguise handoff to D’Andre Swift finally punctured deep into the Cleveland defense, the running back splitting the safeties for a 57-yard touchdown that showed to the world hey, maybe this whole “zero QB” thing can work. It was wrong, of course, as the Lions never sniffed the redzone again. But by God they could have, and the ignominious late-game acquiescence to impending defeat is the chief reason this game lands on the list. Down 6, at the Cleveland 25, in the fourth quarter, after throwing a short pass to Egyptian demigod Amon-Ra St. Brown and pounding the ball into the line twice with D’Andre Swift, and facing a 4th and 1, Dan Campbell decided to settle for a field goal. To cut the lead to 3. Such incomprehensibly risk-averse absurdity deserves to be exterminated with extreme prejudice.

There’s just not that much to say about this game. One thing that did stand out was how bad these two quarterbacks were at protecting themselves; both took huge hits after getting rid of the ball numerous times. In fairness, if I was someone rushing the passer, I’d be pissed I had to play in this game, too. Bad moods abound in Worst Games. Let’s move on.

The rain ponchos. The dog mask. The quarterback statline. The lowered head and downtrodden expression that cannot be concealed. When they write the history of the Cleveland Browns, this might be the picture on slide 1.

IV

Vikings at Bears, Week 15: Cousins-Fields Is Not the Next Manning-Brady

Mac Jones was the best rookie passer of 2021, but Justin Fields came dangerously close to being available for the Pats at the fifteenth overall pick. We have to think that had the Ohio State passer gotten to spend his first NFL year in Foxborough instead of Chicago, he’d have had a much, much better year than he did in the Windy City. Obscured by more jaw-dropping awfulness from picks named Lawrence, Wilson and Mills, Fields’ 1,870 yards, 7 passing touchdowns and 10 interceptions in 10 starts would easily qualify as the worst rookie outing in many other seasons that saw a bevy of young QBs take the reins. But the 2021 Vikings defense was very bad, and provided Fields, who did not play in the final 3 weeks of 2021, a cushy final outing to give Chitown fans some hope. But we must reiterate – it was all for naught in Chicago, as Fields’ best day as a pro to this point equated to only 9 points and sixty minutes of tastelessly blasé ball.

Let’s be even more charitable to Justin Fields than we probably need to be: at one point in this game, very late into the fourth quarter when the final result was unchangeably decided, the Bears had 285 total yards of offense. As you’ll see if you read the above paragraph, that equals the entire passing yardage total tallied by Mr. Fields on this day. So he was the entire offense. Much like Russell Wilson was known to do in 2017, Fields accounted for such a disproportionately high amount of his team’s total offense that it seemed when one looked at the yardage amounts he was the pigskin equivalent of the sole actor in a poorly-cast Chicago Theater production of, say, Patrick Stewart’s mono-actor rendition of A Christmas Carol (which is fitting, since the hilariously grandiose pregame cinematic for this contest was a weirdly holiday-tinged patchwork of 20th century American history interspliced with “memorable” moments from the Vikings-Bears rivalry; the reader is challenged to name one of these moments). And an issue we touched on much earlier with Saquon Barkley again rears its depressingly ineffective head: David Montgomery actually ran well in this game, showing Leveon Bell-like patience in navigating LOS blocking gaps and slugging forward on numerous runs while several tacklers essayed to bring him down, but from a macro standpoint he gave the team a paucity of potency, gaining only 60 yards on 18 carries. On another note, it would be impossible for me to be an eyeball statistician; I’d definitely have guessed based on the game tape alone that he went over 100. This is why we have technology.

Rather than performing the cursory eyeball statistician work that I am clearly not qualified for, I chose, as I always do when writing these entries, to peruse the databases of Pro Football Reference. I was quite amazed to discover that the team that passed for almost 300 yards without an interception was the one that lost by 8 points. Of course, I wasn’t that surprised, as I watched this game live and saw with my own eyes the nauseous brew of late-year non-Packer NFC North football that tends to haunt television sets across America beginning with the customary Lions Thanksgiving doomfest; what I was surprised by was just how bad the Kirk Cousins’ numbers were. The man had 87 passing yards on 24 attempts. That’s TOTAL passing yards – when you factor in the 4 sacks he succumbed to throughout the game, he barely cleared 60. The Vikings weren’t exactly trying to break any passing records this night, it’s true – they ran the ball 33 times in the game – but an experienced field general like Kirk Cousins really should be doing better than this against the 22nd-ranked scoring defense of 2021. Like a pitcher on a cold streak, he just didn’t have “it” this night – both his physical and instinctual faculties seemed stunted on a freezing evening that recalled those supposedly legendary Vikes-Bears highlights the magniloquent pregame cinematic saw fit to rhapsodize. 40 of his yards came in the first quarter. And even though the by this point doomed Mike Zimmer probably just wanted to play a few more games of Zim Ball™ before being shown the door, we must wonder whether that really made sense: Dalvin Cook handled the football on the ground a massive 28 times and only gained 89 yards. Kene Nwangwu, small sample size notwithstanding, was the better runner on the night, making the most of his 3 carries by rumbling for 33 yards. No receiver, it goes without saying, went over 50 yards; only 2 pass catchers had more than 10.

Zimmer’s strategy was unattractive to this viewer’s eye, but was clearly informed by Cousins’ spectacularly erratic play. In one incredible two-play sequence, Kirk held the ball for far too long and fumbled off of a Robert Quinn sack (did you know Quinn had 18.5 sacks in 2021?), only retaining possession because of a diving recovery by Christian Darrisaw. Then on the next play, he threw what will almost certainly be remembered as the worst pass of his entire career, a downfield disaster so ill-advised it is amazing he didn’t become the second quarterback flagged for intentional grounding after throwing an interception. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a thing of hideous beauty – a throw that for all intents and purposes looked like a confident one when Kirk delivered it but wound up in the hands of Bear defender Deon Bush that was the only player in frame when he plucked it out of the winter air. Bush caught the thing like it was a punt. I mean, it sort of was. But this was probably the high mark for the Bears on the day, as the rest of the day was spent meandering around, usually in their own end of the field, for pointless yards that rarely threatened the enemy endzone.

So who exactly was the MVP this evening? I’d say that neither quarterback warranted even passing mention, Fields’ raw numbers be damned. As we’ve seen, the running backs failed to impress overmuch either. Without a whole lot of dynamic wide receiver performances either, we’re excluding them. I guess the whole Vikings defense could get a pass, but they did give up a Hail Mary on the final play of the game to surrender a touchdownless game. As with so many other awful games, Hail Mary confusion was a hallmark of this game too: Cousins had a chance at a Hail Mary too, but at the end of the half, the guy decided to throw the ball OUT OF BOUNDS instead of hitting the endzone. What gives? No, no, no single player on offense or defense deserves such an honor. Instead, we’re splitting it 50/50 a la Super Bowl XII: punters Jordan Berry (7 punts for 295 yards) and Pat O’Donnell (3 for 161 – an average of 53.7 yards per punt!) get to split the MVP car. One of them gets the rear wheels and spoiler, the other gets the engine. Fitting, since the two offenses they attempted to minimize the ineptitude of both looked like they were operating without crucial mechanic parts in a poorly-designed and repair-needy machine. Hopefully the two new coaches helming the command center of these stalled vehicles can induce more liveliness in 2022.

This wasn’t a punt.

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.

II

Jaguars at Jets, Week 16: Blueprint For “Check Back Next Year” Games On Crack

If you want to be chased after by incensed mobs of North Florida and NYC hoi polloi with pitchforks, torches and other gruesome-looking cutlery, build a time machine, travel back to April 2021, and tell Jaguars and Jets fans what their quarterbacks’ rookie seasons would be like. Your life expectancy in hours would shorten to the average of these passers’ YPA.

“Berrios is no joke.” “Berrios having a great year.” “Braxton Berrios is such a weapon.” So reads a lengthy litany of breathless YouTube comments underneath the NFL-published highlight reel of this game, which saw two teams who had been unequivocally pummeled into the unforgiving dust for 15 straight weeks empty out the playbooks and reach shoulder-deep into their respective bags of tricks to try and give their excitement-impoverished fans some semblance of entertainment before a long winter’s nap. They tried, and mostly failed.

I say mostly failed, but, but, but. A point needs to be raised here. Could you have called this a good game? I think, after rewatching this game, that yes, one could come away from this game and call it good. This game was something of a back and forth affair, with four lead changes in the first 18 minutes (albeit rather lackluster ones: Jags 3-0, Jets 6-3, Jags 9-3, Jets 13-9) and some truly wild plays that gave me pause when I rewatched this alarmingly bizarre game. This was the one that included that crazy Zach Wilson scramble for a touchdown and some truly one-in-a-million-odds offensive line hijinks. If you like that sort of thing, and also like seeing young quarterbacks flash snippets of willful potential against two bottom five defenses, and also like seeing two teams who are more or less riding out the string and hoping that their coaching staffs can do better by their players in 2022, and also also like seeing botched fake field goals and unsuccessful 2-point conversions, then yes – this was a good game. I don’t want to be overly hyperbolic in my condemnation of this game, though, even if it does appear in the second slot on this list; I genuinely believe that fans of Gang Green and #DUUUVAL were ensorcelled by this game because of the progress their rookie signal callers showed. My personal rationale for placing this game so high – aside from, I admit, just assuming that this game was as bad as I remembered because of the two teams involved – was more a “lifetime achievement award” conferred on these sorry squadrons for the preceding fifteen weeks, which were by any measure you employ some of the most miserable and disappointing of the last 25 years, with the Jaguars’ zero-dimensional offense and the Jets’ plexiglass defense inspiring nothing but contempt from us at Personal Vowels and nothing but derision from their opponents. So, there’s the caveat. If you didn’t know which teams were playing, you may be tempted to say this was an alright contest. We live in the real world, though, and we can clearly read the needlessly identificational new york emblazoned on the front of the Jets’ jerseys and descry the unmistakably fungal teal-and-mustard color scheme of the Jaguars from our living rooms as soon as we turn on the television. And that counts against them. It should also be said that this game was the second in two years played in Week 16 that saw a head coach inactivated due to COVID-19, with Robert Saleh sidelined for the contest and Jets tight ends coach Ron Middleton assuming temporary managership of the team. Is it concerning that the arguably strongest showing by the Jets offense came on a day when their defensively-minded head coach was not on call? It’s not ultra-encouraging, that’s for sure. But at least we got a lot of cutaways to Middleton during the broadcast, who appeared to be auditioning for the role of an aging Morpheus in The Matrix Resurrections. The movie premiered 4 days before this game, but whatever.

The names of people who scored touchdowns in this game is mirabile dictu: Zach Wilson, Will Richardson Jr., Braxton Berrios, Connor McDermott, and Dare Ogunbowale. Touchdowns by a quarterback, an offensive tackle, a kick returner, another offensive tackle, and a backup running back. And they were scored on a quarterback scramble, a QB sneak fumble recovery, a kickoff return, a tackle-eligible goalline pass, and a halfback dive. Was this the worst Fantasy Football game of all time? It may have been, but if you were expecting a league-winning performance from anyone on either of these teams, we would question your fantasy sanity. Of course, if you were playing in a sixty-person league, maybe you were forced to start Will Richardson, Jr. and Connor McDermott, in which case you looked pretty smart. But even with this stroke of prescient fantasy captainship, you may have been up against a fantasy football prophet of commensurate foretelling power who started Wilson, Berrios (179 total yards and 5 catches) and Dare Ogunbowale (72 total yards and the rushing touchdown), in which case you probably lost a nail biter. The quarterbacks were the stars of this game: Zach Wilson, with his #2 jersey, quicksilver footwork, superior footspeed and fast-ish release looked like Johnny Manziel. He only threw for 102 yards, but he didn’t fumble or throw an interception and added 91 yards on four rushes. See, that’s the guy the Jets drafted – does he really need every defense to be as shoddily coordinated and checked out as the Jaguars living in the fallout of the Urban Meyer era to look like a generational prospect? On the other side, Trevor Lawrence had one of his finest days as a young pro, throwing 39 passes without a pick and racking up 280 yards through the air, adding another 37 on the ground to bring his afternoon to 300+ yards (a rare feat for him in his stormy rookie voyage). But he also took two absolutely backbreaking takedowns in the pocket – one a sack for 28 yards (yes, 28 yards, just two yards short of the record set by…Patrick Mahomes) and another a near-sack on a very late 2-point conversion attempt that forced him to arc the ball into the endzone like a point blank Hail Mary, which fell incomplete. I’ve said it many times before: 2-yard Hail Marys are largely unsound when your personnel includes Chris Manhertz, Jacob Hollister, Laquon Treadwell and Laviska Shenault out of a bunch formation. There were still five and a half minutes left after those lackluster pass-catchers left the field, though, and the reanimated remains of what used to be the Sacksonville defense managed to hold the New York offense to just a field goal, even nearly intercepting a wretchedly ill-advised Wilson throwaway that might have led to a game-winning defensive score which would have ultimately lost them the first overall pick. Rather than this, basically the best possible thing (draft-wise) happened. JAX got the ball back and Lawrence went off, going 6 of 8 passing and adding a heroic 26 yard scramble that conjured images of his CFP victory against Ohio State to set up first and goal at the 5. Lawrence missed his first pass, then nearly threw a game-ending pick 6 of his own which was dropped by C.J. Moseley and dumbly caught by Marvin Jones (they had to spike the ball). Then on fourth and goal, they had an illegal shift penalty. Game over. These teams have a much longer way to go than this game construed. Maybe 2022 will be kinder to these wayward woebegones.

Everyone knows you can’t put a linebacker on Conor McDermott.

I

Lions At Steelers, Week 10: YOU PLAY, TO WIN, THE GAME!!!

If you thought that anything else could steal the sacred top spot of our Top Twelve Worst Games of 2022 rankings, you were sorely mistaken. This game was an opus of oafish play, a grand slam of gridiron grotesquerie, a triumph of terrible football. Every aspect of this game offended the eye and beset the viewer with woeful wonderment. It’s simply The Worst Game of 2021. 

“Ray Ray McDonald from inside the five of the Steelers!” was the introductory remark during the morbid exordium of this game’s broadcast. It is of note because Ray Ray McDonald is not a real person. But a fictional football player would probably have been preferable to the catastrophe we witnessed unfolding at Acrisure, née Heinz, Field on the drizzly afternoon of November 14 2021. The person that the booth was referring to is named Ray-Ray McCloud, and his catch on the first drive was one of four passes thrown by Mason Rudolph caught by members of his own team. One of his other two passes on the opening drive was caught by Lions defender Amani Oruwariye on an amazing, Jermaine Kearse against the Patriots-style bobbled catch, but this interception was overturned due to a 29-yard DPI call on Oruwariye that proved to be the biggest play of the first drive. Mason Rudolph eventually hit former Oklahoma State buddy James Washington in the back right corner of the endzone to take a miraculous 7-0 lead on the opening drive, showing that this Steelers offense could at least take advantage of an overturned turnover, a chiasmus which is fun to write but discouraging to see if you’re a Lions fan. More discouraging than that, though, was what Steelers fans were treated to from their team’s offensive gameplan: fifty passes from Mason Rudolph, who gained 242 yards total on 30 completions. Those 4.84 yards-per-attempt against an 0-8 team doesn’t exactly scream “Big Ben’s successor,” but then again, neither does leading a tying effort against an 0-8 team, which makes the recent comment from Matt Canada, the architect of this artless gameplan, saying that Rudolph has “a great shot” at winning the starting QB job in 2022 after the Steelers signed a free agent and drafted a rookie who can both play Rudolph’s position immitigably ridiculous. A quick look at his passing chart for the afternoon will tell the story simply: he missed every pass he threw over 10 yards when he wasn’t throwing to his right. He completed a single pass of over 20 air yards, and only 4 of over 15 air yards (and one of those officially went in the books as a 9-yard touchdown – it just happened that James Washington was in the deepest part of the endzone when he caught the touchdown).

You can only talk about Mason Rudolph for so long before you start to question your sanity, so it’s understandable that there was a prolonged silence in the booth for about 70 seconds of real time following the first Steelers touchdown. The only actual play the commentary team missed was a kickoff return tackle of Lions returner Godwin Igwebuike by Derek Watt. The way this game went, that was one of the highlights, though, so we could have used some incisive analysis from the announcers. And they were positively on their A Game this day. For example: one of the items of note that play-by-play commentator Chris Myers chose to elevate to the attention of his TV audience was his opinion of the game’s two punters, which differed monumentally in their complimentariness. Of Detroit punter Jack Fox, he gushed: “He’s been their MVP the first half of the season.” Yes, really. Of comparatively unimpressive rookie Pressley Harvin, he scolded: “Not exactly lighting the world on fire.” This is why the luminous sages that provide us with in-game commentary make the big bucks while peons like you and I watch the games for free. Of course, whether you agree with the conclusions drawn in those comments is your call: one (Fox) was the punter for a team that was 0-8 and the other was the punter for a team who was 5-3 with 5 wins in 1-score games. Give Harvin his due. And calm down with calling a punter the “team’s MVP.” It’s obviously fullback Jason Cabinda.

Jokes aside, you could hire a consulting firm to figure out who this game’s MVP was (let’s leave the full season MVPs for this game for another time, as watching sixteen more games’ worth of film on these teams is high above the LD50 of Bad Football for most people) and they would probably come back with the two-word statement “IDK, man.” This what football looked like in 1906; that is to say, it was muddy, unhappy-looking, and difficult to discern who was doing a good job and who had absolutely no idea what they were doing. We can put both quarterbacks conclusively in the latter group, though. We’ve discussed the inefficacious aerial exploits of Steeler QB Mason Rudolph, but he played like 1989 Joe Montana in comparison to Jared Goff. We could expend several pages worth of denunciation in describing Jared Goff’s historically boring afternoon, but since we’re on our final, crowning entry on this list of infamy, and since you’ve probably had enough at this point, we will simply put it this way: he had 54 yards passing going into overtime. Fifty. Four. And they didn’t lose! That’s approaching Rex Grossman versus the Cardinals on Monday Night levels of horror. Commentator Chris Myers recognized the fact that he was witnessing something unimaginable as the seconds ticked away in overtime, noting that Goff’s first completion over the middle to Amon-Ra St. Brown in OT nearly equaled his yardage total over the previous four quarters. It’s not a point I’ll waste too much time on, but a debate has been raging for several years over whether “Quarterback Wins” is a valid stat. I won’t argue for or against that statistic’s validity, but I can say with great confidence that both of these quarterbacks deserve to be credited with battling to a tie. Rudolph and Goff played Tying Football on this afternoon, and their names will echo through the centuries when cups are raised to commemorate all of the great ties that have been played in the NFL. We shouldn’t give Goff too much credit or contempt for his role in knotting this contest permanently at 16-16, though: the last overtime game the Lions played ended in a tie as well. Maybe it’s something in the Detroit water. No, it can’t be that – both ties were road games. Maybe it’s something in their water bottles.

This game’s overtime period was a slapstick comedy. Turnovers, missed field goals, botched snaps, coaching cowardice and that eternal hallmark of hilarity, the Desperation Lateral, all made appearances in crunch time on this day. Right before the period started, the Lions punted on 4th and 10 from their own 45 with 31 seconds left (which makes sense), then the Steelers decided to kneel on the football at their own 21 with 19 seconds left and a timeout. Yellow-bellied. Then in overtime, unlikeliness struck. Terrell Edmunds, who has not been a top-flight defensive back in his career, channeled his inner Troy Polamalu by sacking Jared Goff on Detroit’s third (yes, third) possession of overtime. It’s one of only 3 in his career since 2018. Cam Heyward sacked Goff on the first drive to force a punt, but on the second drive, they actually reached the Steelers’ 30 yard line and had a chance to end the game with a successful field goal. But Lions kicker Ryan Santoso, who had missed an extra point earlier to allow the Steelers to kick two field goals to tie the game instead of having to score a touchdown, was singled out with particular viciousness by the Football Gods as the principal instrument of anti-victory on this day, missing a 48-yarder that had absolutely no chance from the outset. It’s hard to explain in writing, but it looked like he kicked the ball underhand. Did the Steelers capitalize? Of course not. Fumbles on their first and third drives by offensive focal points Diontae Johnson and Pat Freiermuth, both on the Lions’ side of the field, doomed any possibility of a Chris Boswell game-winner. “Does anybody really want to win this game?” begged Chris Myers as the football flew futilely from Freiermuth’s fingertips while the last best shot at declaring a winner in this contest slipped away. With 8 seconds left, an emotionless double lateral by Detroit led to no gain (fittingly) and with that, the curtain fell on this pigskin tribulation. 16-16. There are no winners in Lions-Steelers – only (lame) survivors. 

What could have been.

Epilogue

Did we learn anything? We learned that the Browns and Bears play boring football. Nothing new under the sun.

A fascinating, infuriating, and at times agonizing deep-dive into the most inexpiably villainous depths of the 2021 NFL season has helped me grow as a human being. Never again will I roll my eyes when Tom Brady gets put in prime time 17 times a season. Never again will I groan with weariness when the Ravens run the ball 97 times a game. Never again will the comparatively uninteresting brand of effective football that the Rams play give me leave to complain about the blandness of the affair, for I have started into the gridiron abyss and it has stared back at me, much like a backup quarterback stares down his first read before being intercepted.

            At the end of this long list of miserably played and scantly enjoyed football, are there any patterns that I have noticed that would seem to probabilistically indicate the potential for Bad Football? Yes. Are there earmarks of particularly pathetically-played pigskin clashes that one ought to look out for if they want to maximize their viewing enjoyment? Check. Are there any specific individuals who have authored unpardonable football darkness at greater rates than their peers? In the words of Hugo Weaving in V For Vendetta: “Certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable.” I feel that those to blame for the listed football atrocities have in large part already been held accountable simply through their memorialization on these pixelated stone tablets, but those of particularly bilious predilection towards ineptitude will be climactically named and shamed here. As a cautionary postscript – and a fun bit of distillation that will compress 18,000 words into kernels of pure unvarnished insight – I have bulleted below those things that act as the NFL’s equivalent of the mark of Cain, signifying eye-piercing badness of the rankest magnitude. These are the vile indicators of terrible football that I think promise most positively to degrade the football watching experience:

• Backup Quarterbacks. They are backups for a reason.

• Rookie Quarterbacks. They’re rookies who lack the athletic acumen built up over many seasons of studious self-application, so cut them a break. That said, some of these will be relegated to the first bullet after a season or so more of Bad Ball.

• Botched Hail Marys. If you can’t figure out how to properly attempt a last-ditch-effort all-or-nothing pass (forget successfully converting one), the game probably stinks.

• Rain and wind. We’ve excluded “snow” and “cold,” as these often make for Good Football. Rain and wind don’t. Mud can go either way.

• COVID-19. It doesn’t matter if it knocks out your coach or your players – the presence of the virus equals sleazily-played games.

• Former Patriots assistants. One thing they don’t teach in Foxoborough is how to play exciting football if you’re someone not named Bill Belichick. But maybe Las Vegas has finally made the right hire of a former Beli coordinator. Yawn.

• Game plans “tailored” to limited QBs. This is more an umbrella finding for the first two bullets, but it holds true. Get creative if you have to trot out a B- or worse passer, don’t torment us with a billion runs up the middle.

• Guilty parties:

  PLAYERS: Mason Rudolph, Tua Tagovailoa, Justin Field, Ian Book, Mike Glennon, Geno Smith, Saquon Barkley, Alex Collins, T.J. Hockenson, Pat Freiermuth, Lions Quarterbacks, Browns Quarterbacks.

  COACHES: Matt Nagy, Kevin Stefanski, Dan Campbell, Robert Saleh, Brian Flores, David Culley, Ron Middleton, Mike Zimmer, Sean Payton.

It’s been a fun ride – these games were fun to reminisce about, if only to laugh at as bygone wights growing dimmer and dimmer in the distance. Thanks for playing. Till next time.