The Ringer NFL Show - Week 6 Recap: Rodgers Struggles Against the Bucs, Steelers and Titans Remain Unbeaten, and Winners and Losers | The Ringer NFL Show

Episode Date: October 19, 2020

Kevin and Nora start by discussing Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Bucs cruising to a win over Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers, then they discuss their Week 6 winners and losers. After that, they debut a new segment called Honorable Mentions, answer a listener question, and share their clickbait headline of the week. Hosts: Kevin Clark and Nora Princiotti Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It is the Ringer NFL show, part of the Ringer Podcast Network. I'm Kevin Clark. Today's show, Brady, Rogers, Baker Mayfield, the undefeated Tennessee Titans, and much more. Today's episode of the Ringer NFL show on the Ringer podcast Network is brought to you by State Farm. Getting great car and home insurance from State Farm at a surprisingly great rate. That's like drafting a player that becomes an all pro, the real deal. State Farm agents provide personalized service so you can customize your insurance to fit your needs,

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Choose insurance and always brings it to A-game. When you want the real deal, like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Week 6, Nora Princeati. What's going on, buddy? Kevin. Say it was a good day. Say it was a good day.

It was a great day. Say it was a great day. Good weekend? Great weekend. Great weekend. Whoa. Okay. A good fall, New England weekend.

And then we cap it off with a great day of football games. What are seasons like? Haven't felt those in a while. Yeah, we're having, like, foliage. People are talking about, they're worrying about the leaf peeper traffic. That's the big story in town is, oh, got to, you know, you want to go for a hike on Saturday. Better be careful. You don't want to hit that leaf peeper traffic.

for traffic. Unbelievable. I don't even know what that means. I'm not looking into it. Kevin's just looking at me like he's so disappointed. No, I'm sure that one day I will be back in the Northeast and understand what those words mean.

Until then, I'm going to pass. That's all. I don't want to know what seasons are like. I would live in warm climates and as long as I possibly can't. You seem really defensive. About leaf peepers? About not wanting to know what seasons are like.

again. Listen, I'm all for the idea of seasons. Okay. Well, it seemed like maybe you weren't. Oh, I mean, I like the fall. When I lived in New York, I enjoyed it. And then you get to like Thanksgiving and you're like, well, this is run its course. Right, which is why I'm saying, give me my 63 degree crisp October afternoons. Because in December, it's going to be 15 degrees and sludgy and snowy and you're going to be. going to be all warm and sunny and I'm not. You're just waiting for the regression is what you're doing.

In October and early November, you're waiting for the regression. So I had something happened over the weekend that is one of the craziest things I've ever seen at a restaurant my entire life, which is my wife and I're getting a check. And something's on her back. And I'm like, okay, she gets up and she's like, I think it was a frog. And I was like, okay, that's fine. It's normal. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine. Whatever. It's wildlife, right?

And then the frog. Nothing about this is normal. The frog, it was a frog, the frog just starts jumping from person to person at the restaurant. It was most insane. It was like a set piece in an 80s movie. It was most insane thing I've ever seen in a restaurant. It was on a guy's hat at one point. It was jumping on different tables and nobody could figure how to stop it.

I'm sometimes just for our listeners, like, we're usually pretty like what you hear is what you get. we sometimes will have talked about something just by chance together. I intentionally kept this from you. I had no idea. In all of our meetings and all of our texts, I intentionally kept this information to you because I wanted you to react to this. Let's talk about Tom Brady versus Aaron Rogers. Let's just move on.

It was still bouncing from table to table because we were getting the check, as I said, when it was happening. It was still going while we left. I don't know how it was resolved. Was your wife okay? Yeah, we just left. We bailed.

I mean, if we're like sitting down for the appetizer, it's a different story. Yeah, you're right. Wow. All right. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers absolutely dismantled the Green Bay Packers. And that's our first headline right now because I think that Todd Bowles and his defense kind of rewrote the NFC playoff picture today. And there were a lot of things that I thought at noon today that I no longer think about the NFC.

Now, the Packers are still a very good team. They're a very good offense. I learned more about the Bucks than the Packers today, but I learned a hell of a lot about the Bucs. Norr, start us off. What'd you learn? Yeah. So I would agree with what you just said, which is that we learned more about the bucks today than we did about the Packers. Some of the stats about Rogers throwing interceptions and pick sixes, which his two, his pick six and his interception, the two picks in pretty close succession. That's when this game really changed, right? That's not going to happen to Aaron Rogers a lot. I believe for his career, he has thrown a pick six once every. 2071 throws. He's thrown as many

his career as Tom Brady has this year. Right. So I'm not terribly concerned about Aaron Rogers. However, what I do think that we have noticed is that the Buccaneers have done an incredible job that's flown

pretty under the radar in terms of just how we've thought about the NFL, of stacking their defense with really, really high-level coverage players. Absolutely. So in 2018 and 2019, they get Carlton Davis, Devin White, Sean Murphy Bunting, Jamel Dean. They're just doing this pretty impressive job of collecting those guys and adding and adding and adding. And what we see is that they can go into a game like this where the Packers start and they're running a lot of man beaters.

The buck start out playing a lot of man coverage and Green Bay does get up by 10 points. And they can just make these little adjustments and you see this cool relationship between the coverage players and then the pass rush starts getting home. And you don't know where it's coming from because some of those coverage linebackers that are like the heart and soul of this defense, they can rush up the middle. They can come around the edge. There's just so many ways that they can get pressure. And so Todd Bowles always likes to blitz. But they blitzed Rogers. it was tied for the most blitzes he's faced over the past two seasons.

They blitzed him 17 times, and he was 5 of 14 with two sacks and both of his interceptions on those plays. And if you see a season, you know, we know how smart Rogers is, we know how experienced he is, we know how great of a quarterback he is. It's so rare to see him confused in that way. And I don't think that you necessarily get that against a defense that's just, you know, dominant in one way. You just saw this really good.

Like, Devin White is just such an incredible piece because he can confuse even a quarterback like Rogers, which just, that's not going to happen very often. So I think, you know, we're certainly going to talk about Brady any time that we talk about the Bucks doing well this season. And we should. And I think there are some sort of intangible things like cleaning up the penalties that they've had. But this defense is really incredible. And so that's what stood out to me the most watching this game. 100%. It's a great point. And I think about all the narratives that I thought coming into this game and how many

reversed themselves over the course of three hours. Something as small, and there were a lot of big things, but something as small as the Buccaneers were the most penalized team in the NFL coming into this game. The book on Rogers, and this is still true after this game, but one of the things people thought that the Rogers could exploit here was taking advantage of the sloppy play, drawing these guys off sides with the hard count in an almost empty stadium. taking advantage of not all of those free plays, but any, any sloppy play on the back end or whatever it was, they didn't commit any penalties today. First time the Bucks have done that since 1983.

They were incredibly disciplined all across the line. After losing Vita Vaya, which I think a premium player at a premium position, I think sometimes that those sort of injuries have the capability to derail an entire position group. We didn't see that at all. Todd Bowles' blitzes were awesome. You know, I think the Bucks, you know, to your point, they lead the league in guys right now that every media member says, well, we're not talking enough about Levanté David or we're not talking enough about Devin White. We're not talking enough about Carlton Davis. And yes, we do need to talk about those guys. But now it's becoming a thing where we're talking about them so much that we can stop saying we need to talk about these guys more. Carlton Davis, I mean, you just see, and this has been going on all season, you see the trust Todd Bulls has in him and the positions he puts him in and they think he's number one corner because they scheme. towards it. Okay. Devin White, 10 tackles, three tackles for loss.

Levante David, two tackles for loss, one and a half sacks. This is, this is not just scheme. It's not just talent. It's both. Rogers' second worst passerating for any game he's ever played in which he started and finished. This is, this is sustainable for the bucks. This is not who the Packers are and it won't be come January.

But Rogers was two of seven for 10 yards when pressured. This was, in my opinion, a, as I said, a game that to me, and it takes a lot for me to change my mind on something in October and the weirdest season of all time. But now I'm thinking of the bucks as a much bigger part of January than I thought coming into this game. So there's two things that I think really support that. one, I think we had a conversation about this on a different show, was just that when I was thinking about the books this year and them adapting to Brady and how that relationship was going to work out, I always felt like there was going to be a moment when he was going to have to work out an issue with a receiver

who didn't know him as well as the guys he'd played with in New England did, and where he was sort of going to have to be at a crossroads of, I can either be a little bit more adaptable and a little bit less, like, find the right balance between being a perfectionist, not standing for, you know, having 13 penalties in a game or something like that, but also understand that he was in a new environment and that he was going to need to be a little bit flexible and adaptable. And I always thought about that as something that was going to happen between Brady and receivers, just because that was a narrative in New England. And that was the thing that we spent a lot of time talking about and reporting and analyzing

was, does Brady not trust Nikiel Harry because he doesn't understand the intricacies of how he wants routes run and other things like that? I wonder if we're seeing a different version of it. And I was kind of laughing because I don't know what Ryan Jensen did to annoy Troy. But we heard about this poor center. We heard about penalties. We heard about bad snaps. we heard, can I say swamp bass on this podcast? Like we heard about swamp bass. So I don't know if it's like, you know, did you guys like the same girl? Did he dent your car? Like what's, this is like some old beef? I guess that sort of age timeline doesn't really work up. But we'll have to figure out what happened there. Anyway, I was kind of laughing, but a little bit

serious thinking about that conversation we'd had and just that idea that Brady was going to have to learn to be a little bit adaptable when they were talking about how he'd changed his stance and shotgun so that it was a little bit more stable and he could adjust to maybe a different type of snap or less consistent snaps.

And to me, that's actually kind of the same thing, right? Like he is willing to do what he needs to, even if sometimes it means being a little bit less of hard ass. And it's totally working. And so I think that in combination with the fact that they just seemed to be being proven right about a lot of the decisions that they'd made. I mean, the Bucks, the Brady signing took over the coverage of their off season.

But the second biggest thing, right, was that they did all this work to keep their front seven pretty intact, but they didn't do a lot in the secondary. And they were trusting those young guys and nobody really knew how it was going to turn out. And what it looks like right now is that that was right. That was the right call. have the players to play like that. So all of those off-season questions that we had so far, and I'm with you that it's October and we don't know, but we've seen some other NFC teams not look quite as good as we thought they were going to.

And we've also seen a lot of the biggest questions for the bucks in the off-season be answered in ways that say that they were right all along and that they knew what they were doing and they were making the right calls. Yeah. I mean, for me, I think if there's two teams of relatively similar, strengths or weaknesses or whatever, just as far as talent. I kind of say if it's close, I'm not learning a lot, see you guys in January, just because of how disjoint it this season is.

But if it's a blowout, I'll take notice. That was why I'm reading a lot into Ravens' Chiefs at this point. This is the kind of game. I'm not saying if they played 10 times, I'm not sure how it goes. But I know that if you can hang with a team like this defensively, and obviously the bucks did, you can hang with anybody in football. I mean, this is a team that was. historically through the first month of the season, the best offense in history by points

per drive. Rogers had thrown zero interceptable balls. They hadn't turned the ball over at all over the first team in history, I think, to score 150 points and not turn the ball over at all. And so when I think about just the narrative of the season, there's a lot going for this team right now. I want to say with Brady, this is why you come to Tampa. This is why you have a good supporting cast.

I know the defense was so good in New England last year. But the last time we saw Tom Brady on a field before Sunday, he was doing the four-finger thing. He looked lost. And it was possible things were going to get away from Tom Brady this season. And that he was going to look a little bit while. I mean, when you lose to Nick Foles and the Bears and the way they did and the mistakes they made, it's possible season could get away from you.

And the fact that he was not only, he would have been bailed out by his defense, even who didn't play well, but then he did play well. He got Grunk involved. I mean, this is, it's not going to be vintage Tom Brady this year. That's, that's confirmed, okay? He's 43 years old. He's going to be 43 year old Tom Brady. Aaron Rogers at this point is a better quarterback than he is.

But this was what I wanted to see from Tom Brady and the Bucks at this point in their career, dropping dimes when he needs to. He only needs to make a handful of plays a game if this defense plays like this. And that's why I think from a NFC playoff perspective, I'm thinking differently about January. And he can still, Brady can still go back shoulder to Gronk. And on that play, he had one yard of space and they still made it happen. And I mean, I don't think, I actually think Gronks looked pretty bad. I think he looks slow and stiff.

But there are going to be moments when they can put it together. If you set the over under last week on Gronk touchdown 0.5, I may have taken the under. Right. It was his first touchdown since 2018 in this game. Yeah. Since the Miami Miracle game. was that one that yeah that's what it was yeah so i mean this he had another he had another moment in that game anything he did have another another moment that game uh not his finest moment but

i think that you know rogers said after the game that he thought this was uh quote a game where we quote needed a kick in the ass a little bit he thought that maybe there was too much outside noise about how good the offense had been uh i got to tell you i love erin rogers Aaron, a little bit of that noise was coming from inside the house, buddy. You're the one that kind of got all excited about how all you guys were playing and gave some quotes. He did say that they were feeling themselves a little bit. And that's, you know, one can wonder if there's a look in the mirror potentially happening there. Yeah, maybe.

Listen, the Packers are going to be fine. Okay. David Bacciari got banged up on Sunday. Matt Lafleur said it was not a long-term issue. Obviously, that had a little bit to do with maybe late. in the game, but this game was already set when that happened. The buck scored 38 straight points. Rogers looked amazing for the first, what, 10 minutes of the game, and then it just,

it just didn't happen. You know, I think Bowles' defense is interesting to me. I think their blitz and their aggression is fascinating. I've heard a theory. I actually most recently heard it from Chris Sims, and I really like it about how blitzing in the modern era is nowhere near as effective as it has been in the past, because the younger quarterbacks coming in now are just so, they've just seen so many blitzes and they, they've just been trained to get the ball out quickly, read it, whatever, and that having coverage

guys is going to have more of an advantage and having, you know, dropping back and playing tight, really good play on the back end. And I think that when I look at this buck's defense, they've got the guys in the back to Blitz. And they've got the guys to hang with it. It's like what you said with the marriage between the front and the back of that defense. And I think that this defense, while, again, the bucks have a long way to go. But this defense for me, they've got something going there. And I also think that Todd Bull should probably be a head coach candidate next year.

Well, the reason it works right is because it's confusing. and that has a lot to do with those inside linebackers who can cover really well, but they can also bring pressure. Like, this is going to be an insane analogy, but over the weekend, I was playing. And like, I hate video games. I'm not good at them. I don't mess with that stuff. But I have a friend.

This is more unpredictable than my frog story. You playing video games. It's actually, you know what? I'm going to bring this back to the frog. I don't quite know how I'm going to do it yet, but I'm going to. But my friend got this, it's called like an Oculus thing. and you put on glasses and it's like virtual reality or whatever. Like virtual reality, yeah.

And so I was trying to play this game where you're holding basically like a different colored lightsaber in each hand. And these boxes that are either blue or red are like coming at you and you have to hit them with the appropriately colored sword. I don't know. These are things boys like. I shouldn't generalize, but they're not things I like. Anyway, right when you get used to it,

You go up a level. And no longer are they just blue and red. They're blue and red, but there's also an arrow on one side of the box. And so you have to hit it from the same side of the box that the arrow is on. So you can either, you know, slash the sword up to down or side to side or whatever. And that's kind of what happens when you have a really versatile set of inside linebackers, right? Producer Arjunis has informed us it's called Beat Sabre. Okay.

Inside linebackers. I think it's called Beat Sabre. That's what I was playing. And I literally, I was in a sorority in college and I decided to rush because I was like, I don't want to live in a co-ed dorm with boys who play video games all the time. I just can't be around it. This is too much insight into my life. That anecdote started with the phrase inside linebackers.

This is perfect. But that's really what happens, right? Is that all of a sudden you have to choose, not only are you just analyzing colors, you're analyzing all this spatial stuff and there's this extra level of complication, which I think is pretty similar to what happens when you have great inside linebackers that can cover and bring pressure. And we're seeing it borne out because, so according to next gen stats, the bucks are first in the NFL in having 15 sacks and six interceptions while blitzing so far this season. So both of those are best in the NFL.

And they're playing the same group of quarterbacks as everybody else, right? Like the whole league is more athletic at that position. But they are able to do that because it's unpredictable. You know what else is unpredictable where that frog was going to jump? Man, it was on a hat at one point. It was in a martini glass at one point. Oh, no. Yeah.

Like, did it splash? It was like four tables over at that point. I was just getting to play by play from a very loud gentleman who was telling us where it was going every single time. So is the frog Devon White? I was thinking about how high, like at the frog combine, there's some eye popping numbers there. It would have broken Byron Jones's Combine record is all I'll say about that. All right, let's get to our winner. Winners.

The undefeated AFC teams. Yeah. Yeah. So the Steelers and the Titans, kind of spicy. What did you think, Kevin? Okay, so a couple things. Number one, Arthur Smith is a Red Zone God, Red Zone Lord. Red Zone Prince. Red zone guru. How did you? So Chase Stewart had this, and I can't stop thinking about it. The Titans have not made a field goal since September 18th. Their last 11 scores were touchdowns. Okay. That's good. That's efficiency. and what he does with play action and all that stuff, it's really impressive. But I want to talk about Derek Henry because what Derek Henry is doing is blowing my mind.

First of all, I think there's a very real fear. You see it on the field. There's a very real fear of being memed by Derek Henry. Like Josh Norman made $80 million in his career was one of the best players on a Super Bowl runner up. And for the next, I don't know, decade when I think about Josh Norman, I'm just going to think about him getting just thrown aside by Derek Henry. And I'm not saying that it's going to get him, Henry, very many extra yards. I'm just saying it might get him a few.

Because there's defensive backs right now who do not want to go up against that stiff arm. Just something to watch. You know who else thinks that? He is. Mike Frable. Mike Frable gave a long interview about how they like, they run stiff arm reps in practice with him. They coach him on it. They talk about, you know, Is the arm going to the chest going to get in better leverage than further up, further down? Like, the art of the stiff arm is, it's like those, it's like those memes where they, like, put players into famous paintings. Yeah, I agree with you. The stiff arm effect is real, as is the fear of the stiff arm. Like, there's guys who are going to go half a step slower, been like, I do not want to get thrown into next week, okay?

Totally. And when I look at some of these Derek Henry plays, you know, Roger Sherman kind of reintroduced the famous Derek Henry high school game log to the folks. And you see 400 yards, 350 yards. Like Gadsden High School held them to like 170 yards. And it was considered a coaching marvel. And at some point, Derek Henry needs to find a level where he can't throw everybody around. And he hasn't found it yet.

Like the NFL, he's making the NFL look like North Florida high schools. Okay. When Deshawn Watson is out there for the overtime coin toss and he loses it, he kind of rolls his eyes and throws his head back. I don't know if you saw it because he knew what was going to happen, which is that the Titans roll down the field. Derek Henry takes a direct snap and just bowls guys over into the end zone. This is, this is awesome. I mean, you combine that. The reason the Titans are good for the most part.

is because they're passing efficiency because of Ryan Tannahill. Because Ryan Tannahill is playing like one of the best quarterbacks in football since he took over since he escaped Adam Gase, all that stuff. There's a reason they paid him and it's looking like actually a pretty good deal. But I think having Derek Henry do the things he does is absolutely special. The Titans are the first team in history to have a 350-yard passer and a 200-yard rusher in the same game today. I mean, that's just that kind of says it all. I don't know.

I mean, this team, you know, not only is it talent, but it's coaching Mike Vrable from, from what I saw on Twitter today. Mike Vrable intentionally took a 12 men on the field penalty to stop the clock on a second and one late in the game. Like, he's doing Belichick stuff. And this is the only guys who do that right now are Vrable and Belichick. There's some other coaches who have, you know, dabbled in it. But no one is a time lord like Mike Vrable. Well, who do you learn it from? I love this Titans team.

Yeah, yes, of course. But I love this Titans team. You know, I mean, John Robinson and I've talked about this. He loves, he scouts for badasses, physical guys. And I know every GM says we love physicality, all that stuff. But nobody lives it. I mean, like five teams are this physical. John Robinson breathes this stuff.

This is fun. Who else? So, okay, so that's actually a really good thing to lead us in to their next game because if you make that list of if it's five, teams or whatever who are who can play with the Titans in terms of physicality, one of the teams that's definitely on there is the Steelers. And that's going to be, I'm just getting more and more excited for that game because as much as I think, I mean, you know, I pitched the Titans to win their division. I've been really impressed by them. As much as I think Henry's playing out of his

mind and it's really cool to watch, I'm going to be picking the Steelers in that game. Because I just think that they're going to, particularly if Taylor Luan is hurt, they're going to be able to get after Tannahill and to disrupt, get through that offensive line, disrupt that offense in a way that most teams aren't going to be able to, but they really, I think, will. And you did see, I think the Texans pass rush started to bother Tanna Hill a little bit in the second half. He got sacked twice. And my thought is just, okay, you run that back next week against Pittsburgh, that could be much more significant. And then you're also playing against a team who we've seen be really impressive on offense. And I just think it might be a little bit of a different story, even though the Titans have been super impressive. So my main point is just that I'm excited as heck for that game.

But there are so few teams that can be the level of physical that the Titans are, but they're going to play one of those teams. Yes. So that's what's amazing is that there's three undefeated teams left, the Seahawks, the Titans and Steelers, two of them play each other. You outline that great. I think that generally we're going to learn a lot more. And this is what I liked about this weekend, is that there were a couple of teams I was unsure of on their level, right? And one thing I learned on Sunday is that the Steelers and the Browns are not on the same level.

And I don't think that says a whole lot. and you may disagree with me about the Browns. I think the Browns are still what I thought they were, which was maybe the seventh best team in the AFC and a playoff team. And the Steelers might be on a different plane here where we're talking about competing with the Ravens and maybe the Chiefs, obviously. And then the Titans, I think, are in that conversation as well.

Obviously, the Titans beat the Ravens last week. The Titans had a 10-point lead in Arrowhead last January. Like, obviously, both of these teams, can hang with the elite. When you think about this Steelers-Browns game, your takeaways are what? Mainly that the Steelers just look great. And they were in this game able to pressure Mayfield

with mostly a four-man rush, which is really different for them. You know, Blitzberg, they're used to blitzing a ton. And without Devin Bush, they'll probably have to do that more. I think that's a really significant loss. 100%. I mean, the fact that both these teams had huge injuries today is extremely important.

To lose Devin Bush and to lose Taylor Luan and Jay Glazer reports that they fear Luan as a torn ACL. I mean, those are not, I mean, those are season changing injuries for these teams. Totally. But I do think that

with the Steelers defense, they're playing against a team in the Browns, and I'm mostly with you in that the Browns were not a team that I thought was going to be regularly beating the Steelers and the Ravens, I would say that I'm a little disappointed that they just get crushed

against those teams if their identities is through running the ball, having a good offensive line. I think it's troublesome that their output there gets cut in half when they play the good teams in their own division. I don't care if you lose a close game.

Those are really good teams, but as someone who's thought that they've looked actually kind of encouragingly frisky, I thought that was a little bit of a disappointing outcome, even though I would not have expected them to win this game. Encouragingly frisky. Encouragingly frisky.

I think we called the Panthers frisky last week, the frisky team of the week. But I am cautiously optimistic that the Bush injury will be something that Pittsburgh can move past without being seriously, seriously impacted, even though he's such a pivotal part of what they do. And this might be a little bit of recency bias. But I just thought that the way that they were able to get to Mayfield today by mostly using a four-man rush was made me think, okay, there are more ways that they can do this.

Now, that's helped when you have an opposing offense that's just in third and long all day. and feeling miserable, but I really, really like the situation the Steelers are in right now. Steelers are awesome, full stop, and the Browns are not. And I'm getting worried about Baker Mayfield. Baker Mayfield has 11 career games with multiple interceptions. Only James Winston and Philip Rivers have more since Mayfield under the league. That's not what you want. And I think when I saw that Minkup Fitzpatrick,

interception. And that really changed the game and set the tone or whatever you want to call it. Whatever intangible thing you want to say, it did. It did. I was Makea Fitzpatrick's third defensive touchdown since he joined the team in week three last year. But when I saw that, I thought, you know, Baker Mayfield, he's been given, and I saw Colin Coward made this point. Actually, I agree with it, is that Baker Mayfield is now just holding the team back. In the same way, in the same conversation we're having about Phil Rivers last week, is he bringing anything to the table? I think we should start having that conversation about Mayfield.

And perhaps, perhaps it's just the ribs right now. Perhaps he just banged up and he's getting the crap knocked out of him and he got hit so many times on Sunday. He can't work. Case Keenham came into the game, although there is no quarterback controversy in Cleveland, according to everybody who covers the team. But at this point,

I'm waiting for Baker Mayfield to make this team better. and I just haven't seen it. Because even if you're put in the best position to succeed, and I'm talking about Jared Goff or the elevated version of that right now is Josh Allen. I mean, everybody who's successful in the NFL right now, a quarterback besides Deshaun Watson is putting into position to succeed. Okay. And Baker Mayfield has an improved line.

He has improved weapons. He has an improved play caller. But I just don't see right now what, he's doing to take advantage of his situation. And I'd like to see that. Yes or no on Baker Mayfield. That's it. That's all I need to know. Since we're out of time on this segment, so it's just a yes or no question now.

No. Yeah. Sorry to be a hater. Now it's time for the State Farm's surprisingly great segment of the week. Getting great car and home insurance from State Farm at a surprisingly great rate. That's like the San Francisco 49ers upsetting the Los Angeles Rams on Sunday night football. despite being injury riddled, despite having a stinker of a game last week. State Farm agents provide personalized service so you can customize your insurance to fit your

needs like a GM putting together their very own roster. You need a team that supports you, and State Farm's got a great one. In addition to agents, the award-winning mobile app helps manage coverage, pay bills, file claims, and more. With a great price and even greater service, State Farm goes from strength to strength. Nora, no one saw this 49ers performance coming. Jimmy Garoppolo was benched last week to, quote, protect him from himself. We didn't know if it was the ankle.

We didn't know if Garapolo was bad. One thing we didn't expect was for the Niners to beat the four and one Los Angeles Rams and a team we thought might be an NFC contender. What'd you think? The other thing we did not expect was for the San Francisco 49ers to neutralize Aaron Donald. Nobody neutralizes Aaron Donald. That just doesn't happen. But he had one quarterback hit and one.

one tackle, no sacks, didn't hear his name a lot. And that, that says nothing about Aaron Donald. That says everything about what a great job Kyle Shanahan and the 49ers did, figuring out ways to put their offense, which is still dealing with some injuries. It's a lot healthier than they were a couple weeks ago. But he figured out ways to put them in good positions and to put Jimmy Garoppolo, who's still dealing with the high ankle sprain to a degree. much healthier, but to put him in positions where he barely even has to be passing beyond the

line of scrimmage, and he can get rid of the ball so quickly and have those guys kiddle all of their players who generate great yards after the catch, they can put together a 76-yard drive like they did on their opening drive where they actually gained 88 yards after the catch because Garoppolo was averaging negative 4.9 air yards per attempt because he was targeting receivers behind the line of scrimmage. And we can talk about what that means for Garabolo. We can talk about what that means for his health. But we can also talk about that meaning that he is getting rid of the ball so quickly. And when you're playing Aaron Donald, there are no good solutions, right? There's not a lot of things where it's all going to look super pretty and

clean. So I just think a lot of credit is due to Shanahan and to that offense for finding. a way to navigate what's been a really rough situation for most teams that they found a way out of. There's only two ways to stop Aaron Donald. One is hoping somehow doesn't show up for the game. The second one is get rid of the ball quickly. And they chose the second one. For me, I think that George Kittles emergence here, reemergence, obviously, 109 yards and a touchdown is potentially a season-changing return to form. Obviously, he was banged up earlier in the season. He was part of the just incredible rash of injuries these guys had early in the season that made me think they weren't think of tender, obviously that I pegged them for in August. I think that this shows

you, and obviously Garapolo had a great stat line, 268 yards, three touchdowns, 1204 rating, no turnovers, but this shows you that a good play caller can solve every problem. And I think Kyle Shanahan is always going to be compared to Sean McVay. They work together in Washington, obviously. They run a very similar system. And when I see, these types of games, I remember why Kyle Shanahan is one of the top three play Cowerson football. And the offensive line had improvements. Personnel had improvements. They're a little healthier.

I think this 49ers team now three and three, at some point, you're actually a decent team. And I think because of the injuries, I started to write this team off, certainly. And maybe Shanahan, Garapolo, George Kittle, and some of that talent is enough to get you to January. Well, they got contributions from, I mean, Jason Verrett, played a great game. Yes. And one of the stories, and this is unfortunately, the comeback player of the year list is, you know, 30 people long. But Jason Verrett contributing is just really nice to see. And after all the injuries he's had, I'm a big, I'm a Jason Verrett fan just because of what he's had to endure. Absolutely. And the thing is, is that you hear a lot of excuses when things

don't go right for people. And I think the next time we start having one of those conversations, right or wrong. A good thing to do would be to think about the situation that the 49ers have been in and all the things that they've navigated and just take a beat to remember what smart decision-making that puts players in positions to succeed can do.

And it sounds simple, but I think we just saw that teams can win games that they're not expected to win when that's happening. Choose insurance. It always brings its A-game when you want the real deal like a good neighbor State Farm is there. Our surprisingly great player from last week was Chase Claypool. Okay, coming up, we're talking about the New England Patriots, Kirk Cousins, but first,

a quick break. Okay, time for losers. Number one loser, the New England Patriots, they are under 500 for the first time since 2002. They lost to a Broncos team that did not score a touchdown. Nora, what did you learn? No one, no one likes the end zone. The end zone was a very unfriendly place in this game. Yeah, not a great game for.

for the Patriots. And the funny thing was, I was in the beginning kind of half paying attention to this game and watching on Red Zone and thinking, this is a team with a really beat up offensive line. And as adaptable as they are, that's a huge part of what they want to do because they just don't have great depth at receiver and they need to run the ball and use Cam Newton's athleticism to have the offense that they want to have. Then you start digging into it a little bit more. And Newton was sacked four times. On three of those sacks, he had at least. three seconds in the pocket, which is not, it's not an eternity, but it's enough time to do something with. And they hadn't practiced. They'd practiced twice since their game against the Chiefs because

they'd been dealing with positive COVID tests. But I think, you know, the jury's out on how much that really matters. You could argue that it's good to have rest and that this is a team with a lot of experienced players and coaching that can make pretty good use of Zoom meetings and everything. And everything looked bad. Everything looked sloppy. Receivers were dropping balls. Cam Newton wasn't particularly accurate. They had penalties. They have strange situations like they've guys like Devin Osse Asiase, one of the tight ends they drafted, who despite their lack of any sort of depth at that position, he still hasn't had a target. And I'm very curious to see how the Patriots will approach the trade deadline because they in the same way that I was just describing how they want

to play and how they need an at least competent offensive line to do that. Tight end has been a huge part of their offense for so long, but for the last couple of years, they just really haven't had anyone. And if they're going to show a lack of willingness to use the guys that they drafted, then I'm curious to see if they try to find some other way to address that position because you can you can see it. There are very few things. things that the Patriots can't scheme and adapt around, but that's one of them. And if nothing's going to go right for them, those are the times when you see it most clearly. And if the defense hadn't been great in the red zone, this game would have been a blowout. Yeah. So to answer

your question about what they're going to do with the deadline, they're going to do some minor move that I 100% buy into. Like, Sandy last year, like you might as well. I was ready to give Belichick the executive of the year award because they hired they they traded for mohammed sinew and then yeah they gave up a second round pick and he called two passes yeah it's a nice job um okay so there are certain things that the patriots and belichick can't solve um one of those is obviously the fact that they're they've been depleted the other is you know it's hard to do and i'm not making excuses This is a bad performance from the Patriots. It's hard to do the, we're going to have a deep roster and we're going to game plan

and we're going to have situational football better than anybody and all that when you don't practice and you don't have a full roster to speak of and all that stuff. There's a lot of factors here and all that needs to be qualified. The Broncos played a great game. Tim Patrick surprised everybody. Michael Ojamudia had an incredible game where he was. was all over the place and seems to be a turnover machine. So full credit to the Broncos. I think that Newton getting sacked four times, I think he'd been sacked five times in the

previous three starts. That's important. And that's obviously, as you said, some of that's holding on the ball. Some of that's just the Broncos. This is one of Belichick's biggest challenges that I can remember in the last few years. And one of the things about the Brady era is that Brady could solve Belichick's problems. Belichick could solve Brady's problems that all work together. You don't have that right now. One of the things when I saw the stat earlier about the 2002 season is Michael Holly wrote a series of amazing books about the Patriots and that coaching tree,

GM tree, whatever you want to call it. And one of the things that was in there is that Belichick learned a ton about his team and himself and what to do in 2002 because they made a ton of mistakes. after he won the Super Bowl in 01. And basically the lessons he learned in 2002 set him up for the next three years or whatever. And obviously that was almost 20 years ago. Bill Belichick's a different guy. But I'm always intrigued to see how Belichick reacts to all these situations.

I don't think that this Patriots team is particularly great. I don't think they're going to win a playoff game. I'd be surprised if they do. But I also think that no one solves. problems like Bill Belichick in history of the sport, quite frankly. And I'm now looking at this and wondering how the next two years look like. If Cam Newton, obviously, listen, I think there's a chance that we look back on this game in a month that just throw it out and say this was so weird, didn't practice, COVID, all that stuff, all wonky. But I also think that this Patriots team was

never going to be very good. And when I say that, I mean, they're going to be a nine-win team, not a 12 or 13 win team. And I don't know. I mean, I just think that there's, there's a lot of questions that they should be asking themselves right now. And one of those things is how much a practice matter. So after the game, Belichick was asked,

did it matter, you didn't practice? He said, you want a percentage? I have no idea. And he didn't really want to play that game. I think everybody bought into this Titans thing. The Titans narrative, no, I'll tread carefully here. The Titans did practice. I think we have a fairly clear record on that.

there were some practice, practice activities that took place. I just, I've been having chuckles to myself at that the Titans never practiced because I'm like, okay, what have we been talking about for two weeks? Anyway, moving on from that. Yes, the Titans did practice. We know that all over whatever it was called Montgomery Bell Academy or whatever. Yeah. Anyway, let's just say, I don't want to talk about the practicing with the Patriots that much.

I think it's just much more important that their whole receiving core had six catches for 45 yards in this game. I don't think that's going to be repeated on a weekly basis, but it's emblematic of a problem that has been on that roster for multiple seasons at this point. And it's it's bothered Tom Brady. And I think now it's bothering Cam Newton, who wasn't perfect in that game. But I don't think that it was all him. Can Belichick just kidnap Kevin Colbert and just tell them how to scout wide receivers? I actually wrote it when I was covering the Patriots. I wrote a story about all of the trouble they'd had drafting receivers.

And at some point when I was reporting it, I kind of had to make a decision of whether or not my comparison was going to be like a more generalized how other teams tend to do or I could use the Steelers. And I thought to myself, this is a little mean, but I'm going to do it anyway. Anyway, not great to be Cam Newton today. Worse to be Kirk Cousins today, I would say. Not fun. Well, it depends how you look at it. Kirk Cousins is a very rich man with a lot of guaranteed money coming his way. That's fair.

Having said that, wow, this was bad. Kirk Cousins is now up to 10 interceptions on the season. First play of the game, he threw into like quadruple coverage. I've never really seen it. I mean, it was one of those plays where if Mahomes or like Brett Farr of 1994 did it, they'd be like, well, look at this. But Kirk Cousins is just not capable of that. There's a reason that those guys try those sort of passes. Right.

Well, it was a zone and they were dropping, like, they were like dropping clearly right to where he threw. And his quote on it, I mean, in credit to Kirk Cousins. He always takes responsibility. But he said, that's a mistake I've made in I may have made in here. one, but I'm disappointed that I would do that now. And yeah, I think we all are. It was bad. Like, it was one of those things where I know people kind of rebel against the, like, don't show a screen grab of coverage and draw conclusions from that thing. But if you see that screen grab and you see the four guys, yeah, don't throw it there. That's what I'll say about that.

All right. So Cousins comes out, speaking of quotes and says the reality is, if the pace I'm on in terms of interceptions, if that would continue, I won't finish the season. He obviously means a starter. Mike Zimmer said there was no talk of benching cousins at all. A couple of the B-riders said that's basically because there's no backup that they trust. There's no, there's no, you know, Case Keenum, as is the case in Cleveland right now, even though they had case Keenum. This is a horrible situation given everything. Obviously, we knew the Vikings were going to take a step back from a roster standpoint, but we thought there was, and I read Chad Graff over the athletic this evening, and he made the point. The reason to have Cousins is there's supposed to be a high floor.

And you're not supposed to have games like this. You're not supposed to, as you said, make mistakes that would have happened in year one. You're supposed to have basic competence that will elevate the people around you and make you a better team than you should be. Kirk Cousins is, he signed a two-year extension worth $66 million. His dead cap next year, next year is $41 million. It's, I believe, $62 million this year. Um, obviously he signed through 2022. There's some flexibility maybe in that season, but it's not a good situation.

They're running for the long haul. I think Kirk Cousins can be an okay quarterback, but he cannot make mistakes like this. This is unbelievable. This is like one of those deals where you see where like the state government has signed a deal with like some random business and they're actually that's going to cost them seven billion dollars over two years or whatever. Or like when Chicago, what was that story that Chicago like sold all? of its parking meters and it's going to accidentally cost them $4 billion or whatever.

It's that exact kind of thing right now. This sounds like a Denver airport conspiracy theory is what... No, no, no. Except it's real, unfortunately. Well, maybe the Denver airport thing is real. I'm not sure. Yeah, I think it is real. I think there are weird, there are like,

their conspiracy theories about the Denver airport that are not real, but I think there was some sort of like government, maybe bribery, maybe kickback little situation going on there that was real. I'm checking this out about the parking meters. We'll get to in a second. I don't know. They sold all of their parking meters in 2008, so they just don't even own them anymore.

They just felt like they didn't need them. Well, no, they sold them to a business, and then the business is making a ton of money off of it. By collecting parking fees. Yes, yes, yes. Anyway. So in this analogy, is Kirk Cousins... It's just a bad deal.

Kurt Cousins are the parking meters. Kirk Couss is the parking meter. it's something in this in this situation it's something i'm not really sure what it is but anyway this is the the bottom line here is that these two parties have to figure this out because there's nothing really they can do for the next two years and i think that when you look at this falcons team this should not be happening the falcons had allowed the highest total qBR in the nflbl coming into this game. They did not have, I think that they at no point did they have two interceptions. Sorry, they had two interceptions and Kirk Cousins had three by himself in the first half of this

game. I mean, this is, you're not supposed to make these sort of mistakes and you're not supposed to make them against the Falcons. This was bad. I don't know how you solve it. If this solution is Kirk Cousins can only play well on a good team, well, guess what? The Vikings don't look like they're going to get good anytime soon. And they're not going to have a lot of money to get good because they're paying Kirk cousins. Classic chicken and egg scenario. The cousins are the contract. We're good.

Beautiful. Okay, we'll be right back, but first a quick break. We're going to a new segment. I guess we're calling this honorable mentions. What are we going to, what do you want to call it? Yeah, it's like the honorable mentions two minute drill. Okay, we have two minutes to talk about whatever we didn't talk about. And it starts now.

nervous. Hey, there's the whistle. Wow. All right. We're panicking. We're panicking over the whistle. All right, Chicago versus Carolina. Norah, you have a take on this. Okay. So the bears are like the Josh Allen of teams is how I feel, which is that we're going to be at their Super Bowl parade, and we're going to be talking about how fraudulent they are. And I guess we're going to find out in 2020 if Alan Robinson in a good defense makes a team. And it's not like pure disrespect that doesn't matter because football outsiders track them as the second worst four-on-one team they've ever measured by DVOA last week. And I don't know that beating the Panthers 23 to 16 is going to change that in a crazy way. But the Bears have a really good record and it makes me uncomfortable.

The Josh Allen's much better than the Bears. All right. Next. Jets versus the dolphins. Go. Joe Flacco took a 28-yard sack. Adam Gase has to get fired. Tua looks pretty good. Christian Wilkins jumping over his teammate was the most athletic thing I saw on Sunday. I don't, I can't keep doing this gays thing. Anything? Tua, FaceTiming his parents from midfield after the game was 10 times happier than anything that's happened to the Jets the season. Baltimore, Philadelphia.

You have a take. Yeah. And it's quiet to take. This, this game made me uncomfortable. The Ravens, who I still think are a Super Bowl contender is uncomfortable. Weird word for that. They had a 24-6 lead in the third quarter. quarter and they won 30 to 28. And I'm not sure that that's impressive against this Eagles team.

And they're about to play their schedule now goes, Steelers, Colts, Patriots, Titans Steelers. So they got to get their act together. Otherwise, uh, I think both you and I are going to have some egg on our faces because we like this team a lot. The Steelers played a tight game against Eagles last, last week. So maybe it's just that's, maybe the Eagles just do that. They play people close and lose. Uh, Jalen Hertz, uh, average 18 yards on the place. He was involved in when they did, two quarterbacks. I think there might be some room there for two quarterbacks.

That's my only take right now. The Eagles absolutely stink. Baltimore, I still believe in. Washington against the New York Giants. Washington lost on a field two-point conversion. I just want to say shout out Ron Rivera for going for two on the final play and not playing for overtime. I did not need to watch more of this game.

The East Coast needed to watch Brady Rogers. So thank you, Riverboat Ron. We respect you. He said the only way to learn to win is to play to win. Yes. I have this quote written down too. I love that quote. I don't really know what it means,

but just do it and be legends. It's the only way to be in the NFC East right now. It does not mean anything. Daniel Jones said on one interception he was trying to throw the ball away and he didn't get enough on it. Never a good sign. Our friend Seth Walter said that in the early week, Daniel Jones ran 20 miles per hour,

third fastest person. That's unbelievable. Did we hear the whistle? I played through the whistle because I needed to tell everybody Daniel Jones runs 20 miles per hour. That's how we were. were coached. All right, fan question. It's from Nicholas Good. And he says, would you rather have to block Aaron Donald or try to tackle Derek Henry? Great question, Nicholas. Thank you. Nora.

So the first thing I thought when you sent this to me was that I got my flu shot this morning and I spent a lot of this morning complaining about how sore my like shoulder was because I got my flu shot. So I would like to do neither of these things. But I think fundamentally I would rather have to tackle Derek Henry because he's not trying to get through me. He's trying to do his own thing. And my involvement is really kind of up to me. Whereas if I'm in Aaron Donald's way, I don't want to be there unless Kyle Shanahan can scheme me up some help. Okay.

So a couple of things here. Number one, Kyle Shannon is a great person to have on your side in a situation. But first of all, I guess we have to take a step back here and talk about athletic profiles. What were your best sports growing up? I think that matters here. I'm a very good cardiovascular system. No hand-eye coordination. So I can run.

I can swim. I used to play software. I'm not a million miles away from that. Soccer would be interesting. I don't know if that helps in either of these situations. Yeah. Well, I also, I broke a lot of, I broke bones playing soccer. So I stopped.

My only good sport, I was good to ice hockey. And then I did play football. I wasn't very good. I was a offensive line. I mean, like, I was fine. I wasn't like the worst player on the field. It was just like I was a mediocre high school football player. But I was a center and guard.

So I would have at some point blocked the, you know, Aaron Donald of Orlando. Wow. There were not. Yeah. Keith Rivers was the dominant defensive player in my area when I was in high school, but never played against him, which is nice. All right. So the answer here, I think, is I would rather, so I guess if you're, if you're defending Derek Henry, you can try to push him out of bounds or something. But I'm not going to do that. I'm not. Here's the problem. Here's the problem. Aaron Donald would knock you over and that'd be the end of it. You'd both be standing. You'd stand up. He'd stand up from a three point stance and he would knock you over and be over. Derek Henry is running full speed and you're standing there on the open field. The collision would be much more vicious, right?

But he'd just hurdle me. No, I think that in this scenario, he's coming after you. All the other issue is if he knows you're a football, like, if he knows you're an amateur, he could just bowl you over. If he thought you were a real football player, he would run, like, maybe run around you. So it depends on what he knows in this situation as well.

Yeah, and did he hear me make that crack about the Titans practicing? Because that could influence this. All right. I don't know. This is an unknowable question. I don't want to do either. How about that? All right, it's good to tomorrow's clickbait.

What do you got? I've got Tampa Tidal Town. Did Tom Brady bring its winning ways to Florida? That's clickbait. Isn't that kind of clickbaiting? It's dumb. Does clickbait have to be drama? It's kind of, yeah.

Okay, well, that's drama. Um, well, I think it's going to be, Baker Mayfield. Like, should he be benched? Yeah. I think there's going to be a lot of that. And this would be a lot of that. I also think there's going to be some Kirk Cousin stuff, but I just don't, I don't see that.

Well, because there's no, there's no good cousins clickbait because there's nothing for them to do. You can't, they're not going to swallow a $60 million dead cap hit. So what do you, what's the, what's the solution? They don't have a good backup. Uh, right. Their backup is Sean Mannion. Yeah. Former Rams backup.

Really hard to do clickbait with Sean Mannion. Well, no, the absence of Kirk Cousins is clickbaity. I think, I think, would you rather click on Kirk Cousins should be benched or Baker Mayfield should be benched? Baker Mayfield should be benched. I agree. That's why that's my clickbait. That's all. All right.

This has been, yes? Tampa Tidal Town. Yeah. Oh, my God. Let's do an experiment here. Let's get both of these headlines. on the ringer and see who wins. Okay.

Let's not do either of those headlines. We can talk to our ad. Except Hyphitz, write both of the, hyphids can write both of these out. We just do like the ringer just does performance art now. Like, we do, we do like, what's the method acting of being a digital media company? Why is it not just method acting?

Why are we not just totally in character as clickbait guys? Heck yeah. Norprinciotti. This was fun, buddy. Awesome. This has been the Renner on a fellow show on the Ringer podcast now. You know,