5 Talking Points and Thursday Night Football! Carolina Panthers @ Houston Texans

 

1) The Packers offense started slow on Monday night.

Maybe my reaction to this is unwarranted. Maybe this is just a reaction to only seeing 14 points against the Lions. Or seeing Green Bay going into another halftime without ever having a lead. But this sort of take – especially in the first half of a game, is not exactly dangerous, but misleading, I think.

Anyone who watched the Manning cast knows the Lions were playing a “two-high safety shell defense.” I listened to Aaron Rodgers on Pat McAffee's show (which, if you're not watching the Aaron Rodgers episodes, even just the clips on YouTube, what's wrong with you? The men are a delight to listen talk football.), and he was talking about how that's an antiquated defense. Usually what we see is a single-high safety.

Am I the person you want to listen to teach you about football? I don't know, but here goes. The single-high allows you to use your other safety as a weapon – either in the run game or lined up against deadly tight ends, or even in the slot, against teams that like to use WRs with size inside. The two-high safety concept is designed to use the safeties to keep everything “in front of” the defense.

That's why Rodgers wasn't taking any shots in the first half. That's why they were running it more than you imagine an Aaron Rodgers team running it, down against the lowly Lions: It was there to be had. And it was working. Two TDs on three drives in the first half is a head coach's dream scenario.

Peyton kept talking about how when he was playing, the two-high safety was a test of the quarterback's discipline. How long will he hand the ball off and take dump-offs before he tries to force the ball into a window that isn't there? As I was watching the game, the question became, to me, how long can the Lions stay disciplined in that defensive philosophy. Because Green Bay wasn't exactly struggling to move the ball.

As it turns out, it wasn't long enough to maintain a lead. The third down throws that led to 21 – 17 were exactly the defense Rodgers wanted. And he made them pay. That's the game of football, y'all. Third quarter drives mean more than first half drives – in close games, almost always.

2) Andy Dalton Looked Better Than Justin Fields?

I didn't watch much of the first quarter of the Bears/Bengals “tilt” because I was burning my salsa and listening to the Dolphins on the radio. But nothing that I'd seen from Andy in the previous four quarters of play said to me that he was doing anything better than Fields. His cadence didn't call procedure penalties and he wasn't himself called for any procedure penalties.

But is the quintessential average quarterback really better than Fields' upside? I don't know. Fields can do things that Dalton can't, and he doesn't have the pressure of getting beaten out by a rookie quarterback hanging over his head. Fields isn't going to get yanked, so he's not nearly as likely to press to do things that are just outside his actual skillset like Dalton was – like Dalton did on that run that got him pulled from the game.

I guess I don't have much to say about this other than, What?

But maybe this is an indicator that I need to look more closely at quarterback play. Maybe it's me who's missing something.

3) A Quarterback Wearing a Wristband is a Problem.

I heard A. Rodgers talking about this little gem from Manning Monday, too. Peyton and Eli were discussing the utility of the wristband for a quarterback. I'm sure I've said it before, and you've no doubt heard it elsewhere, but Peyton said he would like to see Goff outgrow the wristband. Rodgers kind of laughed at that idea, talking about how the plays in LeFleur's offense are so many words that it's just impossible not to wear a wristband for them.

Peyton said he used the wristband to help him remember the “Value Menu” plays. I thought that was brilliant. But it seems the philosophy might be different for different OCs, and I think that's kinda great. Because I know I saw Brady wearing a wristband, still, in Week 1. So I wanted to know what was going on there. I'm glad to hear Rodgers kind of clear it up.

I want to keep talking about this, because I wonder whether the League hasn't gotten, maybe, more complex than Peyton is aware. It has been a while since he retired in 2016. Have offenses complexified so much that even the great Peyton Manning would need a wristband to call plays?

I genuinely don't know, but I know I'll be watching every quarterback in every game I watch this year to see how many of them have wristbands and whether it impacts the flow of their offense – and whether I could even tell a difference.

4) The Taunting Rule Is Stupid.

I actually agree in totality with both sides of this argument.

Taunting is unsportsmanlike. Ungentlemanly. It is ugly to see one man standing over top of another man, jawing at him – especially in the game of football, where one play very often does not mean the game. And emotions can mean flagrant personal foul penalties in the fourth quarter. Besides, from what I've seen, the majority of the taunting penalties called seem to be in the first half, when the game could be going either way.

I think, from a diplomatic standpoint, that we're all kind of losing our minds a little bit. The Cult of Personalities which is what the NFL amounts to wants to see the Players have fun. The fans want to see the players have fun. They also want to see them embody other Warrior ideals.

Because, lest we forget, from our comfortable Colisseum seats and our couches and our bars – wherever we are watching the game – we are watching bloodsport. The games football are evolved from an ancient game that has seen iterations in use as training for Roman soldiers, and even to peacefully resolve disputes between rival cities. Indeed, this tradition remains. You see it especially in college sports – particularly, I think, football.

A lot of the conversations I see seem to be splitting the hair's difference between taunting and celebration. How was Lamar Jackson's flip into the Endzone not taunting? Where is the dividing line between a personal ejaculation of joy and a demonstration of your superiority over another man? I'm not sure.

But I do think that it is important to remember that children are watching. And we do want to be mindful that we want to raise a generation of children-warriors who are respectful of the rules and the other combatants – maybe not their feelings, because that was my first-take reaction to all this: why are we defending adult men's feelings – but respectful of them as fellow warrior-combatants.

Chivalry, Bushido, Sportsmanship – these are rules which are as ancient as organized warfare itself – we should be mindful to respect them in our sport, as well.

That said, I think the rule emphasis was an overreaction to the number of F-bombs heard on TV last year with empty stadiums. No empty stadiums means this will likely correct itself by midseason. And, if I'm right and there have been fewer taunting penalties in the second half, it's already correcting itself by the fourth quarter.

5) Because Aaron Rodgers opened up to the media before the season that means that they (or we) are entitled to hear him talk more – and that we can open a one-way dialog without him with impunity.

This one's tricky, and I've been thinking about it for a while. Rodgers just happened to talk about it.

But I've already talked about Rodgers in this piece.

So let's bust Colin Cowherd's balls a little bit. He's not going to read this – he doesn't read my comments on YouTube, why would he read this? (O.O Maybe he does read my YouTube comments.)

Anyway, he kind of went on a rant the other day about the “horseshit” comment. Look it up yourself, I thought it was hilarious. I mean, how would you feel if you had a guy like Colin Cowherd talking about your relationships with you friends and family on television? How would you feel if someone described you as the kind of person who had nothing better to do with his time than sit around and read what people say about him? How would you feel if someone said about you that you're soft, pretentious, spoiled, unraveling?

Before I don't speculate about how you'd feel, let's really look at the things people say about Aaron Rodgers. Like – there's so much projection onto Rogders's character because he has chosen to kill the media with indifference for so long, now that he is speaking and from his mouth comes a flaming sword to strike down the nations, they can only continue their narratives as gross and, frankly, gratuitous and uncomfortable projection.

Aaron Rodgers has a book club, people. He's encouraging people to read. To follow their joy. To work hard at work, but also on ourselves as people. And, gods damn it, but if you're reading my other work, you have to know this would resonate with me.

Moving on

Thursday Night Football!

Carolina Panthers (2 – 0 ) @ Houston Texans (1 – 1)

Holy carpe diem, Batman. This is my #5 game of the week. (Look for the rest of the game rankings on Friday. That seems like a good time to do something like that every week.)

I genuinely didn't expect that.

I figured this week I should probably predict how good I think the Thursday game is when I rank the rest of the games so I don't only do 15 games and get confused when I go back to do the whole slate on Tuesday. (Which is when I should really be putting the post-weekend rankings out, huh?)

There really aren't many bad games this weekend. Like, I think there were maybe two – spoiler alert, Falcons @ Giants is one of them – that I just wouldn't watch even if they were the only thing on. So this one really didn't benefit from others being bad so much as it was buoyed by my own interests in Sam Darnold, Matt Rhule, and whether the narrative thread leaving tonight's game and taking us through to next week is asking if Davis Mills isn't a better quarterback right now than Zach Wilson. I don't think he is – but wouldn't that be fun?

On to the game.

These two teams are pretty evenly matched, as far as their current output through the season. With one notable difference: Carolina's defense. Through two weeks, NFL.com is calling them the best defense in the League. Houston are a respectable 17^th.

Are Houston going to be able to stop Christian McCaffrey? If you look at the way these two teams have played going into this one, I have a feeling the Panthers are going to want to come in throwing. They're going to want to get a lead and sit on it. Can Davis Mills do anything about it?

I haven't watched much of either of these teams. I'm expecting a close one because that seems to be what both teams want. I'm giving the edge to Carolina just because of what we all thought about Houston coming into the game.

Let's go something like 27 – 17. Carolina score ten points in the fourth, closing out what was up to that point a tie game.

Thanks for stopping by!