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It was a week of wayward kicks in the NFL, whether from the boots of the kickers or those of disgruntled Miami interior linemen. From the Dolphin Disgrace in London to a Red Rocket Renaissance in Cincinnati, here are five takeaways from Week 4 of the NFL.
1. Dolphins drown in London
The beauty of the NFL and its 16-game schedule is that a team often only needs two or three weeks to completely and utterly self-implode. The results are often as glorious as they are farcical.
We’ve had some great farces in recent years – the Dream Team Eagles, Mike Singletary’s 49ers, the Marc Trestman-Jay Cutler soap opera in Chicago – and Miami looks intent on joining them. Right now implosion is spelt ‘$114 million’, which is the amount of money in Ndamukong Suh’s six-year contract.
The Dolphins have quietly been one of the most ineptly run franchises in North American sports over the past decade. Their incompetence is easy to neglect because they haven’t finished in last place in the division since 2007, overshadowed by the louder suffering of teams like Cleveland, Buffalo, Jacksonville and Oakland.
But the reality is that the Dolphins have won one playoff game since 2000, or in other words, 20 less than their ‘rivals’ the Patriots. They’ve made the playoffs once in the past 13 seasons (getting blown out at home by Baltimore in 2007) and they have no discernible direction as a franchise – refusing to bottom out and rebuild while mindlessly throwing cash at big-name free agents like Suh, which is akin to putting a band-aid over a bullet wound.
With the coach now fired, the only compelling question surrounding the Dolphins right now is whether Suh did actually kick Ryan Fitzpatrick in the head or not.
Suh kicked Fitzpatrick in the head, knocking his helmet off pic.twitter.com/dM8KJCQJvm
— Ben Volin (@BenVolin) October 4, 2015
And really, that says it all.
2. The week of the woeful kicker
The kicking around the rest of the league didn’t have much more conviction either. The Thursday night horror show masquerading as a football game between Baltimore and Pittsburgh was an apt prologue to the week’s action.
Baltimore had no business winning that game, and saving their season in the process, but Josh Scobee and Mike Tomlin were in a giving mood. Two missed field goals in the final minutes by Scobee left the door open for the Ravens, and then coach Tomlin ushered them through it on a red carpet with a pair of incomprehensible fourth down calls.
Scobee’s misses set the tone for the week, with wayward kicks sentencing Jacksonville and Philadelphia to defeat. Regulation under-40-yard misses from Zach Hooker and Josh Lambo almost cost New Orleans and San Diego too, but they were spared ignominy by the respective brilliance of Drew Brees and the non-brilliance of Cleveland’s special teams.
Fittingly, the Ravens, the one team who needed a victory more than anyone else this week, got it largely thanks to Justin Tucker, the league’s most clutch kicker, who slotted two against the Steelers with ice blood in his veins. It pays to buck the trend.
3. The AFC South needs to secede
Trivia question: since 2004 how many combined playoff games have the Tennessee Titans, Houston Texans and Jacksonville Jaguars won against teams not quarterbacked by Andy Dalton?
The answer is one.
This division needs to leave. Peyton Manning and Andrew Luck have been the saving grace of the AFC South in the new millennium but with the Colts terrible this year and Luck now injured, there is nothing to save us from the darkness of Ryan Mallett. In a 32-team league a team’s ‘right’ to make the playoffs simply because they’re better than three other teams is far too generous.
4. Is it finally time to take the Bengals and Andy Dalton seriously?
Outside the teams in Massachusetts and Wisconsin starting superheroes at quarterback, the Bengals have been the most impressive team in the NFL over the past month. They’re doing it on both sides of the ball, having entered the week ranked top seven on offence and defence in DVOA. The offence, which ranked a mediocre 18th in DVOA last season, is looking particularly lethal.
Most importantly for the Bengals, they’re succeeding with eternally beleaguered firebird Andy Dalton as their driving force. The Red Rocket has been outstanding through four weeks, posting a quarterback rating over 115 in all four starts. The line on Dalton has always been that if you get a pressure on him, he reverts into a stuttering mess.
Cincy’s dominant offensive line is keeping him upright though, and if they can do it into January, critics might have some Bengal-sized crow to eat.
5. The Panthers and Falcons are both 4-0, but are we sure either of them is good?
Carolina and Atlanta are unbeaten but their wins have all come against the train-wrecks that are the NFC East, the aforementioned secession candidate in the AFC South, and the comical bottom half of the NFC South.
The Panthers have been forced to gut out wins against Ryan Mallett and Luke McCown and are walking seriously wounded in defence with superstars Luke Kuechly and Charles Johnson on the sidelines. They seem to be winning games purely on the merit of ‘not being terrible’ and having a physical freak at quarterback.
Their four wins are banked but the schedule gets much more difficult from here on out, with games against Seattle and the Packers in the next month, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to see Carolina struggling for a playoff spot in the final weeks.
The Falcons have been more impressive, annihilating Houston on the weekend after three wins against the NFC East. In retrospect, Atlanta’s away win against the suddenly decent Giants is the most impressive victory any team in the NFC South has locked up this year.
But questions persist about the defence and the offence’s historically insane dependence on Julio Jones. The questions might go unanswered until the playoffs though because Atlanta’s schedule the rest of the way is comically easy. Seriously, look at it.
There is a very real possibility that the Falcons will enter every game for the rest of the season as favourites. Their toughest matches are at Carolina and home to Minnesota. It’s a farce. Atlanta could go 13-3 and we still might not know if they’re any good. Such is life in the NFL’s south.