If you’re under the impression that NFL special teams this season have been especially wonky, you are completely and utterly correct.
Still, as weird as it special teams had been through the first 11 weeks of the season, nothing could quite compare to what happened on Sunday. Kicker misses and miscues have been legion, but Sunday saw far more blunders than usual.
Most prominent of all was Austin Seibert of the Washington Commanders. The seven-year veteran came into Sunday perfect on extra-points, and 25 of 27 on his field goal attempts, this season.
And then came the utter disaster Seibert put himself in against the Dallas Cowboys in a 34-26 Commanders loss. With 48 seconds left in the first quarter, Seibert missed a 51-yard field goal. No surprise there, as his only two misses this season had come from 50 or more yards. Then, after Jayden Daniels scored a touchdown on a 17-yard run with 9:59 left in the third quarter, Seibert missed his first extra-point attempt of the season. It didn’t seem a huge deal: Washington still led 9-3 against a Dallas team who have been woeful all season.
Seibert suffered another blow when his kickoff was returned 99 yards for a touchdown by KaVontae Turpin to give the Cowboys a 27-17 lead late in the fourth. That was bad news for a Commanders team in the playoff hunt, but the touchdown had much more to do with Turpin’s skills than Seibert’s deficiencies. Seibert even booted a 51-yard field goal with 1:40 left to narrow the deficit to seven points and give the Commanders a faint whiff of hope. And there’s always hope against these Cowboys. First, Dallas recovered Seibert’s onside kick but were forced to punt. Then, with 33 seconds left, Daniels hit Terry McLaurin on a miraculous 86-yard touchdown in which Dallas, as has become routine this season, forgot how to tackle.
The score was 27-26 and all Seibert had to do was make the extra point and almost certainly send the game into overtime. You can guess how that went.
But there was more to pain to come for Seibert. He tried an onside kick on the very next play after his miss, and Cowboys safety Juanyeh Thomas returned the darned thing for a 34-yard touchdown to put the game completely out of reach. Two successive plays from Seibert had cost his team victory over a detested enemy in a season where they had started to reverse their recent reputation as a hapless franchise. It also doomed the 7-5 Commanders to a third straight defeat just as their NFC East rivals, the 9-2 Philadelphia Eagles, are on a seven-game win streak. It’s hard to think of a passage of play being more painful for a single player in NFL history. Seibert’s haunted expression told the story in a single image.
Give Seibert credit – some players would rather drop something heavy on their foot than face the media after so many debacles, but he was a standup guy. He refused to blame the bad snap on the second missed extra point, and he refused to blame the hip injury that had caused him to miss the Commanders’ two previous games.
In a season where special teams have been anything but, Seibert will become the unfortunate personification of those struggles with one of the most agonizing games any kicker has ever had.
MVP of the week
Saquon Barkley, RB, Philadelphia Eagles. As if things weren’t bad enough for the 2-9 New York Giants (more on them in a minute). Barkley, the running back they deemed expendable this offseason, rolled right over a highly competent but very young Los Angeles Rams defense on Sunday night for 255 rushing yards and two TDs as the Eagles boat-raced the Rams, 37-20. Pending the results of Monday night’s game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Los Angeles Chargers, Barkley leapfrogged Baltimore’s Derrick Henry for the NFL’s lead in rushing yards with 1,392 yards to Henry’s 1,185. Barkley had touchdown runs of 70 and 72 yards, and put up the ninth-most rushing yards in a single game in NFL history.
Before Giants fans wonder where this was before, there’s no way to imagine this version of Barkley in New York – or most anywhere else. He’s playing behind the best offensive line he’s ever had by far, and he has a quarterback in Jalen Hurts who amplifies Barkley’s rushing threat with his own mobility. It’s a prime example of the perfect player in the perfect situation, and yet another personnel hit for Big Blue.
Video of the week
The Carolina Panthers played the defending Super Bowl champion Kansas City Chiefs much closer than anyone might have expected. In fact, the game was 27-27 with 1:49 left after Carolina converted a two-point attempt.
So, the Panthers gave the ball back to the Chiefs and hoped that Patrick Mahomes wouldn’t do something ridiculous. That hope, of course, was in vain. With 48 seconds left, Mahomes trucked for a 33-yard run that took the ball to the Carolina 22-yard line, and set up Spencer Shrader’s game-winning field goal as time expired.
If you think you’ve seen something like that before … well, you pretty much have. In last season’s Super Bowl, the score was 22-19 in the San Francisco 49ers’ favor before Mahomes’ 19-yard scramble set up his game-winning touchdown pass to Mecole Hardman three plays later.
As was the case with most of the Chiefs’ 10 victories this season, it wasn’t pretty … but a win is a win.
Stat of the week
There were several kicking malfeasances on Sunday besides those of Seibert, and that’s been the case all season (along with a few heroics). But before you think that it’s happening at an unusual rate in 2024, let’s not let recency bias trip things in the wrong direction. Through the first 11 weeks of the 2024 season, kickers had made 84.9% of their field goals, and 96.5% of their extra point attempts. Over the last decade, field goal percentages were lower every season from 2014 though 2020, and the success rate is just one percentage point lower than last season’s 85.9%. And this season’s extra point rate has been the highest since kickers booted an amazing 99.3% in 2014.
Pro Football Reference’s data tells us that there has been an uptick in field goal attempts of 50 or more yards this season, which would explain some of the misses, but it’s not a massive change over the last decade. What has always been true is that kicking is an inconsistent and unpredictable art.
Elsewhere around the league
— Late in the third quarter of Minnesota’s 30-27 win over the Chicago Bears, Vikings quarterback Sam Darnold appeared to hit Jordan Addison on what became a 69-yard play.
The question was whether Addison stepped out of bounds before he completed his after-catch trek. Per the broadcast replays, it appeared that he did – but after the officials reviewed the play, the original ruling was upheld.
Ordinarily, most people would chalk this up to another instance of officials blowing a call, but there’s a subversive and incomprehensible context to this and other replay rulings. As former NFL VP of Officiating Mike Pereira explained, the league is not allowed to use sideline cameras on replay review because not all stadiums have them, and it would throw parity out the window if such replays were allowed when there are stadium have-nots.
In 2023, the NFL’s overall revenue exceeded $13bn. Even the most technically impressive cameras available to the NFL tend to come in at less than $10,000: we’re guessing that NFL teams could easily pool their money together to cover the cost of getting them in every stadium. Cost is not the issue. Revenue is not the issue. Why the NFL hasn’t standardized its technology in this regard is nonsensical.
— No quarterback ever wants to be benched, but there is something to say for the practice of sitting a young signal-caller down so that he can spend time processing the complexities of NFL playbooks, and the speed of NFL defenses. Bryce Young, who was looking like one of the league’s worst first overall draft picks through his 2023 rookie season and well into this campaign, found himself on the bench in favor of Andy Dalton three games into the Panthers’ season. He didn’t get the starter’s job back until Week 8.
But Young has started to look more comfortable in his role post-benching, and he was absolutely that in Carolina’s loss to the Chiefs. Young completed 21 of 35 passes for 263 yards, a touchdown, no interceptions, and a passer rating of 92.9. Chiefs defensive coordinator Steve Spagnuolo blitzed Young repeatedly, and Young threw those blitzes right back in Spags’ face. Young was blitzed on a season-high 40.0% of his dropbacks, and he completed 11 of his 14 passes for 123 yards and a touchdown against multiple disruptors. The tape matched the metrics; Young just looks like a different quarterback now.
— Of course, quarterback benchings don’t always work. If you thought things couldn’t get any worse for the New York Giants after they benched and then released Daniel Jones … well, think again. In Big Blue’s 30-7 embarrassment of a loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Sunday, replacement Tommy “Cutlets” DeVito completed 21 of 31 passes for 189 yards, no touchdowns, no interceptions, and a passer rating of 83.9. In the first half, before things got out of hand and the Bucs played more relaxed coverages, DeVito completed just three of five passes for 31 yards.
2024 first-round receiver Malik Nabers wasn’t targeted until the third quarter, and he was not at all happy about that.
“It ain’t about the quarterback,” Nabers said postgame. “Same thing happened when DJ [Jones] was the quarterback. Go out there, first and second quarter, don’t get the ball, and targets at the end. You can’t do that. Started to get the ball when it was 30-0. What do you want me to do?”
Nabers said that the media should “talk to Dabs” [head coach Brian Daboll] about that. Nabers also called the performance “soft”, and he wasn’t the only one. All-world defensive lineman Dexter Lawrence said that the Giants “played soft, and [the Buccaneers] beat the shit out of us today.”
The Giants are 2-9 in a season that has disappeared down whatever drain they were circling before, and Daboll is 17-27-1 in his Giants career. The numbers are bad enough, but when your best players are openly questioning coaching and effort, it would appear that Daboll will be the next Giant looking for a new job.
Oh … and beyond Barkley’s efforts on Sunday, it was a very good day for other former Giants. Defensive lineman Leonard Williams had 2.5 sacks for the Seattle Seahawks in a 16-6 win over the Arizona Cardinals, and safety Xavier McKinney bagged his seventh interception of the season for the Green Bay Packers in a 38-10 beatdown of the San Francisco 49ers. If this wasn’t the worst day in Giants history, it was certainly on the shortlist.