Week 12 NFL Recap: The Ozian Football League
Yes this is about Wicked!!
I hope everyone is having a relaxing holiday week thus far and officially plugging out of work emotionally until the new year! Quick programming note: because of the Thanksgiving football schedule, plus the fact that I’m going to be with family, there will not be a preview post this week. Try your best to survive without me!
And even though I stand firm in the fact that this is NOT a fantasy football newsletter, this is a gentle reminder to remember to set your lineups by Wednesday night. Another gentle reminder: subscribe and share! Love you!
NFL Storylines of the Week as Told By Songs From Wicked
Because I’m bailing on this week’s upcoming preview, I wanted to give the Bad Sport faithful something special and also do something completely self-indulgent. So, instead of doing our normal recap programming, I’m holding space for the Wicked movie and giving you the low down on this week’s action through song (Act I numbers exclusively, of course.)
The Chiefs are Still Dancing Through Life, Somehow
In the first act of the landmark musical Wicked, Fiyero Tigelaar is a handsome, privileged aristocrat, whose introduction song “Dancing Through Life” is literally about how much easier life is when you don’t actually stop and consider the people and systems around you. As the show goes on, however, a character with more inner depth and values is revealed—and by the finale, he demonstrates a stronger ethical resolve than nearly any other character in the show.
Fiyero’s arc is not dissimilar to what the Chiefs' past two seasons have looked like. Through the first half of the season, they have had fairly limited substance. They’ve had winning records but just haven’t looked like a Super Bowl team. At this point in the season last year, I would’ve put actual American dollars on the line against them making it that far in the postseason—their offense looked slow, Mahomes looked off, and at least two or three other AFC teams were putting together much more impressive seasons.
That familiar feeling crept up for me this weekend when the Chiefs eeked out a win against the lowly Carolina Panthers, 30-27. With less than two minutes left, Bryce Young and the Panthers' offense marched down the field to score a touchdown and successful two-point conversion to tie the game at 27. Naturally, when Kansas City got the ball back with about 90 seconds on the clock, Patrick Mahomes willed the Chiefs into field goal range, and they hit the winning kick as time expired.
While I see this game as more about the Chiefs than I do about the Panthers, credit where credit is due: Bryce Young played what was almost his certainly best game as a pro, which it feels like he’s been doing every week since he came back from a benching that many thought to be the unofficial end of his time in Carolina. He not only made a few eye-popping throws but also just seemed far calmer and more consistent than he has.
It will be interesting to see what the Panthers decide to do with Young at the end of this season. This year’s quarterback draft class is uninspiring, and there are a lot of teams with very few wins this season, so even if they have a player they like it’s very possible they won’t be able to take him. If Young continues to play at the level he’s been playing, I think it’s worth giving him another year to see what he can do. At the end of the day, he can’t grow, and it’s possible that regardless of how good of a player he is, he won’t be able to overcome the fact that he is an outlier in size.
As for the Chiefs, a win is a win, and in professional football, parity rules: every year you’ll see a bad team take a good team to its limit. I still think that great teams, however, don’t play down to their competition, especially coming off of their first loss of the season. Nate Taylor, the Chiefs beat writer for The Athletic, described a low-energy Kansas City locker room after the game after another very close call against what should be inferior competition. Half of their wins this season—against the Broncos, Panthers, Buccaneers, Ravens, and Bengals—were decided on the final play of the game.
I know better now than to think that anything about the way the Chiefs look in the regular season will have any impact on whether or not they win the Super Bowl, but I’ll say this: this team, currently, in this precise moment in time, does not look like the best team in football, or particularly close to it. When they perhaps inevitably host the Lombardi Trophy this February, I’ll be scratching my head again as to how they managed to do it. As Fiyero says: Nothing matters but knowing nothing matters.
Saquon Barkley is Defying Gravity on the Eagles
In the generation-defining musical production, “Wicked,” Act I ends with Elphaba (if you do not know that is, please do not feel obligated to continue reading this) making her definitive choice—to leap, literally, into an unknown future to do what is right for her and fight for a better world.
This past offseason, then-Giants running back Saquon Barkley had to make the decision to trust his instincts, close his eyes, and see if there was a world beyond what New York had offered him. Barkley had been a mainstay of the Giants organization, a fan favorite who was committed to raising the standard of what has been a lowly franchise for the better part of the decade. When it was time for Barkley to receive a new contract from New York this year, he repeatedly insisted that he wanted to be a Giant for life, but the team wouldn’t give him the contract he felt he deserved. The front office suggested he look into other offers, assuming that he’d run into what has been a historically low-value running back market, and return home. Instead, Barkley signed with the division rival Philadelphia Eagles, and so far, his leap of faith seems like it’s paying off more than anyone could’ve hoped.
Barkley had a career game on Sunday Night Football versus the Rams this week, setting an Eagles franchise record with an eye-popping 255 yards on the ground and two touchdowns, each of which were 70+ yard breakaways down the field. Saquon leads the league in rushing yards at 1,392, and is currently on pace to come dangerously close to the all-time season rushing record. After Sunday night’s game, some in NFL media are suggesting that he may be making a case for MVP—an award that hasn’t been given to a running back since 2012.
Over the last few years, we’ve seen the running back position become more and more undervalued as conventional wisdom has shifted more toward the idea that the real things that determine rushing productivity have more to do with offensive line play and scheme. In some ways, Barkley’s astonishing season has proved that theory to be true. While he was always a clear talent on the Giants, playing behind one of the league’s best lines in Philadelphia with a quarterback who is also a running threat has made him take off. Just 12 games into the season, he’s already surpassed his previous season-best rushing yards.
On the other hand, Barkley is showing just what investing in a top-tier running back can do for you. The Eagles have had a successful running game over the past two years, but Saquon’s distinct talent and athleticism have taken Philadelphia over the top in ways that their lesser backs couldn’t do in the same conditions. And this revelation isn’t unique to Barkley and the Eagles. Derrick Henry on the Ravens is well on track to have the best season he’s had since he won Offensive Player of the Year in 2020, and he’s doing so at 30—an age widely considered to be past the hump for the position. The Green Bay Packers’ Josh Jacobs is similarly on pace to have his second-best season, only behind the year he led the league in rushing.
What Barkley, Henry, and Jacobs all have in common is that they went from bad teams to historically well-run ones in the Eagles, Ravens, and Packers. It doesn’t surprise me that these franchises saw the dip in the market and bought low. In order for a running back to matter, it seems, you need to create an environment in which talent is able to thrive. Once you have, there is immense reward in investing in it. For these backs who decided to bet on themselves and fly solo—I don’t think they’ve lived to regret it.
No One Mourns The Wicked Kyle Shanahan
The titillating opening to the musical “Wicked” begins with a proclamation: Good news! She’s dead! The Wicked Witch of the West had been killed, and all of the citizens of Oz were celebrating. (Well, not all—you should just watch the movie.)
I felt somewhat similar to the Ozians when I saw the San Francisco 49ers lose this weekend: Good news! They’re dead! Well, technically they still have a 14% chance of making the playoffs. However, after a brutal loss to the Green Bay Packers this Sunday, nothing about this San Francisco team suggests they are anywhere close to competing for a Super Bowl as they did last year.
I generally try to avoid letting my personal football biases too much into this newsletter, but because we’re deep into the season and I’m feeling frisky, I’ll say this: I don’t like Kyle Shanahan. I think that he’s one of the two best play callers in the NFL, I think he’s an amazing offensive coordinator. I don’t, though, think that he is a great head coach, and the 49ers failure to get over the hump in the last few seasons despite at many times looking like the best team in football falls on him.
Sure, there have been injuries, lots of them. It’s hard to win a game in the circumstances that San Francisco was in on Sunday, down their starting quarterback, star left tackle and edge rusher. However, in football, injuries are not a if you get them thing to worry about, it’s a when you get them concern. Games like this are why early-season matchups that feel low-stakes matter. The 49ers dropped early, close games to the Cardinals and the Rams, two teams that they should have bested if the Niners think of themselves as true Super Bowl contenders. Both games were blown leads, which 49ers fans are all too familiar with. Had they pulled these out, there wouldn’t have been a reason to write an obituary for this team before we’ve even had our Thanksgiving turkey.
Some of this—all of it, really, given Shanahan’s play-calling chops and previous success—would be forgivable to me if he gave any indication that he understood that some of this had anything to do with him. Great leaders point the thumb, bad leaders point the finger. And Shanahan loves to point the finger. In his post-game presser on Sunday, he took shots at the officiating, his run defense, the bad turnovers that resulted in 21 Packers points, and the injuries his team was once again plagued with. Football is kind of famously a game of inches, and whether or not a team makes it to a championship often comes down to little things like this breaking your way. However, when you look at all of these things cumulatively, it comes down to the coaching staff.
(I also have been developing a small conspiracy theory around the San Francisco training staff being uniquely bad because the amount of injuries this team seems to always have doesn’t add up to me however I have absolutely no basis for that one. Just putting it in writing in case something comes up about this in the coming years and I can say I’m right. Because how is everyone hurt all of the time.)
If you were to find the most polar opposite coach from Shanahan that you could in the NFL, you would maybe land on the Lions Dan Campbell. A former player whose previously held highest position on a team was “Assistant Head Coach and Tight Ends Coach” on the Saints before getting the head coaching job in Detroit, many criticized the choice when the Lions made it. In his now-infamous introductory press conference, Campbell said that he wanted to create a culture where a team “bite your kneecaps off” while trying to beat you.
In Campbell’s first season in Detriot, the Lions went 3-13, failing to win their first game until December. In this situation, most teams feel apathetic with postseason dreams wiped away— but it never did with Campbell. After losing on a late-game field goal to the Vikings in Week 5 of that season, Campbell cried at the podium during his presser, saying: "When you see your players give all that they have and you lose that way, it's tough. You don't want that for them. But we'll be better for it and credit Minnesota. We made the one mistake that cost us. Ultimately, we didn't do enough to win." Pointing the thumb.
Shanahan won’t get fired, and probably shouldn’t, but as the 49ers inevitably begin their first rebuild in a long time in the upcoming few years, he’s going to need to do more than just write up clever schemes that get his players open. Shanahan was given one of the best rosters in football over the past few years and couldn’t get over the hump, and I don’t feel bad for him. In the words of the Ozians: Nothing grows for the wicked, they’ve only reaped what they’ve sown.
Caleb Williams Has to Wait to Meet His Wizard
In “Wicked,” the immensely popular stage musical turned movie, Elphaba rests her hopes of the future on meeting the powerful Wizard of Oz, who can hopefully get rid of her green skin so she can no longer experience ostracization for standing out. This dream comes into focus when her professor Madame Morrible suggests that Elphaba is a powerful enough witch to one day meet with, and perhaps even work with, the mighty wizard himself—told through the iconic number “The Wizard and I.”
Like Elphaba, the Bears’ Caleb Williams is probably feeling like his future could be unlimited, even if his electric comeback against the Vikings this weekend fell just short in a 30–27 loss. I was watching this game at Vikings bar in Boston with my dear friend/native Minnesotian, so my rooting interests were naturally aligned there. If I hadn’t been, though, I think I would’ve appreciated more what Williams and the Bears offense did against this talented Vikings defense.
With less than two minutes left and down 11 points, ESPN had Minnesota at a 99.9% chance of winning the game, which, of course: the Bears would need to score a touchdown, get a two-point conversion, recover an onside kick, get into a field goal range and then make a field goal to tie the game. Maybe it was karma working its magic after their brutal blocked kick versus the Packers from the week before, but the Bears miraculously pulled it off. It was the first onside kick recovered by any team this entire season.
While they weren’t able to pull out the win in overtime, leading to Chicago’s fifth consecutive loss, I have to think that Bears fans left this game with plenty to smile about. Williams showed everyone why he was picked number one overall by throwing a number of eye-popping balls that generously less than five other quarterbacks in the NFL would be able to hit. My personal favorite is this 30-yard bomb to DeAndre Swift that Caleb made on the run with both of his feet off the ground. Like, look at that.
If you don’t understand how difficult that is, I would encourage you to find some rolled-up socks or something and try seeing how far you can throw them while jumping. So much of the power of any throw comes directly from how energy is transferred from the legs and hips. Throwing a ball that far, accurately, while running away from some of the largest, fastest people on the planet is mind-boggling.
For as disappointing as this loss felt in the moment, in the long run, it will probably do more to help this Bears team than hurt it. They are more or less out of the playoff picture, so any loss really just means a better future draft pick this upcoming year. Crucially, though, this loss helps strengthen the case for the inevitable: the Bears will be getting a new coaching staff this offseason. It’s needed.
It’s no guaranteed thing any time you hire a new coach or staff, but Chicago very well may be the premier destination for any talented offensive playcaller who wants to take a head coaching position. It’s a great sports city desperate for a championship, and they have one of the best young quarterbacks in the sport. The Bears offense has already looked drastically different since firing coordinator Shane Waldron only three weeks ago, and it doesn’t feel like they’ve even scratched the surface of Williams’ potential.
I’m sure that this season has been a massive letdown for Bears fans, but again, like Elphaba early in Act I, you can hold your hope that a powerful figure (maybe in the form of Lions OC Ben Johnson?) may come in and make magic happen. Let’s just hope that whoever does come to Chicago is nothing like the Wizard of Oz.
One Short Day Can Change Anything in the NFC West
Toward the end of Act I of the beloved, global phenomenon “Wicked,” Glinda and Elphaba make it to the Emerald City to finally meet the Wizard of Oz. The excitement is palpable, even if they’re only there for one short day, they feel like meeting the Wizard could change the trajectory of both of their lives indefinitely.
Everything can change in a day in the NFC West, too, as we learned on Sunday, when the Seattle Seahawks beat the Arizona Cardinals to overtake the top spot in the NFC West race. As everything currently stands, Seattle and Arizona are both at 6-5, and Los Angeles and San Francisco are at 5-6. These teams aren’t technically all one game away from each other when it comes to potential playoff chances; a number of those wins and losses are to one another, which changes the math. Still, usually by this point in the season there is far more clarity around the postseason race.
Just a few weeks ago, it seemed like Seattle’s hot start was a bit of a red herring for what many anticipated would be more of a rebuilding year after firing their longtime head coach Pete Carroll. However, after big wins versus the 49ers and Cardinals, the Seahawks are in first place, in large part due to a defense that has been coming on strong for the past few weeks. They didn’t allow a single touchdown from the Cardinals, who had scored 28, 29, and 31 points in their previous games. The biggest play of the game came in the third quarter when cornerback Devon Witherspoon chased down Kyler Murray, forcing him to throw an off-target pass that landed in the arms of Seattle’s Coby Bryant who returned it for a touchdown.
This kind of defensive success was what the Seahawks had hoped for when they hired their new head coach Mike MacDonald. When MacDonald was the defensive coordinator of the Ravens in 2023, his unit was not just the best in the league, it was one of the best defenses that the NFL had seen in years. Known to be a uniquely good defensive play-caller, it looks like MacDonald’s vision is coming together in Seattle.
At present, I’d give a slight edge to the Seahawks taking this division. The 49ers, as stated earlier, have a significant uphill battle if they want to see the postseason. The Rams have Matthew Stafford, who when healthy is a good enough quarterback to give any team a chance, but lacks the offensive line play and defensive talent to really make a run. The Cardinals feel like the next most likely team after Seattle to win this—their offense had been playing well up until this past week—and most perhaps most importantly, have a much easier schedule ahead of them than their division rivals. Still, the Seahawks are the team at present with the least obvious gaps and a good defense that only seems to be getting better.
See you at the end of the yellow brick road! Go be a bad sport this week : )