The Top 12 Worst Games of 2021: 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 denudeing 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.