Suspensions cannot slow Seattle
Last week it emerged that two of Seattle’s top three cornerbacks were set to face bans for doping offences. Walter Thurmond’s four-game suspension was confirmed by the league on Tuesday, while Brandon Browner (a repeat offender, although there is more to his case than immediately meets the eye) is expected to be excluded for a full year.
Their absences ought to have represented a significant blow to the Seahawks. Together with Richard Sherman, Browner had formed one of the league’s most effective cornerback tandems over the past two seasons. Thurmond, meanwhile, had performed well in relief of the latter player, who injured his groin last month.
Now they would both be missing for a crucial game against New Orleans. At 9-2, the Saints were just one game back of Seattle in the NFC. With Drew Brees under center, they were better equipped than most to take advantage of any deficiencies in the Seahawks’ secondary.
And yet, on Monday night in Seattle, they utterly failed to do so. Harassed by a relentless pass rush and disrupted by a crowd that officially re-established CenturyLink Field’s status as the loudest sporting venue on the planet, Brees turned in his worst performance of the season – completing just 23 of 38 passes for 147 yards and one touchdown. He also lost a fumble.
Seattle’s Russell Wilson, by contrast, was electric, going 22 of 30 for 310 yards, three touchdowns and no turnovers, as well as rushing eight times for 47 yards. He was impressive throughout, but his 12-play, 88-yard scoring drive to close out the first half was the stuff that MVP nominations are made of.
That put the Seahawks up 27-7 at the interval, and they extended their lead by a further seven points in the third quarter. New Orleans had no response, pulling Brees out before the end of the game so as to avoid adding injury to insult.
The win secured Seattle’s place as the first team to qualify for this year’s playoffs, but more than that it gave them an almost unassailable lead in the race for the NFC’s top seed – which would grant them homefield advantage throughout the playoffs. The Saints and Panthers, who face one another twice in the next three weeks, each trail Seattle by two games at the top of the conference standings, but the Seahawks hold the tie-breaker over both of them.
“As of right now, it looks like the road to the Super Bowl goes through [Seattle],”
said Brees afterward. Monday’s game served as a deafening reminder of exactly what that means.
Fortune favours the Foles
It seems that Chip Kelly has finally come around on Nick Foles. It was not until last week that the Eagles head coach finally confirmed that the second-year quarterback had replaced the injured Michael Vick as his team’s full-time starter. This Monday Kelly went a little bit further, saying that Foles could be the team’s No1 signal caller for “the next 1,000 years”.
Of course, Kelly was really just making light of the media’s endless questions about the depth chart. His reluctance to name Foles as the starter in the first instance had less to do with doubts over the player’s ability than his durability. Kelly had lost both his top two quarterbacks to injury at different points this season, and was in no rush to make any big announcement until he felt like some stability at the position had been achieved.
Not even Foles, though, can have dreamed that he would perform this well when given a prolonged opportunity. Through nine appearances this season – six of them starts – the quarterback has completed 63% of his passes, throwing for 19 touchdowns and zero interceptions.
Or at least that’s what the stat sheet shows. Foles was actually picked off on Sunday, lobbing a horrible pass into the hands of Arizona cornerback Patrick Peterson over the middle of the field late in the fourth quarter. It was an inexcusable mistake, with the Eagles leading by just three points and less than four minutes left in the game. Thankfully for Foles, the play was wiped out by a holding penalty against another Cardinal, Tyrann Mathieu.
But great sporting achievements very often require a slice of luck somewhere along the way. Foles did not make many other bad decisions on Sunday against a formidable Arizona defense. He now stands just one touchdown shy of matching the NFL record for most scoring passes without an interception to start a season. And if he does not get it this time, then the good news is that he should have plenty more opportunities between now and 3013.
Smith is not the one holding Kansas City back
The Chiefs’ Super Bowl hopes suffered a potentially fatal blow this weekend, as they were beaten by Denver at Arrowhead Stadium. It was their third consecutive defeat after a 9-0 start. Kansas City will almost certainly still make it into the playoffs (indeed, they could conceivably retain a Wildcard berth without winning another game) but their shot at homefield advantage has all but disappeared. They trail the Broncos by one game in the AFC West, but crucially have also surrendered the tie-breaker to their division rivals – none of whose remaining opponents hold a winning record.
To make it to the Super Bowl the Chiefs would most likely need to win consecutive postseason games on the road in three out of four of Cincinnati, Indianapolis, New England and Denver. Right now, it is hard to imagine them doing so – although not for the reasons that we might once have assumed.
When the Chiefs were stacking up wins in the early part of this season, the sceptics’ main doubts seemed to revolve around quarterback Alex Smith. He was perceived as a game manager, and nothing more. Many people assumed that he would not be able to hold his own in a shoot-out against a more prolific quarterback.
But over the last two weeks, the Chiefs have been drawn into two such match-ups, and Smith has acquitted himself well. In a 41-38 defeat to San Diego, he completed 26 of 38 passes for 294 yards and three touchdowns. There was an interception in there, too, but it would be tough to argue that he had not done his part. Smith led the Chiefs down the field for a go-ahead touchdown with 1:22 remaining, only for the defense to yield yet another score on the Chargers’ next possession.
Against Denver on Sunday, he was picked off in the end zone on the first drive of the game, but after that did not do a whole lot wrong. Smith’s passing numbers – 26 completions on 42 attempts for 293 yards and two touchdowns – were solid, but they might have been sensational were it not for a handful of disastrous dropped catches by the likes of AJ Jenkins and Donnie Avery.
There was plenty of blame to go around for the Chiefs, from those butter-fingered receivers through to a defense that seemed to have forgotten how to make tackles. Kansas City’s pass rush has understandably been damaged by the loss of Justin Houston, but weaknesses in the secondary have also been exposed. Both Manning and Eric Decker – who caught four of the quarterback’s five touchdown passes – deserve credit for exploiting the struggles of rookie cornerback Marcus Cooper quite so ruthlessly.
Smith made mistakes, too, most notably on that early interception. But with a little more help from his team-mates, his efforts might not have been in vain.
Fantasy Football thoughts
Eric Decker. Alshon Jeffery. Josh Gordon (again). This was a week of monster performances by wide receivers that have not necessarily fallen into the ‘must-start’ category for Fantasy owners. In Gordon’s case that is mostly a question of perceptions taking a while to catch up with reality; his back-to-back 200-yard games are an NFL first, but his production since returning from a two week suspension to begin this season has been strong enough to merit a spot in any Fantasy line-up. Decker, though, is another case entirely. He had just 13 catches for 170 yards and no touchdowns over his past four games combined. On Sunday, he had eight catches for 174 yards and four TDs.
So, do you start him the rest of the way? That really depends who else you have on your roster, but the prospects of another performance like this one are very slim indeed. Sunday’s output was the result of a perfect storm of circumstances – from the match-up with a struggling rookie to the fact that Denver fell behind early and needed to score often against a defense that was rolling its coverage heavily toward Wes Welker. There may be more good weeks ahead for Decker, but there will not be another like this one.
In other news, here are my three guys to consider on the waiver wire this week:
1) In an ideal world, you will be all set at quarterback, going into the Fantasy playoffs, with a Peyton Manning or Matthew Stafford under center. But with Matt Ryan struggling, Aaron Rodgers injured and even Tom Brady having gone through some rough patches, there are not so many safe bets at the position this year. More owners than usual are chopping and changing, playing the match-ups, and there are few teams more generous to opposing quarterbacks right now than the Dallas Cowboys, who go to Chicago in week 14. Josh McCown has thrown for more than 350 yards in each of his past two match-ups, and, unless Jay Cutler returns from injury next Sunday, he will have a good chance of putting up gaudy numbers once again.
2) Over the last two games, Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman has reeled in an impressive 18 catches for 211 yards. He is never going to be a downfield target, so his value relies on a high volume of touches, but with defenses devoting more and more resources to slowing down Rob Gronkowski, its seems that the opportunities for the slot man might be on the rise.
3) Tight end has been a tough spot to fill this year, with few consistent performers and even the best of those – Jimmy Graham, Julius Thomas and Rob Gronkowski – all missing time due to injury. San Diego’sLardarius Greenis not a rival to that group, by any means, but he has been building up a nice rapport with Philip Rivers, posting a combined 206 receiving yards and two touchdowns in his last three games. He had a further score chalked off against Kansas City in week 12 due to a holding call on a team-mate. Antonio Gates remains the Chargers’ No1 tight end, but increasingly it seems that their offense is big enough for both him and Green, and especially while the former is still dealing with a lingering hamstring complaint.
Quick outs
• Eight wins in a row now for Carolina, who made short work of a previously resurgent Buccaneers team. They are now level with the Saints at 9-3, going into those key head-to-head match-ups.
• Adrian Peterson’s 211-yard day against Chicago was enough to take him over the 10,000-yard mark in his career. Remarkably, he didn’t make it into the end zone on Sunday, a fact which no doubt left one or two (greedy) Fantasy owners gnashing their teeth. Still, they cannot be as angry as Bears fans were on Sunday night after seeing head coach Marc Trestman send in his field goal unit for a 47-yard attempt on second-and-seven in overtime – eschewing the chance to move the ball a little closer first. Of course, Robbie Gould missed the kick wide right, and Minnesota went straight down the field to steal away the victory on a 34-yard field goal by Blair Walsh instead.
• Geno Smith, benched at half-time during the Jets’ 23-3 rout by the Miami Dolphins on Sunday, will start against the Raiders in week 14, according to his head coach Rex Ryan. It is easy to mock the rookie quarterback, who has completed less than 40% of his passes while throwing for no touchdowns and six interceptions in his last four games, but rather harder to pinpoint exactly what has gone wrong for a player who was capable of at least putting in serviceable performances in the first half of this season.
• Another week, another officiating controversy. Jeff Triplette initially sought to defend the actions of his crew at the end of Washington’s defeat to the Giants, when a miscommunication led to head linesman Phil McKinnely signaling for a first down even as the referee himself was gesturing for a third. Washington’s head coach, Mike Shanahan, saw the chains move and, believing his team had first-and-10 called for a pass downfield. Both that, and a subsequent throw on fourth down, fell incomplete, killing Washington’s final possession. Triplette later said he had not stopped the game to resolve the confusion because Shanahan’s team were out of time-outs, and he did not want to give them an unfair advantage. But by failing to do so, his crew had clearly damaged Washington – who might have tried a different play-call if they had been aware of the correct down-and-distance.
“In this situation where there is obvious confusion as to the status of the down, play should have been stopped prior to third down and the correct down communicated to both clubs,” said the NFL’s vice-president of officiating in a statement released on Monday. “This should have occurred regardless of the fact that Washington had no timeouts and it was inside two minutes.”
• Perhaps the most dramatic image of week was that of Denver running back Knowshon Moreno weeping during the national anthem before the game against Kansas City. What was he crying about? It seems that even he is not sure. “I don’t know, I guess the slow motion made it look a little worse than it was,” he said on Monday. “Excited to play this game, excited to be a part of this team, definitely blessed and privileged to be able to play this game.”
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