The good, the bad and the headliners:
The Bills’ bizarro week. Interesting buzz around the league last week. Buffalo’s 12-men-on-the-field penalty Monday allowed Denver a second chance at a winning field goal, and the Broncos made it to stun the Bills, and less than 12 hours later Buffalo fired the offensive coordinator, Ken Dorsey. Odd, to say the least.
“Obviously, not a fun week,” Josh Allen said Sunday from Buffalo. “It was a feeling like if you played better, you’d still have guys [Dorsey] in the facility. And the whole week it was just this sick feeling, knowing that you have to go and perform in five days, but you don’t have time to sulk. I applaud coach [Sean] McDermott for how he’s handled this whole situation.”
But Allen likes Dorsey, and of course he was conflicted about the firing. But it’s a results business, and the Bills had lost four of six and had been outscored over those six games. He didn’t like it, but understood something had to give. “It sucks,” he said. “Sucks losing someone that you care so deeply about. Especially during the course of the season. You don’t want to be a part of teams that do that. That’s typically where bad football’s played. We’re not a bad football team. This week has been a gut punch, but something this team felt like we needed.”
“Typically, to make the playoffs, you’ve got to win double digits. Felt like, ‘We gotta make a move now, right now.’ Gotta win 10 to sniff the playoffs.”
Which meant going 5-2 in the last seven, starting Sunday against the Jets. It felt like a classic must-win, with games at Philadelphia, at Kansas City and Dallas at home to follow. And Sunday just felt different, starting on the opening kickoff.
“It started on play one with Reggie Gilliam,” Allen said.
Special-teamer Gilliam cleanly destroyed Jets’ returner Xavier Gipson, forcing a fumble Buffalo turned into an immediate field goal. It was 29-6 after 40 minutes, never much of a game, and the Bills put up 32 points and 393 yards on the best defense in the division. “That’s not a bad defense,” Allen said. “They’re not—I wouldn’t say they’re the ’85 Bears, but it’s a very solid defense with a good head coach. They seem to play us pretty well. We didn’t play them up to our potential the first time we played them. Tonight, we felt like we played a pretty good game.”
The Bills hadn’t had an offensive day like this in seven weeks, since the 48-point demolition of Miami. With explosive plays back on both sides of the ball, it was the perfect game to end a tumultuous week—in advance of a hellscape schedule.
Joe Burrow. In the last three years, since Nov. 22, 2020, the Cincinnati quarterback has had major knee surgery, a dislocated throwing pinky, a knee strain causing him to miss a game, a calf strain causing him to miss all of training camp this year, and a torn wrist ligament ending his season. He’s missed the equivalent of nearly a full season (15 games) out of a four-year career.
I don’t believe Burrow’s injury prone, and I don’t think he’ll be on IR every year. Football players, particularly those who don’t shy away from contact, get hurt. I’d compare Burrow to another quarterback hurt multiple times early and often in his career. Phil Simms missed time due to injury in four of his first five NFL seasons, but he turned into an ironman mid-career, missing only four games in his seven prime seasons. I think Burrow and the Bengals spend time next off-season figuring out modalities to avoid injury as best as he can—dumping the ball off earlier, throwing it away more—sort of the way Tua Tagovailoa and the Dolphins did this past off-season. Burrow told me in October he worked particularly on his athleticism and explosiveness last offseason, but the calf injury never let him show that off. It’s smart, because those traits are key to be able to avoid rushers like Jadeveon Clowney—who knocked him down in Baltimore, causing the wrist injury.
“You’ve got to be lucky to avoid injury,” said Simms. “I remember against Buffalo in 1990, some guy fell on me and I went to the sidelines and said, ‘I think I broke my foot.’ And I did. I know they’re protecting the quarterbacks a lot better now, but the rules don’t matter much—you’re going to get hit if you stand in there. So, it’s just bad luck sometimes. The good thing about Joe is he doesn’t get blown up.”
As for the league looking into whether the Bengals hid a hand or wrist injury to Burrow, good. Let the sun shine on injury reporting, because the league’s gotten in bed with every gambling company west of Kennebunkport, and if you’re going to ask people to throw away their money on your product, they’d better know if Burrow has any kind of injury to his throwing hand. I was at the Thursday night game in Baltimore and watched Burrow throwing the ball perfectly in pregame warmups, so there’s that. But the injury-reporting system simply must be above board. If the Bengals didn’t report a Burrow injury that was real, discipline must come down.
The Bengals on TV. Never in their history have the Bengals been such TV darlings in the back half of a season. Thursday night Amazon Prime in Week 11, Monday night on ESPN in Week 13, a possible move to a Saturday national game in Week 15 (there is a five-game pool of games, three of which will move from Sunday to national windows all day Saturday), a Saturday NBC game in Week 16, a CBS Sunday doubleheader game in Week 17. That’s a possible five national games out of the final eight—and Burrow, as it turns out, was around for 25 minutes of one before getting knocked out for the season.
On Friday, the league’s VP of broadcast planning and a prime schedule-maker, Mike North, talked to me about the Bengals and flex-scheduling. You can hear North in full, on Black Friday football and the Bengals and flex-scheduling, on The Peter King Podcast, which will drop at 3 p.m. Tuesday.
“That’s the point of flexible scheduling,” North said. “We’ll see what happens. There’s still a lot of football to be played. You know that the Bengals aren’t going to shut it down. There’s no question losing a guy like Burrow hurts. That’s one of the risks that the scheduling team faces every year in April and May when we’re putting this puzzle together. Which of these games do you deploy early in the season because you’re worried that they might not hold up if you save them for too late? And which of these games do you feel pretty good about saving for December when you’ve got to figure these teams are going to be playing for something? Three or four Bengals games on national television in December sure seems to imply that the scheduling team thought Cincy was going to be there. I don’t think there’s going be a rush to judgment. If you’re hovering around .500 in December, you’re in it … Let’s see what happens over the next couple of weeks before we write them off.”
A couple of points. The NFL is always loathe to move a Mahomes game from a national window, and as of today, I think the league would want Mahomes to stay in a national doubleheader window on New Year’s Eve—unless the Bengals are firmly out of it. But this is an easy fix if need be. CBS also has Miami-Baltimore on Dec. 31, in the early window. CBS easily could trade the Mahomes game for the Tua-Lamar game, pushing a game with some major playoff stakes into the big late-window national game.
I also mentioned the Week 15 Saturday flexibility. The NFL will play Saturday games on Dec. 16 at 1 p.m. ET, 4:30 p.m. ET and 8:15 p.m. ET. Three of five candidate games from Sunday’s slate will move to those three Saturday slots: Minnesota-Cincinnati, Denver-Detroit, Pittsburgh-Indianapolis, Chicago-Cleveland, Atlanta-Carolina. The best game is likely to be in the night window.
Deshaun Watson. The Browns got a scouting reward Sunday, with the 140th pick in the draft last year, Dorian Thompson-Robinson, leading the game-winning drive against the arch-rival Steelers. DTR completed key passes to the three big receivers for the Browns, Elijah Moore, Amari Cooper and David Njoku, and the Browns won 13-10 on a Dustin Hopkins field goal with two seconds left.
Whew. This was a vital game for Cleveland’s playoff hopes, with winnable games against Denver, the Rams, Chicago and Jets remaining. Thompson-Robinson played a C-minus game at best, but he was at his best when he had to be. The Browns, for the first time ever, beat Baltimore and Pittsburgh in consecutive weeks, just when such a daily double seemed unlikely.
That’s because Watson, after he played his best game as a Brown, was lost for the season with a broken bone in his throwing shoulder. So now, what have we earned about him in his 12 games over two seasons? Not a lot that’s good. His two-year accuracy (59.%) is 5-percentage points below league average. His two-year passer rating, 81.7, is well below the 89.0 league average since opening day 2022. He has 14 TD passes in his 12 Cleveland starts; Sam Howell of Washington has 14 since Oct. 1.
Now for more bad news: Watson’s cap number for each of the last three years on his contract is $64 million. A couple of weeks ago I said the worst thing for the Browns would be if they got to the off-season and weren’t completely sold on Watson being the long-term quarterback they traded three first-round picks for. The end was encouraging to Cleveland because of how Watson engineered the win. Still, when he lines up to start next September, Watson will have played 12 games in the last 3 years, 8 months. The truth is, no one knows how he’ll play with yet another 10 months between meaningful snaps.
Charissa Thompson. Two things about why this story matters:
We live in a time when the media is more distrusted than I ever remember. Thompson is a high-profile person who hosts the Thursday night pregame show on Amazon Prime, who hosts a Sunday pre-game on Fox, who co-hosts a podcast with Erin Andrews. She says on the Pardon My Take podcast that in her former role as a sideline reporter at Fox she would “make up the report sometimes.” It’s outrageous. It’s fireable. Thompson’s not covering the White House, but I don’t care if she’s covering the Chula Vista Little League. Her job is to report the truth, and she admitted she made up things. When Thompson says that, it’s fodder for media-haters to say, “See? They all lie.” Now, in these high-profile roles at Amazon and Fox, how do you trust she’s not inventing some of the things she’s saying? And where are the programming people, the bosses, particularly at Fox, where Thompson said these sideline reports occurred? The silence says one of two things: Sideline reports don’t really matter. Or the truth doesn’t really matter. Or both.
Thompson’s statement after the firestorm didn’t solve anything. Thompson didn’t say on Pardon My Take that she’d almost make it up, or use some qualifying words. She said she “would make it up.” And she repeated it: “No coach is gonna get mad if I say, ‘Hey, we need to stop hurting ourselves, we need to be better on third down, we need to stop turning the ball over and do a better job of getting off the field.’ They’re not gonna correct me on that. So I’m like, it’s fine, I’ll just make up the report.” In her Instagram statement the next day, Thompson said: “I understand how important words are and I chose the wrong words to describe the situation. I’m sorry. I have never lied about anything or been unethical during my time as a sports broadcaster.” Twice Thompson said she’d made up reporting. A day later she said she never lied or was unethical. So, what’s true? What she said on the podcast? What she said in a clear CYA statement that made things worse? We’re left not having any idea.
As for those who say, “Who cares? It’s just a sideline report!” … When a person stands in front of a camera and tells a national TV audience (or any audience, at any level of communication) something, the viewer must believe it’s the truth. Or why is that reporter on TV?
And as for those who say, “Sideline reporters are worthless” … Amazon’s Kaylee Hartung was on the field two-and-a-half hours before the Thursday night game, gathering information. She relayed information on the injuries to Mark Andrews and Joe Burrow to the booth, and gave some to the audience herself. Without her, all the viewers at home would have known is “Burrow, wrist, out.” I remember Michele Tafoya’s illuminating job on NBC the night that Houston coach Gary Kubiak collapsed on the field near halftime of a game. In the moment, all viewers at home have are sideline reporters to advance stories. So yes, some of the information is boilerplate and cliché. Some of it’s important to the plot of the football game.
Game of the Week: Philadelphia at Kansas City. Fifteen days ago (man, it’s been a long time since KC played), I stood outside coach Andy Reid’s office in the bowels of Deutsche Bank Park in Frankfurt, Germany waiting for the door to open. Reid was in there with offensive coordinator Matt Nagy. Minutes passed. Seventeen of them. Finally, Nagy came out. No discussion, at least with me, over the topic, but clearly the offensive brain trust was concerned with an offense that’s been the shakiest of the Mahomes Era. Kansas City beat Miami in Frankfurt, 21-14, but only two of the TDs belonged to the offense, and Mahomes got stripped and handed the Dolphins a short-field TD. This followed a desultory loss at Denver. So, KC enters Monday having scored 23 offensive points in the last eight quarters. Not good.
“We’re a little bit like the defense was last year in that we’re young in some spots,” Reid told me in Germany. “But we’re getting better.”
Mahomes needs his two 23-year-old second-round receivers, Rashee Rice and Skyy Moore, to be better starting now. For team chemistry, the loss of Tyreek Hill might be good; for the football games, his loss is felt a year-and-a-half later. Per Next Gen Stats, Mahomes threw 44 deep touchdown passes in his first four seasons, 2018-’21. (Deep TDs are those that travel more than 20 yards past the line of scrimmage.) His total TDs traveled 13 air yards in those four years. Since the start of 2022, post-Tyreek, Mahomes has thrown just two deep TDs in 26 games. Josh Dobbs and Davis Mills have more. And his average-TD length is 5.7 yards, less than half of what it was with Hill, per Next Gen Stats.
That’s why Mahomes needs Rice and Moore, who run 4.5- and 4.4-second forties, respectively, to beat coverage. And Mahomes may need to force the ball to Travis Kelce regardless of the Eagles’ coverage plan. No Kelce against Miami (just four targets) really put a damper on KC’s passing attack. For the Eagles, it’s a good time to play Kansas City … but after two weeks of prep, I don’t expect Reid and Mahomes to come out struggling.
Black Friday football. First, some history.
When Miami and the Jets face off in New Jersey at 3 p.m. Friday, it won’t be the first time pro football’s been played on Friday. The first game in American Football League history was played on a Friday night in Boston 63 years ago. The Patriots played all seven home games that year on Friday nights, not wanting to go head-to-head on Sundays on TV with the popular New York Giants, whose games were shown on TV stations throughout New England. And Al Michaels, who will do the game for Amazon Friday, did a Friday night game in 1986, Rams at Niners, when the game was iced by a Joe Montana-to-Russ Francis TD pass at Candlestick.
Speaking of odd days to play football games, the NFL opened the season in 2012 on a Wednesday night because Barack Obama was accepting the Democratic nomination for president on Thursday that week. And there was a Tuesday game on Dec. 28, 2010, when a nor’easter forced the Vikings and Eagles to delay their game till Tuesday—a fairly infamous game in Philly, because the immortal Joe Webb and the going-nowhere Vikings stunned the Mike Vick-led Eagles.
Amazon always wanted a game on Black Friday, to coincide with a day most Americans don’t work and many shop. From 3-6 p.m. ET Friday, on the Amazon stream (you won’t need Amazon Prime to see the game, just Amazon), special ads will pop up so you can watch football and buy a discount video game for the nephew at the same time. Garth Brooks will perform from his bar in Nashville after the Amazon post-game show.
Originally, this looked like a gem of a game, with a Tua Tagovailoa-Aaron Rodgers duel. Now, it’s 7-3 Miami, with a two-game AFC East lead, at the reeling 4-6 Jets, with Zach Wilson trying to keep New York in some vague playoff contention. For the league, adding a seventh marquee game to a packed Week 12 was always going to be a challenge. Said Mike North of the NFL schedule team: “We thought there was a window where in an already pretty-thin week, we’ve got to stretch these 16 games across now three games on Thursday, one Friday, we’re looking for the big doubleheader game Sunday afternoon, and a good Sunday night game, a good Monday night game. It’s always challenging Week 12 because of how much inventory’s already allocated to other windows. Finding a game for Friday, you know, it’s got to come from somewhere.” The Dolphins are good TV, so the game still works. Prediction: Ratings will be gold, and just like the Cowboys and Lions with the annual Thanksgiving games, more than one team will lobby the NFL to be the permanent host on Black Friday afternoon.
Read more in Peter King’s full Football Morning in America column.
