Looking ahead to Bills-Ravens
The Buffalo Bills–Baltimore Ravens game should be electric. Both teams look rested and like they’re peaking. And we’re going to start in Buffalo where, on Sunday, the Bills looked again like a punches-in-bunches kind of juggernaut—where a close game can get out of hand quickly.
But maybe most notable to me was how the game started, and how Buffalo responded.
On the game’s third play, Denver Broncos rookie Bo Nix delivered a dart on a deep in-breaker by Courtland Sutton to convert a third-and-8. Two plays later, Nix took a shot off a deep drop, going downfield to connect with Troy Franklin for a 42-yard score. So less than three minutes in, the Bills, under plenty of pressure to deliver this January, were down 7–0 against an upstart Broncos team clearly taking a house-money approach to the afternoon.
It looked messy from the outset, and the Bills certainly could’ve felt the stakes. Instead, they followed their leaders.
“I’m always going to stay optimistic,” future Hall of Famer Von Miller told me over his cell, from the locker room postgame. “It’s all I know. That’s the energy I brought today. I just have so much faith in our defensive coaches, and I know how the playoffs go. All the teams are good. They’re going to get some punches in. We’re going to get some punches in, too. We just got to make sure we got more points than them at the end of the day.”
As Miller said, both teams threw plenty of punches from that point in the first quarter. The Bills just wound up landing way more of them.
Thirty-one unanswered points later, and Buffalo advanced to the divisional round for the fifth consecutive year. And it’s in the divisional round where the Bills have lost for the past three years. For Buffalo to get to the AFC championship, the Bills will have to beat the Ravens, who handled them easily in a 35–10 rout in September (to be fair, the Ravens have fewer playoff wins with Lamar Jackson than the Bills do with Josh Allen).
On Sunday, we got a glimpse, again, of why this group might be different. Yes, Josh Allen played like an MVP candidate, throwing for 272 yards, two scores and a 135.4 rating on 20-of-26 passing. But it was more than that. It was how Buffalo ran for 210 yards. It was how Allen completed passes to eight different guys, with all eight targeted more than once and six having multiple catches. It was how, after the first drive, the Bills’ defense held the Broncos to just 154 yards and 11 first downs, while shutting them out.
Allen’s awesome, of course, but Buffalo’s balance just might be the difference.
“It all starts with Josh,” Miller says. “He’s an elite quarterback. Your team is just a shade of who your quarterback is. It starts with Josh and translates down to everybody else.”
But in this case, again how the word “everybody” comes into play makes a difference.
We’ll know how much of a difference soon.
For now, though, as Miller continued to paint himself as the eternal optimist—“Even [when I played] in Denver, when we probably shouldn’t have won a game, I still felt like we had a chance to win the Super Bowl”—they can at least hang their hat on the number of guys who can throw the aforementioned punches. It’s allowed them to use a veteran like Miller as a specialist, which has juiced his production of late. It’s made them more difficult for an opponent to handle.
It’s given them a look that Miller saw before, both in Denver and with the Los Angeles Rams.
“I can’t compare to those guys,” Miller says, referencing the champion 2015 Broncos and ’21 Rams. “But I know we got a great quarterback. We play great defense. The energy of this team, I can’t put my finger on it yet. We got to keep working and keep winning. In a couple weeks, we’ll figure it out.”
We may not have to wait that long.
In fact, it sure feels like we’ll know a lot more in six days.
Ravens over Steelers
The Ravens broke the Pittsburgh Steelers’ will Saturday night—and it makes Lamar Jackson even scarier to face. Remember, this is one of the most rugged rivalries in the history of the sport. So it’s not often that one side steals the other’s soul. But you could see it happen at M&T Bank Stadium on this cold January evening.
It was there in how Derrick Henry easily stiff-armed his former college teammate, Minkah Fitzpatrick, to the ground in the first quarter, as the Ravens built their lead. It showed up again in how Patrick Queen was less than enthusiastic in filling the hole on Henry’s 44-yard touchdown. And it was painted all over the stat sheet at halftime—at that point, the Ravens had a 308 to 59 edge in yards, with 164 of them on the ground.
The Ravens finished with a 28–14 win. And while you can give the Steelers credit for fighting back some, with a bunch of Russell Wilson moonshots late, it was clear how thoroughly the Steelers’ spirit was broken.
“Those first few drives, 14-play drives, it’s wearing on people,” said two-time Pro Bowl center Tyler Linderbaum. “I’m proud of the guys. I wouldn’t say [the Steelers] quit, but that’s always the goal going in is to try to get a team to quit. They’re a physical team, but we’re a physical unit, too.”
More physical on this night, and maybe more physical than anyone else in the NFL.
While the Ravens have been that way forever, I think there’s a difference this year, and he wears No. 22. And he’s going to present a problem for the Bills next week like he did earlier this season when he rushed for 199 yards in Baltimore’s 35–10 win over Buffalo in late September.
Earlier in the year, after the Ravens beat the Bengals in a shootout in Cincinnati, John Harbaugh told me. “Every time we played him, I’d look at him with that ponytail sticking out of the back of his helmet—the girlfriend you could never get.” The Ravens’ coach wasn’t the only one who looked at it that way, because you didn’t need to be Ozzie Newsome to understand that the former Tennessee Titans star fit the Ravens like Ray Lewis and Ed Reed once did.
Now, Harbaugh, and a lot of other folks have been proved correct. Henry looks like he was made to be a Raven, and the sight of him and Jackson in the shotgun has become flat-out terrifying.
“He hits it 1,000 miles an hour,” said fullback Pat Ricard of Henry. “For me, blocking in front of him, I have to be playing as fast as I possibly can because if I don’t, he’s either going to stiff-arm me or he’s going to run me over, because he’s trying to get in those holes. That’s the big difference with him versus other backs we’ve had. I’ve played with some really great backs, Mark Ingram, J.K. Dobbins, Gus Edwards, all Pro Bowl, 1,000-yard rushers.
“He’s just different.”
He’s made a difference for Jackson, too.
The Ravens see their quarterback as healthier and fresher than he’s been for the playoffs in years, which naturally has made him more sound as a passer (because a quarterback’s mechanics get thrown off when he’s banged up). And after bulking up the past two years, he slimmed back down this offseason in an effort to be more elusive, and try to take fewer car-crash hits, which worked. Another is how Henry’s presence means when Baltimore’s run game is rolling, things open up and Jackson is running in traffic less.
Or, in some cases, he’s just not running as much at all, because there’s less of a need for it.
Either way, when you add all this up, before even getting to how good (and efficient) Jackson’s grown throwing the ball, you get a picture of how the Ravens could bully even their rivals from Pittsburgh—pushing the Steelers to exhaustion with grinding 95-, 85- and 90-yard first-half touchdown drives that Linderbaum referenced.
“It’s very hard for a defense to stop,” Linderbaum adds. “The coaches have done a very good job scheming and figuring out ways to get advantages, either by numbers or angles, with how we motion. … Our [offensive] line did a great job in running the ball. The tight ends, myself, the receivers are just blocking to the whistle. If you do all those things and you do it one play at a time, you’re going to have games like we had tonight with players like Derrick and Lamar.”
Eagles over Packers
Jalen Hurts had thrown for 39 yards at the five-minute mark of the third quarter, and the Philadelphia Eagles still won going away. So it’s time for DC Vic Fangio to take a bow. The team’s defense, a mess a year ago with Sean Desai and Matt Patricia splitting the season, is now a force. And it’s a force behind a combination of new guys and guys in more prominent roles than the ones they previously served for the Eagles.
Jalen Carter, for example, went from a part of the rotation to the centerpiece of the defensive front. Rookies Cooper DeJean and Quinyon Mitchell have quickly become anchors in the secondary. Veterans Zack Baun and Chauncey Gardner-Johnson came in from the outside and emerged as cornerstones. And it’s all coalesced, and fast, around their salty old coach, now 66 years old and clearly still throwing his fastball.
“I’ve thought about this, and I think the common denominator is everyone’s just hungry,” Baun said to me over the phone, postgame. “Everyone has a reason to have a chip on their shoulder, whether it’s Cooper DeJean, myself, Nolan Smith, Chauncy Gardner-Johnson. Everyone has the biggest chip on their shoulder, and everyone wants to be better and get better as fast as we can. Having Vic is a blessing because he is a great teacher, has a great scheme and holds everyone accountable.”
The weird thing is, by Philly standards, it’s happened pretty quietly.
Before the team’s Week 5 bye, the defense had struggled—blowing a late lead to the Atlanta Falcons, and looking leaky against both the Green Bay Packers and Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And just as the offense was working to find its identity, the defense rounded into shape, mostly through the standard that Fangio set for unit not just in games, but every day they punch the clock. He and his unit just didn’t have the spotlight on their progress that Hurts and A.J. Brown did.
“He’s a hard stone to crack,” Baun says. “He wants things done, and he wants things done his way and he wants them done right. That’s all we want is someone to hold us accountable. From there, it’s all about execution.”
Baun then paused, and referenced Fangio’s last home, “I don't know what happened in Miami, but I love what’s happening here."
Indeed, things didn’t end great for Fangio there. He clashed with star players. There were questions about his ability to reach the younger generation. And a year later, in a new locale, that stuff’s not an issue anymore, and it’s showing on the field.
The Eagles held Jordan Love to 212 yards and a 41.5 rating, and picked him off three times. Philly didn’t fully stop Josh Jacobs, but outside of a highlight 31-yard run, the Packer workhorse managed just 50 yards on 17 other carries. So on a day when the Eagles’ offense wasn’t at its best, the defense carried the afternoon.
“As a defense, we don’t really worry about what our offense does or what situation they put us in or don’t put us in,” Baun continues “We’re going to play our brand of football no matter where the ball is put down. They’ll get it rolling. We got trust in them. They got trust in us. We definitely play off each other.”
That trust, going both ways, has been earned. Which, before yesterday, you might’ve missed until now.
Commanders over Buccaneers
I don’t think the Washington Commanders have enough to beat the Lions, but if I were Detroit, I wouldn’t be comfortable if the game was tight late. And that’s because this Washington team, Dan Quinn’s first in D.C., seems to be nails when the pressure turns up.
It showed again Sunday, after Tampa Bay Buccaneers kicker Chase McLaughlin drilled a 32-yard chip shot to tie the score at 20, with less than five minutes left.
The ball went back into Jayden Daniels’s hands. You know what happened next.
“You knew that he was gonna make the play,” 13th-year linebacker Bobby Wagner told me an hour after the game. “Just like we were all gonna make the play. The last four, five weeks we’ve seen it. Even before that, we’ve seen it. It’s going to be a little different writing [each time], of course, but the same result.”
And so it was that, moments later, Zane Gonzalez was knocking a 37-yarder through to give the Commanders, who already won 12 games in the regular season, their first postseason win with Quinn as coach, this one coming by a 23–20 final score.
This, of course, was no work of art.
But what the Commanders did show, in slipping past the Buccaneers and into the divisional round, was just how unflappable they are, something that starts, strange as it sounds, with the 24-year-old rookie quarterback with wisdom beyond his years.
The reality is everyone was anointing Daniels as the NFL’s next big thing back in September, as a too-good-to-be-true guy whose California cool was easily translating over onto the game field in the pros. And Daniels, maybe because he’s already had some contrasting highs and lows, in being a five-year college player, remained unfazed.
“His composure, his humility,” says Wagner. “Through the success, through the big games, he’s remained the same. He’s still working the same. Everything is the same. That’s the biggest thing, especially at his age.”
That’s why Quinn and Kliff Kingsbury went to the well, down 17–13 in the fourth quarter, sending him out there for a fourth-and-3 and then … after missing that one, went for it again with less than 10 minutes left, on fourth-and-2 from the Buccaneers’ 5. He paid off the second gamble with a touchdown pass on a slant to Terry McLaurin.
It’s also why Wagner had little doubt about how Daniels would finish the game.
Daniels was ready for it, like he’s been ready for a lot of things this year—and like his Commanders always seems to be ready. They do, in fact, practice these moments, which is a big part of it, too.
“It’s just game situations,” Wagner says. “It’s different situations, whether we’re down by three, up by three, need a touchdown, need to stop somebody from scoring a touchdown—it’s just putting you in those moments in practice so when you get in those moments during the game, it’s no different because you’ve done it. That’s I think the biggest thing. It’s like, Today, we’re down by three, we need to score. Or, Hey, we’re up by a touchdown, we gotta make sure they don’t score.
“So when you get on the field, get in those moments, it’s not a big deal because you’ve done it.”
And the list of things the Commanders have done is, in turn, growing by the week.
The players love playing for Quinn. They love playing with Daniels.
The rest that comes with it, they’ll tell you, is what they’ve come to expect.
Texans over Chargers
This version of the Houston Texans might just be feisty. I’ll raise my hand as someone who thought Houston was pretty dangerous coming into the season, with a rising young core built around C.J. Stroud; veteran additions such as Danielle Hunter, Stefon Diggs and Joe Mixon; and a staff led by DeMeco Ryans. And by dangerous, I mean I thought they could have a dark-horse Super Bowl run in them, even with the challenges of the AFC bracket taken into account.
Then, the season started, the offensive line crumbled, Stroud’s play leveled off and folks tuned Houston out. In turn, the Texans seemed to sleepwalk to another AFC South crown.
But what remained was that talented core Ryans and GM Nick Caserio built.
Saturday looked like that talented core coming back to what it was supposed to be—with a resounding 32–12 rout of a Los Angeles Chargers team that many expected to go into Houston and end the Texans’ uneven second season of the Ryans-Stroud era.
When I asked Mixon, who spearheaded a 168-yard effort from the Houston run game, if this was simply the manifestation of what the Texans were supposed to be from the start, he didn’t skip a beat. “No doubt,” he says. “Today was definitely the first day that it was displayed.” He adds, “We just tried to do whatever we could to put together a complete, four-quarter game. We were fortunate to do that.”
On offense, it had been a long time coming, between the frustrations over where OC Bobby Slowik’s offense was, in terms of having answers to how defenses were playing the Texans, to the cratering of the interior of the offensive line earlier in the year. Stroud wasn’t happy, and he wasn’t alone. But maybe growing pains for a young group coming off the magic carpet ride of 2023, a renaissance season few expected, should’ve been expected.
Maybe Saturday means they’re out of it, maybe it doesn’t. It did look a whole lot better.
And Mixon pointed to the 23-year-old quarterback’s throw with 2:24 left in the first half, to Xavier Hutchinson—Stroud dropped a shotgun snap, picked it up, scrambled free from the defense and threw it across his body deep to an open Hutchinson for 34 yards—as the turning point. “That set it off,” Mixon says.
From that point forward, Stroud was 13-of-16 for 199 yards and a touchdown against a rugged Chargers defense, deploying a scheme he’s struggled with.
“When his best was needed, he delivered,” Mixon says. “I’m just happy for him that he prevailed in every situation. He deserves everything he has coming for him."
Meanwhile, a defense that’s been pretty good all year—ranking sixth in total and run defense, and 11th against the pass—did what it’s done all year. Tua Tagovailoa threw seven picks this year, with three of them against the Texans. Jared Goff threw 12 picks on the season, and five came against Houston. Likewise, Justin Herbert threw three picks in the regular season, then four against the Texans.
They showed a lot of man and played a lot of zone, on the premise that the Chargers hunt man coverage. That plan, as laid out by Ryans and DC Matt Burke, worked beautifully, allowing for Will Anderson Jr., Hunter, Denico Autry and the rest of the rush to get four sacks, and all-day pressure, and allow for their dynamic young corner duo of Derek Stingley Jr. and Kamari Lassiter to play the ball and generate three of those four picks.
That, of course, only underscores the larger point here. This Texans team really didn’t come out of nowhere. It has the horses it needs. It just took a while for them to hit full stride in unison, which isn’t that unusual for a younger team still finding its way.
“We’re fortunate and blessed enough to come to work tomorrow,” Mixon says. “We’re going to need everybody. Everybody’s peaking at the right time. I’m just happy we were able to put it together for four quarters, and we got to carry the momentum into next week.”
And maybe give the Kansas City Chiefs more of a game in the divisional round than anyone would’ve seen coming a couple of weeks back.
Patriots hire Mike Vrabel
The New England Patriots’ hire of Mike Vrabel is fantastic. But it’ll only work if key people in the organization accompany it with a long look in the mirror. On the surface, New England’s “process” for landing Vrabel didn’t seem like much of a process at all. They brought in two Rooney Rule candidates (and that’s not a shot at Pep Hamilton or Byron Leftwich), since rules prohibit teams from satisfying the rule with coaches working for other teams until Jan. 20. They interviewed other guys, including Detroit Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson, over Zoom. Then, they hired Vrabel.
In between, presumably in hearing the temperature rise on their sidestepping of the Rooney Rule, the Patriots also put in a request for Lions DC Aaron Glenn—more than 48 hours after putting one in for Johnson. So imagine Detroit’s surprise when the notification from the league on Glenn arrived Wednesday, separate from the slip for Johnson.
If it looks to you like the Patriots have rabbit ears, you should follow that instinct. This feels a lot like 83-year-old owner Robert Kraft doesn’t like the way he’s been perceived the past few months, and really didn’t like the way he was perceived last week, reaching for a public relations win and a sudden change in narrative.
Now, I’ll say it again: I think Vrabel is a home run hire.
But in today’s NFL, it takes a lot more than one person to turn around a franchise that’s in the decrepit state the Patriots have fallen into the past couple of years, a state where they’d even feel the need to rush a process to beat out the Las Vegas Raiders, Chicago Bears and New York Jets for a coach who played for them.
Bill Belichick had his way of doing business, of course, for 24 years. He essentially was the team’s analytics and sport science department. He employed small coaching and personnel staffs, prioritizing trust and cohesion over volume of resources. He was also, to borrow a phrase, one of one, capable of doing all the work that a dozen folks might account for in another organization
It wound up costing the Patriots in a lot of ways the past few years. Slowly, EVP of player personnel Eliot Wolf started modernizing the operation last year, which is one reason I think the Krafts stuck with him after ousting Jerod Mayo (we’ll see, in time, what Vrabel’s arrival means for Wolf’s fate). And all of that needs to be accelerated now.
It’ll also be interesting to see where Vrabel lands on all this. The Titans ran an old-school shop when he was the head coach there. And then he went to the Cleveland Browns, who are on the newer-age side, giving a pretty good side-by-side comparison of one versus the other.
To give Vrabel the best shot of actually turning around a team that’s not remotely close to contention now, he’ll have to figure that out, as will the people around him. That’ll require, again, that cold, hard look in the mirror. That the Patriots rushed through the process, and waived the right to take a look at how everyone else does business to hire someone familiar, isn’t the best sign that it’ll happen.
But the Krafts are smart enough to figure out how to do that on their own. We’ll see whether they have the stomach to go through with it.
Titans’ offseason changes
The Titans ran through 10 general manager candidates this weekend, and will wrap up their first set of interviews Monday with Packers VP of player personnel Jon-Eric Sullivan—who is close with president of football operations Chad Brinker from their time in Green Bay—Zooming in. And the biggest question for most of those candidates coming in was, more or less, What exactly is this job?
So we can hit some of the background here first.
The Titans of a couple of years ago, led by Vrabel and Jon Robinson, were very old school. And my sense is ownership’s call to hire Ran Carthon from a new-age San Francisco 49ers operation was made to try to bring the personnel department closer to the forefront in how football teams are built in the 2020s. It’s a big reason why Brinker, with a Kellogg MBA and background in every facet of personnel from Green Bay, was brought aboard to be Carthon’s right-hand person two years ago, then promoted above him last year.
Obviously, it didn’t work out for Carthon, and ownership has a ton of egg on its face for the handling of Vrabel last year. But, the mess of the past 26 months, I believe, is getting to owner Amy Adams Strunk’s desired result. Which is to have a more forward-thinking operation, complete with a young head coach with quarterbacking background, and a top executive focused on modernizing just about everything on the football side of the building.
In turn, I think Brinker’s new model will look like what you might see in other sports, with an acknowledgment that the job can get too big for a traditional coach or GM.
So the GM will run the draft and free agency, and oversee departments such as strength and conditioning, medical and sport science, as well as scouting. Coach Brian Callahan will report to that GM which, in so many ways, is a traditional setup.
What isn’t traditional is having the over-the-top guy. But, again, you’ll see setups like this in baseball and basketball now because, as some franchises see it, the jobs have overgrown the old organizational model. That’s where Brinker comes in, overseeing the entire football operation and charged with creating alignment between all departments, while serving as a tiebreaker/tone-setter on big decisions.
I don’t know if it’ll work. A lot of that rides on something separate from all this—finding a quarterback (in other words, if they find one, everyone’s a genius; if they don’t, then everything was doomed from the start).
But the idea in a vacuum is really interesting. We’ll see how it plays out.
Tom Brady and the Raiders
Tom Brady’s presence in Las Vegas shouldn’t be ignored. The smoking gun: Ben Johnson’s candidacy. Johnson’s initial plan was to take three interviews, with the Bears, Jacksonville Jaguars and Patriots. But Brady’s sell job, through intermediaries, made the difference.
Now, to be clear, I don’t think it’s Brady’s intention to be there day to day—his family being in Florida full-time will likely prevent that for the time being. But I also don’t think he’s going to put his name on anything that he doesn’t feel like he can fully put his name behind. It’s been well established that Brady wasn’t wild about the way things operated with Antonio Pierce, which is one reason why Pierce isn’t there anymore.
Brady also arrived with business partner Tom Wagner, with both guys buying 5% of the team, just before Silver Lake CEO Egon Durban was approved after buying 7.5% of the club—Durban is also on the board of Premier League power Manchester City. Raiders principal owner Mark Davis’s sale of pieces of the franchise are believed to be in preparation for a heavy estate tax bill (his mother, Carol, technically owns the team and is in her mid-90s), and at least make it feasible that he could continue as owner after paying them.
Having Durban on the team, in turn, gives someone such as Brady the chance to realistically tell prospective coaches, executives and players that a new day is coming for the Raiders, and the shoestring budgets that could sometimes result from a lack of cash on hand are gone.
So now, if you’re Johnson or one of the other candidates, you can take a hard look at the state of the team, and see an opportunity to create a football operation in your own image, complete with major input into who your GM will be, a gleaming practice facility, a brand-new stadium and a home city that’ll be easy to attract players (whether it’s because you like a lack of state income tax or everything else Vegas has to offer).
Now, there are still problems with the job. There’s no long-term answer at quarterback. Some of the problems associated with working for Davis, who can be unpredictable and abrasive with his coaches, may not go away, even if the new owners promise to keep him at bay and the new coach insulated. The roster was just flipped, and while it got younger, it still has a long way to go.
That said, if the Raiders’ next coach, be it Johnson or someone else, wins big, we’ll be able to return to the events of the past few days and explain why.
Rams-Vikings moved to Arizona
A seven-minute conversation changed the course for Monday night’s Los Angeles Rams vs. Minnesota Vikings game in Arizona. As Rams president Kevin Demoff recalls it, on Thursday morning, ahead of a call with the operations staff at SoFi Stadium, and Los Angeles public safety officials, everyone with the football team felt optimistic about the idea of playing the playoff game in Inglewood four days later. But before coming to any sort of final decision, they’d first have to make sure the air quality at the stadium would be safe and local resources wouldn’t be taxed by the game.
Then, Demoff picked up the phone and heard the tone in the voice of a fire chief.
“The weariness, the concern, the gravitas,” Demoff says. “From the moment we got on the call, which lasted seven minutes, we felt like we were already a distraction. They told us that at this point, they could not safely project that we could host the game and that it wouldn’t be draining resources. The seriousness of the call and the concern in their voices for our community, I got a pit in my stomach that said, This game has to move. You listen and then there’s the question of, What if we wait another 24 hours and see if things get better?
“From that point, you start to think we’re holding 500 rooms for us, the Vikings, officials, game day [staff]. Those rooms could go to evacuees right now if we make this decision. You start to think about what are we gaining if we wait? I talked to [owner] Stan [Kroenke]. He was in agreement.”
So the Rams pulled the plugged two days before the drop-dead date of Saturday, set by the team and the league, to move the game.
Here’s a little more about the timeline, on how this all played out …
• On Tuesday of last week, the fires broke out, and the Rams started discussions on what it would take to move the game. They had a reference point from 2018, when the league decided the Tuesday before kickoff that a Chiefs-Rams game would be moved back to Los Angeles because of shaky field conditions in Mexico City. Wildfires in the L.A. area also coincided with that decision, but the Rams were able to host it. (The game happened to be the memorable 54–51 shootout.)
• On Wednesday morning, the league and Rams convened, and agreed on Arizona as an alternate location, with the Cardinals looped in. Still, the Rams were focused on doing what they had to in order to have SoFi ready to host a game Monday night.
• On Thursday, as the decision was made, the Rams pushed their focus in trying to give the people of L.A. a proper tribute in Arizona. Their thoughts went back to 2018. “Aside from the fact it was one of the greatest games of all time, I would put it as one of our top franchise moments, on par with winning the Super Bowl at Sofi,” Demoff says, “just what it did for the city, starting to help people heal.”
• The Cardinals then handed the Rams the keys to State Farm Stadium in Glendale to map out repainting the field to make it look like SoFi, and to flip all elements of game presentation to what it would have been in Inglewood. And as the Rams discussed when to leave for Arizona, a flareup of the Palisades fire became visible at the team’s facility, and the Kenneth fire broke out in West Hills, close a lot of players’ and coaches’ homes.
• At 5:00 p.m. Thursday, around when the Kenneth fire was contained, the Rams decided they could practice safety at home Friday, then leave for Arizona. Meanwhile, Cardinals owner Michael Bidwill sent the team’s two planes to get families to Arizona with the players, coaches and staff—the Rams also gave families the option to stay, providing rooms in Manhattan Beach and Santa Barbara. A total of 355 people, six dogs and two cats boarded for Arizona, thanks in large part to Bidwill. “[Bidwill’s gesture] made a huge difference in us being able to give our group certainty,” Demoff says.
• The team had a call with players, coaches and families at 9:00 p.m. Thursday to give everyone the roadmap for the days to come. The Rams put tickets on sale first for season-ticket holders, then for those who’d previously bought tickets, at 10 a.m. Friday.
In explaining all this, there were a lot of people Demoff wanted to thank, among them the Vikings, the Cardinals, and Rams’ employees such as Sophie Harlan (on logistics), Dan August, Hadley Rossitter, Steven Moore and Meagan Roberts (on handling tickets), Kat Frederick, Sarah Schuler and Brittany Cipolla (for arranging the fan buses and marketing), and Molly Higgins (who helped arrange for LAFD hats and shirts, and the community outreach).
Demoff also mentioned how much Roger Goodell and Dawn Aponte did from the league office, and how good Sean McVay, Les Snead and Tony Pastoors were leading the football side, and even what Aaron Donald did in visiting with first responders, and Seth Markman and ESPN did in being flexible with the broadcast. It was, simply, an all-hands-on-deck situation, and the Rams got all hands on deck.
“You think about all the logistics,” Demoff says, “you also think about taking the pressure off everybody in Los Angeles by removing [the game] from their concerns. That, to me, is great. I’m hopeful this’ll be the beginning of a great playoff journey. But regardless, I could not be more proud of our staff and the NFL as a whole for what they’ve done.”
Quick hitters
And on a less serious note, let’s dive into the quick-hitters for this week …
• This may be interesting only to me, but there are nine teams that carried over $60 million in dead money this year, and six of them (Broncos, Vikings, Bills, Packers, Eagles, Bucs) made the playoffs. Which is good to see, because these are teams that spent cash over cap to put together better rosters. That the price they have to pay for it looks a bit overblown should motivate other owners to spend. And their fans to not allow anything less.
• Along those lines, Denver had a fantastic year—how it ended Sunday, notwithstanding. The Broncos carried $85 million in dead cap, largely because of the release of Russell Wilson, and survived it just fine, relying on a ton of young guys and a rookie quarterback. The arrow is pointing up for Sean Payton’s crew, even in the rugged AFC West.
• Wilson and Justin Fields are both free agents. Will either be back in Pittsburgh? There was frustration with Wilson down the stretch, so I’m not sure how far the Steelers will be willing to go to keep him. Meanwhile, the team would love to keep working with Fields, but it might not be as a starter. I’d heard before the playoff game Saturday that the playoffs would likely help set the course. Based on how the offense played …
• I did have the thought that the Browns could land Klint Kubiak as offensive coordinator (if it’s not tight ends coach Tommy Rees, who’s also of interest for the Patriots) and bring back Alex Van Pelt in another role. Van Pelt is incredibly well-liked from his time in Cleveland, did a good job with really shaky talent in New England this fall and was a huge part of developing Patriots rookie Drake Maye.
• Good to see the Jets and Bears bringing in a massive number of people for their coaching searches. There’s no harm in getting to mine the league for valuable information.
• Lou Anarumo will interviews with the Indianapolis Colts on Tuesday, and it feels like the former Cincinnati Bengals DC is going to be a really good hire for someone. The age of guys such as Sam Hubbard and Vonn Bell, added to some missed draft picks, contributed to the defense’s collapse and Anarumo’s firing.
• Dallas Cowboys coach Mike McCarthy’s contract expires Tuesday. And I do feel like he’s a bit annoyed that it’s gotten to this point. As he should be.
• I heard this week about one team that ordered its coach to shrink his staff. The reasons were budgetary, and I really hated hearing that. I feel bad for fans of that team—remember, there’s no cap on what you can pay a coach or a scout.
• Deshaun Watson reinjuring his Achilles could give the Browns a window to walk away. Because he was injured away from the team facility, he may have defaulted on his guarantees, which cover $92 million over the next two years (Cleveland’s going after quarterbacks regardless, FYI).
• Jaguars owner Shad Khan has expressed some flexibility to coaching candidates on his decision to retain GM Trent Baalke. And my read on that is this: If a coach has the leverage to get what he wants from the team, then Khan could still pull the plug on Baalke.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Wild-Card Weekend NFL Takeaways: Bills-Ravens Game Should Be Electric.