Week 10 NFL Recap: Witchcraft Remains Undefeated All-Time Versus Logic

On ancient blood magic, good vibes, and microeconomic principles.

It feels like it’s been a minute since I’ve done a recap because I couldn’t get myself to write as election results came in, and this was one of those weeks where a decade happened. It’s good to be back though! I hope everyone is taking care of themselves and making hearty, brothy, and fulfilling soups. A way to take care of me? Share this with friends and subscribe if you haven’t. All of my love xoxoxo

The Pittsburgh Steelers are Officially the Vibes Team of the Year

When you get this far into the NFL season, it grows increasingly clear which teams are legitimately competing for a Super Bowl. There are teams like the Chiefs or the Lions, who came into the year with the roster and expectations that they are championship-caliber, and have proven so. You have teams like the Eagles or the Bills, a tier below, but who would only need a few things breaking their way to make a true playoff run. You even have teams like the Washington Commanders, who have been injected with new life from outstanding play out of rookie quarterback Jayden Daniels, and while unlikely, could find themselves in legitimate contention. 

Every year, however, there is the Vibes Team. A Vibes Team on paper at least competent. They have capable quarterback play, but not a truly elite passer. They have players with solid fundamentals, but few true stars. They win games consistently, often improbably, but rarely dominate them. Vibes Teams seem to overperform every week, often in dramatic and exciting ways. The players are happy. The fans are happy. The coaches are happy. Even the biggest sports curmudgeon can’t help but root for them at least a little bit. 

This week, the now 7-2 Pittsburgh Steelers have announced themselves as this year’s Vibes Team. No one expected this team to be awful, per se, but most thought they would be a solidly bottom-half team trapped in a division that forces them to play both Joe Burrow and Lamar Jackson twice a year. They lacked any true stars outside of edge rusher TJ Watt, and relied on the ultra-athletic but incredibly unpredictable George Pickens to be their number-one receiver.

Still, head coach Mike Tomlin, who I will once again remind you has never had a losing season in his 17 years of coaching the Steelers, has done more with worse rosters. The biggest reason for why expectations for this team remained relatively middling was the quarterback situation. Pittsburgh came into the year with two potential quarterbacks in Justin Fields and Russell Wilson, both of whom had been run out of town from their previous teams. 

Fields and Wilson represented two ends of a spectrum of questionable quarterback starters. After being drafted in the first round by the Bears just three seasons prior, Justin Fields showed flashes as a runner and a deep passer, but never developed into the player they had hoped. With a change of scenery and some new coaching, it felt possible though unlikely that he could become a true franchise quarterback. 

Where Fields was still seen at the dawn of his career, Wilson was understood to be at the twilight of his own. After ten years, nine Pro Bowls and one Super Bowl win with the Seattle Seahawks, Russ spent two disastrous years in Denver, playing the worst football of his career with the Broncos. His trademark running ability had clearly diminished with time, and so had his caché. 

Wilson’s personality always hovered on a knife’s edge between lovely earnestness and overwhelming corniness, but it was easy to look at his persona positively when he was an icon of Seattle sports. He gave canned pregame speeches directly from Friday Night Lights, he prayed at the end zone of a field after doing warmups for a game he wasn’t even playing in, he tried to make “Broncos country, let’s ride” into a thing. In his two years in Denver, he went from a beloved if meme-able future Hall of Famer to an out-of-touch veteran who may have overstayed his welcome in the league. 

However, in the three weeks since Wilson has taken over as the starter in Pittsburgh, he’s looked more like his old self than he has in years. His signature moon ball is as good as ever, he looks mobile and accurate. He’s thrown six touchdowns to one interception, and taken the Steelers from a fringe playoff team to one that seems like they could compete with anyone. In a flashy veteran moment, he was able to end the game by getting a rookie defensive lineman on Washington to jump offsides on fourth down, allowing the Steelers to drain the clock to zero.

As it happens, this improvement in play has reminded a lot of people what they love about Russell Wilson. Yes, he’s corny, but it’s fun when he’s good. Take this little dance he did after beating Washington—you can’t pull that off when you’re bad, but when you’re winning, it becomes iconic. Steelers will be doing this all year, because they are the Vibes Team thanks to Russell Wilson. They may not be real Super Bowl contenders. They lack the electricity of the Ravens, the dominance of the Lions, the recent pedigree of the Chiefs. But they have Vibes, and you never know how far that can take you. 

Big Week For…

Ancient Devil Magic

In this house, we are skeptical of the narrative that some teams may be luckier than others. A case in point is the Kansas City Chiefs, who seem to get good break after good break exactly when they need them. My usual response to this is that the mere presence of Patrick Mahomes and his legendary ability to make magic happen in crucial moments creates this luck. Defenders play more aggressively because they don’t want to be the victim on a highlight reel, offensive players play with more decisiveness because they trust their quarterback to get to the ball to them. However, what happened Sunday between the Broncos and Chiefs couldn’t be explained by anything other than Patrick Mahomes engaging in something beyond our natural world and the laws that govern it.

After being behind the entire game until there were six minutes left in the final quarter, the Chiefs were hanging on to a 16-14 lead when Bo Nix and the Denver offense got the ball. He led a surgical, 13-play 42-yard drive that drained the clock and gave his kicker a chance to knock in a 35-yard field goal with three seconds left: a chip shot, a takedown of the last undefeated team in football. Then, the inevitable Chiefs: Kansas City defender Leo Chenal jumped up and got his fingertips on the ball, blocking the field goal, sending the Chiefs to 9-0. 

The Chiefs have played well this year, but it felt like they were due for one to slip away. Mahomes is still Mahomes, but he was off this game, and the Broncos took advantage of it. Denver’s defense has been playing incredibly well all year, and Bo Nix has improved every game. He did everything that needed to happen to put his team in the right position to win it. It still didn’t matter.

Once the kick was blocked, every non-Chiefs football fan let out a collective groan. The Ringer Fantasy Football Show put it best this morning: Kansas City has officially shifted from the heroes of the league to the villains. Even though they’ve won three Super Bowls in the last five years, they were still hard to hate on. Patrick Mahomes was still feeling like a revelation, they came from a smaller city in an underappreciated part of the country, and most importantly, they were just a blast to watch.

Things have obviously changed in the last few years. The biggest difference of course is the presence of Taylor Swift, and how the Chiefs went from the center of the football universe to feeling like just the plain center of the universe. Yes, I still love seeing her in the stands and actually would like more of it, but the novelty has worn off. An underrated part of the Chiefs fatigue, though, is that what was once an offense that felt like appointment television has changed. You rarely see Mahomes make the magical plays down the field and on the run like he used to, not because he can’t, but because it’s not necessary. Their defense has become one of the best units in the league, meaning the offense can just chip away at you for sixty minutes. 

I’ll put it on the record now: I think the Chiefs are going to win the Super Bowl and get a three-peat. Not because I think that they are the best team in football, or even in the AFC, but because I’m done doubting what can only be understood as destiny.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy

I spent some time last week previewing this year’s Toilet Bowl, a matchup between two of the worst teams in the league that will ultimately have significant consequences when it comes to draft positioning this spring. Our two sewer-dwellers this year were the New York Giants and the Carolina Panthers, duking it out in Munich. 

Bad Sport Rules Committee Proposal: Any Team That Loses an International Game Should Have to Stay There Until They Win

International games have become more frequent and more expansive year after year, as Roger Goodell continues his determined attempt for cultural imperialism. One of the failures of this plan is that almost all of the international games are between two bad teams. If we want to show that American Football is a viable international product, then we need to present European fans with an enticing matchup. 

International games are very inconvenient for teams. They require extensive travel, hotel stays, and most importantly, significant time zone changes for everyone involved. You lose a day to flying and need to go practice on a soccer pitch outside of a hotel. For a team that is already having a tough season, the motivation to put in the work to win one of these games must be pretty minimal—you don’t even have to deal with the embarrassment of losing in front of your fans or your opponents. 

To raise the stakes and create a more competitive environment, I think that any NFL team playing in Europe needs to win their way out. Yes, this would create havoc for the schedulers, but that’s not my job. Make every game so high stakes that the difference between winning and losing is the difference between being away from your family and friends. It would create incredible drama, havoc, and storylines about other teams being forced to travel to Europe unexpectedly because the team they are playing is trapped in the EuroZone. 

Anyway, the Panthers came out on top of this dungeon duel, if coming out on top in this case means winning the game and thus worsening your draft position. I understand if Carolina fans were disappointed by this outcome, especially considering how much quarterback talent they’ve missed out on over the last two years by trading up for Bryce Young. Still, it was hard not to feel happy for them. Young got the start over Andy Dalton, who is still recovering from injury, and he played quite well. It’s still unclear if Young will be able to overcome the very real concerns about his size to become a good NFL starter, but he showed the accuracy and playmaking ability that made him a number one draft pick. 

Often, there's a little bit of schadenfreude when a hyped-up pick like Bryce Young turns out to be a bust. Any number one overall pick is someone who has had unbelievable athletic success throughout their entire life, and watching him flounder makes for juicy drama. Young, however, is hard to root against. He’s always come off as deeply humble and likable, failing for reasons somewhat beyond his control. On the sideline of this game, you could see him with childlike joy, actually having fun playing a game he loves. It’s hard not to root for that, and also rookie wide receiver Xavier Legette, who has an outrageous South Carolinian accent. Please watch this video of him trying German foods.

Beyond the feel-good subplot of the Panthers, the real story of the Sunday morning game was Daniel Jones, the sixth-year Giants quarterback. Jones had a dismal outing, throwing for only 190 yards, no touchdowns, and two interceptions against a league-worst Panthers defense. As of Monday morning, it’s looking like he may have played his final snaps as a Giant. 

The Giants haven’t been good in a number of years, so the NFL hasn’t scheduled them for many primetime or standalone games, which means that unless you are a Giants fan or in the New York sports market, you’ve likely watched very little of Daniel Jones. When you root for a bad team, there is some mercy in this—just how inept they are feels like a family secret between you and the rest of the fan base. So when the Giants got the island game treatment on Sunday, and the whole (at least East Coast) NFL-watching world was up, drinking their coffee, and asking themselves the same question: how has Daniel Jones lasted six entire seasons on this team? 

The longevity that Jones has had on the Giants represents both an aberration from and a natural result of the endless race to find a franchise quarterback. When the Giants hired head coach Brian Daboll, the hope was that he would utilize the dual-threat ability Jones had in the same way he did as offensive coordinator for Josh Allen on the Bills. For a season, it felt like it worked—in 2022, the Giants had a surprising run and even won a playoff game, in large part due to a big jump in play from Jones. 

In the endless quest to find a franchise quarterback—the most important position in sports—the Giants only needed to see one season of good play to announce they had been right about Jones all along. As a result, he was handed a four-year, $160 million contract as a part of the rapidly inflating quarterback market. This has quickly proven to be a bad investment. Reports suggest that the Giants tried to trade up in last year’s draft to get a quarterback, but were unsuccessful, so they were left with yet another year hoping that they may get their money’s worth. 

On Monday, Daboll gave a vague answer when asked if Jones would be the starter next week, though anything other than “Daniel is our quarterback” means “this man could go into hiding in Jakarta I would not care” in coach speak. In reality, the Giants are likely to bench Jones not because of his poor play (they could’ve done that by now) but because he has a $23 million injury guarantee on his contract, meaning if he continued to play and got injured, the team would owe him that money. In my opinion, these calculations are one of the grosser aspects of the business, but they are a part of it nonetheless. For Giants fans, many of whom I love and hold dear, you can exhale: the Danny Dimes Era died in Munich this weekend. Long live Danny Dimes.

Collective Psychosis

On Sunday night, with about 30 seconds left in the second half of the Sunday Night Football game between the Detriot Lions, I turned off the game, turned on Yoga with Adriene’s 10- Minute Bedtime Routine, went upstairs, brushed my teeth, and got into bed. 

I was away from the TV for about 25 minutes, and when I checked my phone to see the score before turning off the lights, I saw that in my absence three interceptions had been thrown in the game: two from Jared Goff and one from CJ Stroud. I turned the game on on my phone, which I rarely do, just to try and get a sense of what was going on. In the ten or so minutes that I watched of the second half, I saw each quarterback throw yet another interception, bringing Stroud’s total to two and Goff’s total to a whopping five—more than doubling the Lions quarterback’s total on the season in one game. The ESPN play-by-play looked like this:

This would be a wild turn of events for any two quarterbacks, but especially for Goff and Stroud. While he was coming out of college, the line on Stroud’s play was that he was functionally just a more athletic version of Goff—a passer who lacks the mobility and creativity that the cream-of-the-crop quarterbacks have, but who is incredibly accurate and can make any throw he needs to. Stroud has turned out to be a much better out-of-structure playmaker than anyone predicted, but the accuracy remains. In his rookie year, he didn’t throw a single interception until Week 6, breaking the record for most pass attempts to start a career without an interception. 

Perhaps what is most jarring about this entire situation was that despite Goff’s five interceptions, the Lions still won this game. In a very feel-good version of events, Detroit kicker Jake Bates, who just 18 months ago was working as a brick salesman in his hometown, kicked two clutch field goals, one to win the game as time expired. In what I thought was an outstanding piece of color commentary, Mike Tricio said on the broadcast that they were lucky they hadn’t put an extra coat of paint on the uprights—that’s how close the kick squeaked in. 

While two of Goff’s interceptions weren’t really on him (one was an end of half Hail Mary and the other was tipped into the arms of a defender), this game showed that the Lions can still win even when seemingly everything goes wrong. Yes, the Texans played imperfectly as well, and a team that didn’t make those kinds of mistakes would’ve almost surely won this. Still, it’s an encouraging sign about the capabilities of this team that we’ve been saying all year can win in almost any way they want to.

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Heyyyy thanks for reading go be a bad, bad sport this week ; )