NFL Reactions: Impressive Incompetence

Sorry, I couldn't think of a Big Picture sort of intro framing for this week. I tried to make up for it with a nearly 600-word screed about the Seattle playcalling toward the end of the article. But first... the nuggets.

• I feel like it only becomes more clear with time that Sean McDermott is a good coach and is a borderline martyr for absorbing the burden that is Brandon Beane's policy of sabotage. The Jets laying an egg under the watch of soon-to-be-fired Todd Bowles perhaps put the ball on a tee for the Bills, but a 31-point road upset with Matt Barkley starting is still a 31-point road upset with Matt Barkley starting.

• Zay Jones' tumultuous NFL career to this point has all but erased from history the fact that he was an objectively strong prospect when the Bills selected him in the second round out of East Carolina. His eight catches for 93 yards and a touchdown on 11 targets is the sort of box score that renews my long-term hopes for him if the Bills should find decent quarterback play at some point. Robert Foster is worth monitoring as a prospect, as he was a blue-chip recruit at Alabama and went undrafted mostly due to injury troubles. In this offense, though, it's best to assume his 105 yards on four targets were an extreme fluke. His emergence could spell the end of the Kelvin Benjamin Offense, though.

• Hooray for Byron Leftwich! The King of Huntington could prove a legitimate coaching asset for the Cardinals after unleashing a vintage showing from David Johnson against the Chiefs, getting him loose for seven receptions for 85 yards and a touchdown on nine targets in addition to 98 yards and a touchdown on 21 carries. Josh Rosen will limit the offense until he gets the hang of things, but Sunday's showing gives reason to hope that it won't really be Johnson's problem. The Cardinals need to resolve to firing Steve Wilks this offseason regardless of what hope they show between now and then, and they should probably evaluate Leftwich as a potential man for the job.

• The Falcons defense is not good in its battered state, but Hue Jackson and Todd Haley look borderline criminal for how well Baker Mayfield played Sunday. Completing 17-of-20 passes is never easy, and there's almost no way this happens if the old playcallers are in charge. Freddie Kitchens is off to a great start as offensive coordinator. Nick Chubb is a monster and he can absolutely keep making an impact as a pass catcher, too. It's just on Kitchens to dial up the necessary play calls, but Chubb turning three targets into three catches for 33 yards and a touchdown could give Kitchens reason to investigate the possibility.

• As an extensive investor, it nauseates me to say that things haven't looked any better for Jarvis Landry despite Mayfield's improvement. It feels like Landry has to catch on if Mayfield keeps throwing like this, and John Dorsey certainly has a political incentive to dictate a Landry-heavy game plan, but it's a bad look to total two catches for 22 yards on five targets in a game like this.

• I can't get too mad since I own tons of shares of his in best ball leagues, but Eric Ebron's box score against the Jaguars is probably one of the most annoying outcomes of the season. The guy played 17 snaps against Oakland – fewer than Mo Alie-Cox and Ryan Hewitt – even in a setting where Indianapolis played much of the game from behind. We know Ebron isn't on the field to block, so if he sees that few snaps in a pass-happy game, that would seem like a disturbing trend. That trend was mostly signal – PFF's Nate Jahnke credited Ebron with just 20 snaps against the Jaguars, with Alie-Cox playing 23 and Jack Doyle 48. That Ebron managed to score thrice in this framework is just baffling to me, and since he saw only three targets I think I have to consider him a sell-high. He has 10 touchdowns in 2018, giving his owners more than they could have possibly envisioned over even 16 games. If you can sell him for something worthwhile now I think it will mostly lock in profit.

• I still don't think Mitchell Trubisky has properly arrived – I would expect more ups and downs yet going forward – but you have to be extremely optimistic when a young player shows the ability to reach the high points he has this year, regardless of the opponent. And my god, what a fantasy value he's been. I know I'll be more dogmatic than ever about waiting for quarterbacks going forward. If you waited until the 10th round to draft Pat Mahomes this year, you could have gotten Trubisky in the 13th or 14th.

• Predicting the skill position output for the Chicago offense will likely be maddeningly difficult for the foreseeable future. Allen Robinson is the WR1 and windmill dunked the fact home Sunday with six catches for 133 yards and two touchdowns on eight targets, but rookie second-round pick Anthony Miller has big ambitions of his own, and Taylor Gabriel barely even appeared Sunday with no catches on three targets. Trey Burton will have his days of course, but they can't all four come through with what their owners hope each week.

• I don't know if Jordan Howard is toast or if he's just a bad fit for the Matt Nagy offense, but he was completely unable to build up momentum on his carries against the Lions, just repeatedly leaning into the wall of traffic in front of him play after play. I can't tell whether there's a lateral read in the play design that Howard just can't execute, but the practice in the meantime doesn't seem like what Nagy intended, whatever the specifics. At this point I'm growing concerned that Nagy might investigate whether Benny Cunningham deserves a look. I don't see any of that stomping power that Howard showed so much before this year.

• Six more targets for Kerryon Johnson. The Lions might be a mess under Matt Patricia but that line is still run blocking well, and few backs have the rushing/receiving usage that Johnson will in light of the Golden Tate trade. Only a rough schedule keeps Johnson out of the top eight or so fantasy backs the rest of the way, but he might end up in that category all the same.

• I've never witnessed a team half as confusing as the Titans. Never. At multiple points they have appeared potentially the worst team in the league, yet against the Eagles, Cowboys, and Patriots they looked positively intimidating. The frustrating thing is that I still don't know where we go from here. Marcus Mariota and Corey Davis are both great prospects who appeared to turn a corner particularly with that Eagles game, only to look absolutely ghastly against the Bills and Ravens afterward. They go to Indianapolis to face the max-tempo Colts next week, so there's no excuse if the Titans crash back to earth in that setting.

• The Titans defense is probably quite good, but I don't know how you can look at the Patriots offense and see it as the almost infallible force we've gotten accustomed to since 2007. When they're on the road and facing a good defense, I think it's fair to consider your quarterback alternatives since Tom Brady has just five touchdown passes in his last five games. Of course, with a bye week to get their act together, the Patriots should throttle the Jets in Week 12.

• Washington is pretty obviously the worst 6-3 team of all time and I refuse to discuss the matter further.

• It looks like Cooper Kupp won't be as lucky with this knee injury as he was the last one, and he's presumably done for the year. It's a brutal development, but for the Rams at least there's reason to believe Josh Reynolds can step up sufficiently outside to allow Robert Woods to more than capably replace Kupp's slot functions. Reynolds probably needs to be owned in 12-team leagues. His skill set is more specialized than the Rams' starting three wideouts, but on the outside Reynolds is a legitimately good prospect.

• Brian Schottenheimer has always been a bad coordinator. He failed upward because of his name, and his reception as a precocious coaching prospect 15 years ago was the result of privileged access. With Schottenheimer failing at every stop in between then and now, Pete Carroll looked at his offense this offseason and thought,

Maybe Brian Schottenheimer is the guy. His offense couldn't work for Georgia, the Jets, or the Rams, but maybe he'll be good for us. Hey, remember that beer commercial where those guys say 'Waz Up?' They should make those again.

Pete was wrong. It turned out to be a bad idea to hire the guy who exclusively failed as a coach for a decade-plus. We all make mistakes. 'Mistake' is indeed the word for the Seattle game plan against the Rams.

Schottenheimer almost certainly reasoned his way to this approach by fixating on the commonly circulated stats along the lines of 'Team X is 9-1 when they run the ball 35 times or more,' or whatever the version of that for the team and time period in question. Not that this is unique to Schottenheimer, but he concluded that rushing volume causes victory rather than victories causing rushing opportunities. You run a lot more when you don't need points, so when you win it tends to correlate with higher rushing volume. The Seattle rushing offense was a veritable rampage against the Rams, but all it did was shrink Seattle's window of opportunity since the Rams matched and exceeded Seattle's scoring pace. As it turns out, running the ball when you aren't protecting a lead is self-defeating.

Going into today, 156 of Jared Goff's 292 pass attempts (53.4 percent) occurred in the first half of games. For Wilson the numbers are 86 of 221 (38.9 percent). Wilson threw just 109 of his passes while tied or ahead (49.3 percent), while Goff threw 184 passes in the same conditions (63.0 percent). Now, of course the Rams have a lot more leads than the Seahawks, but particularly when a quarterback is truly great like Wilson, the idea that you should use him to close deficits rather than establish leads is just asinine. Very obviously intuitive stuff that a child should be able to point out.

The Seahawks lost this game 36-31. Wilson only finished with the still meager total of 26 pass attempts because Seattle found themselves down 36-24 with under six minutes left. Wilson would throw 12 of his passes from that point. This is all to say that Schottenheimer meant to be far more run-heavy than the script allowed – he meant for Wilson to throw something like 18 or 20 passes. The 26 attempts was the catch-up script. Here's a comical detail: even with Goff throwing 32.6 passes per game to Wilson's 27.6, the Seahawks needed Wilson to throw 58 4th-quarter pass attempts prior to this game, whereas Goff threw only 56. That means Wilson threw 26.2 percent of his passes when games are least malleable, while Goff's 19.1 percent highlights the fact that the Rams don't need to throw late because they throw early.

• Where was I? Oh, right – it was always obvious that Rashaad Penny was vastly superior to Mike Davis but I'm still shocked that the Seahawks gave the rookie a real opportunity Sunday. As someone with too much prior familiarity with Penny to let context-free anecdotal NFL usage details determine my understanding of him, Penny's trajectory this year has caused a great deal of frustration for me. I of course hyped him pre- and post-NFL Draft, but even I pulled the alarm when I heard he was up to 236 pounds in training camp. I was shilling for the 220-pound Penny, the one that runs a 4.46 and ran for 2,248 yards (7.8 YPC) and 23 touchdowns in 13 games, exceeding 200 yards rushing in six of them. I never meant to hype a 236-pound version of Penny, and luckily for me my trolls were not interested in any of these details: Penny Is Bad And I Am Dumb, it was decided. I might still be dumb, but at least Penny is good again. And at least I wasn't quite dumb enough to think Davis or Chris Carson could run for 200-plus yards in five straight games or average nearly eight yards per carry in college. Historical perspective is a good thing to have.

• With that said, I don't think anything can be clean with a coaching staff this bad. Carson is a few levels better than Davis as a pure runner, and to Carson's credit he definitely does run with a hot motor and strong anchor ability. When Carson is back from his hip issue, I would guess he gets the first crack at starting. Penny has looked great for about a month now but it took Carson missing a game for Schottenheimer to care, so nothing is guaranteed regardless of how well Penny plays.