Six Things to Know After Week 14: NFC West Is a Race Again

Plus, COVID-19’s impact being felt, Urban Meyer once wrote the opposite of his current leadership style, Bills putting it all on Josh Allen, and more!

This week was full of the unexpected: Two late-afternoon OT thrillers after an early-afternoon window that wasn’t very competitive on Sunday. Successful on-side kicks—many of them! Two straight weeks with a good Monday Night Football contest. Here are six things you need to know after Week 14, even if we still don’t know who is good in the AFC.

1. The Rams are only a game back of the Cardinals in the NFC West. Heading into this season, that sentence would not have made much sense. The Rams, fresh off their trade for Matthew Stafford, were a popular Super Bowl pick for this season, while the Cardinals hadn’t been better than .500 since 2015. But heading into Monday night’s game in Arizona, the Rams were the team with more at stake, having lost three of their previous four games and already down 0–1 in the season series against the Cardinals. Monday’s 30–23 win, in which Cooper Kupp and Aaron Donald starred and new acquisition Odell Beckham, Jr., scored his third TD in three weeks, kept the Rams alive in the division race. The Cardinals, though, have a slightly easier schedule remaining, in part because one of their games is against the 1-11-1 Lions.

2. As for the rest of us, COVID-19 continues to impact the daily operations of the NFL. Rams All-Pro cornerback Jalen Ramsey tested positive for the virus hours before the MNF showdown with the Cardinals, one of four Rams starters who missed the game on the reserve/COVID-19 list. Per NFL Network, 36 players around the league tested positive on Monday, the highest number since the list was created in 2020. There are likely several contributing factors: Colder weather and the holidays resulting in more indoor gatherings; a decline in antibodies among those vaccinated early in 2021; and the new Omicron variant, which new studies indicate current vaccines are less effective at preventing infection from—though, importantly, the vaccines are still highly effective at preventing serious disease and hospitalization. The NFL on Monday also issued a memo requiring booster shots by Dec. 27 for all Tier 1 and 2 staff who are eligible under CDC guidelines, though this does not apply to players, for whom all protocols must be negotiated with the players union.

3. When a leader puts more emphasis on getting rid of the leakers than addressing the underlying issues, they lose their ability to lead. We are talking about Urban Meyer, though this is also true in many other settings. After Sunday’s shutout loss to the Titans, Meyer issued a scathing response to Saturday’s NFL Network report that described multiple charged interactions with his players and assistant coaches. “If there is a source, then that source is unemployed,” Meyer told reporters. “I mean, within seconds.” A more constructive approach, rather than dismissing outright the concerns and issues that do not appear to be isolated, would be to address them directly and find ways to fix them.

That’s an approach that Meyer himself once championed, in the book he published in 2015 after winning a third national championship, Above the Line: Lessons in Leadership and Life from a Championship Season. In it, he describes the examination he’d undertaken after the previous season and where the team had fallen short (albeit after a 12–2 season with losses in the two biggest games, as opposed to 2–11, the Jaguars’ current record). “I had to take a hard look at myself, our staff, and our team,” Meyer wrote. “The typical reaction is to blame and complain, and that often results in the head coach firing somebody. But I was determined not to do that because I knew in my heart there was a better way. That kind of self-evaluation is not easy to do. It takes time, effort, and courage. I had to get beyond the symptoms, look deep, and identify root causes.” It’s fair to ask: What happened to his stated commitment to self-evaluation?

4. The Bills have put everything on Josh Allen. That was certainly apparent in Sunday’s overtime loss to the Bucs, when Allen not only passed for 300 yards but was also (by far) the team’s leading rusher, with 109 yards on the ground. As the Bills season has hit a speed bump, with four losses in the last six weeks dropping them to 7–6 and now two games back of the Patriots in the AFC East standings, one reason is that the Bills did not do enough to diversify their offense this year to build on last season’s success. While the trade for Stefon Diggs in 2020 helped unlock the version of Allen and the Bills offense last season, the team didn’t add additional weapons or schematic counterpunches. That being said, if the Bills get the very-warranted DPI call in the end zone on their final drive in regulation and get a fresh set of downs to try for the game-winning TD, maybe we are having a very different conversation this week. But the left foot sprain Allen suffered late in the game, which has his status for next week’s game up in the air, shows the cost of the team putting everything on him.

5. This was the week of the onside kick. Four teams (Ravens, Giants, Bears and Cardinals) successfully recovered their own onside kicks this week. That matches the total of onside kick recoveries for the season’s first 13 weeks, per ESPN Stats & Info. The bad news for these teams, however, is that none was able to score after the recovery and thus did not win the game. Two of the teams, the Giants and the Bears, threw an interception to end the possession after the recovery, while the Ravens turned the ball over on downs and Kyler Murray was sacked by Aaron Donald to run out the clock. Onside kicks had become much less successful since the NFL changed its kickoff rules in 2018 to make the play safer. But this year, there was another rule change, on a one-year trial basis, stipulating that the return team could have no more than nine players in the setup zone, between 10 and 25 yards from the spot of the kickoff, limiting the number of people in position to recover the kick. It’s possible this rule change is having the desired impact, to make the onside kick more of an intriguing play.

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6. A case for the AFC North as the NFL’s most entertaining division. With four weeks to go, this is still anyone’s division. Only two games currently separate the first-place Ravens from the fourth-place Steelers. In addition to the storied Steelers-Ravens rivalry, this division has had three different winners in the last decade and has produced eight wild-card teams in that span, including three seasons when the AFC North produced three playoff teams.

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