Super Wild Card Weekend - A Reaction PIece

 

Wow. The NFL season really has a way of kicking you in the dick, doesn't it?

I forwent writing about the Wild Card round because I didn't have a good feel about any of the Away teams. Really I didn't have a good feel about any of the teams. But if I'd said in print what I said all week, you'd know that five of the six teams I wanted to be in the Divisional round made it there. It's retrodiction, now – and really it stems from a place of cowardice, a hangover from the dramatic end to the Dolphins' season and my relationship therewith.

But I did think that all of the Home teams were going to win. That's how it should be. That doesn't mean I didn't watch the Bengals/Raiders tilt through slits in my fingers as my hands shielded my eyes and that I didn't hope the Eagles would upset the Bucs.

I blame the Cowboys. I stuck my neck out for them and said that they had a chance to be the best Dallas team since those dynastic squads of the 70s through the 90s – on the condition that their defense continued to play as well as it had through the first eight weeks. I haven't watched their contest with the 49ers again – but it wasn't the defense that didn't get the job done. And I thought while I was watching it that that was the biggest surprise of the weekend. Then I heard Rich Eisen comparing Dak Prescott to Patrick Mahomes and Josh Allen because their price points are similar.

It occurred to me: Dak is only a third round prospect.

More and more I'm beginning to agree with the traditionalists and olde-timers in this regard: draft positioning as a quarterback does matter. Really it matters for every position – but quarterbacks are unlike the other positions. Unlike a running back, those traits which get a quarterback drafted in the first round can't be found in undrafted players from smaller schools by a savvy scouting department. There's a reason it was the Cowboys' offense that didn't show up in the Wild Card round of the 2021 Playoffs – and it most certainly wasn't that Zeke Elliott and the running game took off.

Everyone agrees that Dak is at his best when the running game is working and he can rely on the play-action game to take deep shots – everyone except Mike McCarthy and Kellen Moore, that is.

I don't think this 49ers team is as ferocious as the Cowboys can be when everything is working. But any given Sunday, right?

That isn't what happened, though. I've never seen a team so at a disadvantage in their own home stadium. It's like no one on the staff had experienced a midday game with the windows open. It's like no one knew there would be giant blind spots on the field. And how does Dallas's punter hit the jumbotron? That's coaching. You can't fire McCarthy for that game alone, but the expectations have to be absolutely sky high for him next year – if he can manage to keep his staff together. Something tells me that at least one of his OCs is going to get a job offer this coaching cycle, and if I'm Jerry and they both get offers, one of them has to be promoted.

You can't fire him because, as much as his team getting the yips and forgetting how to play a clean game of football, you can't coach a team to be as big as the moment. What do I mean? I mean that the moment was visibly too big for the Cowboys. It was too big for Kellen Moore, and it was too big for the defense. Thankfully for Dallas the rest of the Division is a long way from competing for titles - so there's always next season.

I'm glad that the Bengals, Chiefs, Bills, Rams, and Buccaneers won, though. I would have enjoyed a Philadelphia victory just so I could be done with Tom Brady in my life for the rest of the season; but let's be real – we do want the best teams to win, even if the underdog is the juicier storyline. And the Eagles weren't going to punch above their weight three games in a row to advance to the Super Bowl. They just weren't.

I read a tweet that summed the Eagles up perfectly: You build your offense to mask the flaws of your quarterback and accentuate his strengths; the goal of a defense is to make you beat them with your weakness; when your weakness is the downfield element of the passing game, your offense looks like the Eagles against the Buccaneers. That is to say you have no chance.

Everyone in the football world knew that the Eagles were going to try to hit the stretch play over and over again, that they wanted to attack the boundary of the Buccaneers' defense. If I know it and you know it, Vance Joseph knew it. Prevent the stretch play, and voila – the Eagles are cooked.

I'm not sure I ever believed in the Cardinals. I wrote week after week that they had too many weapons to contend with; but by the back half of the season that wasn't the case anymore – and Wild Card weekend, Murray just wasn't good enough. Nothing about the Cardinals' operation was good enough.

Honestly, I'm waiting for Cliff Kingsbury to get the surprise ax before Mike McCarthy does. Arizona sold out everything to win this season and they can't get it done on either side of the ball.

It's official – I'm not in on sub-six-foot quarterbacks. I always rooted for Drew Brees (without really ever watching his games) because I have a tendency toward rooting for underdogs. But with Russell Wilson and Kyler Murray and Baker Mayfield, Jalen Hurts, and Tua Tagovailoa all playing less than stellar ball, I'm out. I don't necessarily need a Big Ben, but I want a quarterback who can be at least difficult to tackle. There can be no coincidence that guys like Aaron Rodgers, the Mannings, Tom Brady, Josh Allen, and Justin Herbert finish so many of their seasons. Barring a serious injury, they're large enough either to shrug off tacklers or absorb the hits.

Which - I'm not convinced Russell Wilson's seasons didn't go the way it did because he was carrying too much weight. Weight he put on to help absorb all the hits he's taking. Or weight put on because married life is good life.

Injuries aren't why I'm out on small Qbs, though. It's their reliance on getting outside the pocket – it's their inability to see over the line of scrimmage to make throws under pressure. And it's their coaches somehow forgetting to practice the scramble drill.

Murray should have taken the Safety and let his defense get him the ball back. Instead of two points, he gift wraps the Rams six points, and I felt like the game was over after that.

Good to see Matthew Stafford have such a good game, though. Really really good to see the Rams running game working so efficiently. I don't know that I trust the Cardinals' defense, though – remember, they let the Jaguars hang around with them until deep in the second half. They had a good record, but they were also the 2020 Pittsburgh Steelers: a train held only together by scraps of wire, duct tape, and the forward momentum of scheduling and necessity by the end of the season.

The Bengals struggling with the Raiders didn't come as much of a surprise to me. That isn't to say that I wasn't biting my nails the whole game. It's to say that if the adage of the team nobody wants to play in the post season is a real thing, then both the Raiders and the Bengals are that team. I went into the game kind of thinking that whoever won it would go on a tear, and I've left it feeling like the Bengals have the chance to flirt with the Championship game if not the Super Bowl – but I've thought that all season.

Burrow and Chase are too good and the defense is playing too well. And that's ignoring Higgins, Uzomah, Mixon, and the job Zac Taylor is doing right now.

Bummer that Matt Philon went down, though. The game had a different script when he was on the field.

The Bills embarrassing Bill Belichick and the Patriots did surprise me. That they won wasn't that shocking – they'd done it only a few weeks before. What was shocking was that the Patriots didn't show up at all. Their defense got unmasked in front of God and everybody, and Mac Jones simply wasn't good. I'm starting to think the Patriots have a Mac Jones playing in the cold problem – specifically that Mac Jones isn't good when he's cold. But he's a rookie, and it's unusual for rookies to win in the post-season. See you next year, kid.

The best possible script for the Bills was to win that game and go screaming into the Divisional round with all the momentum they could muster. The first part of that is all a go. Let's see if they can do the same against the Chiefs in Arrowhead.

Speaking of the Chiefs, I'm especially glad they didn't let that game get stupid – that is, they didn't let the bum Steelers hang around for even ten minutes of regulation. I'm annoyed that the Steelers offense played as badly as it did, but also vindicated in seeing Big Ben's receivers drop routine passes all night. Whether he is or was washed up or not, his receivers did not help him out. Least especially JuJu.

I don't care what happens with him and Ben next season. I don't care if Tomlin is secretly taking job interviews in Las Vegas. Whatever happens with Pittsburgh the next few seasons, I think they're ultimately going to be just fine. They have the best pass rusher in the universe and Najee Harris – that's more than most teams without a quarterback can say.

The takeaway from this weekend could easily be that it's a bummer that these games weren't competitive. I disagree. We complain all regular season that there's too much parity, too little distance between the good teams and the great teams. Then the postseason comes along and we're upset that the best teams in the League pound on the teams in the tiers beneath them.

The Playoffs are structured so that the best teams have favorable matchups. Only one home team lost, and really this feels like what happens every year. Every season we complain about how the Wild Card games aren't competitive enough. That's why we wanted a seventh team from each Conference: so there could be more underdogs fighting their way to the Super Bowl.

I don't have many strong feelings about any of the teams in the NFC – I'm a Never Brady for another Super Bowl, the Rams make me nervous at all times, Jimmy Garoppolo is the quarterback in San Francisco; but really it looks like Green Bay's Conference to lose. The AFC, though, has given us its best four teams, and without any doubt whatsoever any of them could beat any of the NFC teams. Whatever happens, like every year, the Divisional Round is going to be the round we all remember.

Literally cannot wait.

Talk at you soon.