NFL Week 16 Takeaways: Ravens Again Show They Can Beat Anybody

Baltimore knows people didn’t expect a beatdown against the 49ers, but this team believes in itself. Plus, notes on a big Dolphins win, credit for Jared Goff and Andrew Berry, Jayden Daniels’s draft stock, the Chiefs’ offense and more.

Christmas is over, and so is Week 16. Here’s what we’ve got coming out of the holiday …

The Ravens know you didn’t expect Monday. But after the way they dished out similar beatdowns to the Lions and Seahawks earlier in the year, they don’t seem to think anyone should be surprised by what transpired Christmas night in Santa Clara either.

You saw what I did—Baltimore totally choking out the presumed best roster in football.

The final was Baltimore Ravens 33, San Francisco 49ers 19, and this one didn’t even seem that close. Lamar Jackson played like the MVP candidate he clearly is. The defense picked off Brock Purdy four times, then scored a fifth off Sam Darnold for good measure. Eight different guys caught passes, and the run game got the yards it needed.

And if you watched the ABC broadcast, you might’ve caught how it sounded a lot like it’d been relayed to Joe Buck and Troy Aikman just how overlooked and disrespected Baltimore felt coming in, like they weren’t capable of a game like the one they wound up playing. So afterward, I caught up with Patrick Queen, who had one of those picks, and seven tackles to go with it, to ask him about that.

The Ravens celebrate their fifth interception of the night against the 49ers/ :: Cary Edmondson/USA TODAY Sports

“Y​​eah, they tried to write us off,” Queen told me. “We all felt a certain way about that. You don’t want to give us a chance to play the game. You try to write us off. I think everybody hates the Ravens. We don’t know why. We just go out there and play football. We don’t play the football that everybody wants to see, though.”

At this rate, America’s not going to have any choice.

With the win Monday, the Ravens are 12–3, and a home win Sunday against Miami away from clinching the top seed, a bye and home-field advantage throughout the AFC playoffs. So we’re all, in all likelihood, going to get a steady diet of the bruising, old-school game Baltimore brings.

And all of that was on display in California on Monday night—and it started with a bet the Ravens’ players and coaches made during the week.

Quite simply, it was that the Niners, great in their own right, hadn’t quite seen a team like theirs.

“We definitely knew,” Queen says. “People don’t want to play the style of football we like to play. They are a physical team. They are that aggressive team. But I think our brand of football outmatches anybody. … We know they don’t believe that people can tackle them for four quarters. We’re the team to do that.”

The belief, from there, went that eventually if Baltimore kept swinging, with physicality and creativity, the dam would break, and the interceptions wound up manifesting that. Purdy’s second pick came when Brandon Stephens got free and tipped the ball in the air to Marlon Humphrey. The third came when Humphrey popped the ball loose from George Kittle and Kyle Hamilton was waiting for his second pick of the day. The fourth came when nose tackle Travis Jones collapsed the pocket, and hit Purdy, sending his throw wayward and into Queen’s arms.

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“Those guys up front, when they eat, we’ll be able to make plays on the back end,” Queen says. “[Purdy is] a great quarterback. He made some miraculous throws these weeks leading up. We knew that there are plays out there that you can capitalize on. There are plays where he does mess up, but people just don’t capitalize on it. We knew we could take advantage of that.”

And all four of those were important—the first one stopped the Niners’ first drive deep in Baltimore territory, and the next three led directly to 17 points.

Meanwhile, Jackson was surgical, averaging 6.4 yards per carry, posting a 105.9 passer rating and staying in total control throughout. Back in early November, a panel of 38 NFL executives voting on my annual midseason awards made Jackson the overwhelming pick for MVP (he got more than half the votes) before many people were talking about him that way.

Now, everyone is. Including his teammates.

“He proved that tonight,” says Queen. “I think he proved that over and over again. He’s going to continue to do that. We’ve got all faith in him. That’s the MVP in our eyes. We’ve got two more games left in the season before the stretch in the playoffs. We just got to have his back.”

And really, that alludes to the best thing about these Ravens—that there’s enough there, as complete as the roster is now, for everyone to have everyone’s back. As is the case with the Niners, there may not be a discernible hole on the Baltimore roster.

Maybe it’s time for everyone to take notice of it.

“We just proved that we got a chance,” Queen says, slyly. “When you got chances in life, you got to take advantage of those.”

I’d say the Ravens look ready to.

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The Dolphins are aware of what everyone thinks of them, too. That they haven’t really beaten anybody. That they’re a notch below the league’s elite. That, eventually, the bottom will fall out the way that it did last year.

It didn’t Sunday. And, to me, third-and-2 with 1:42 left showed why this Miami team might just be different.

At that point, the Dolphins were down 20–19, at the Dallas 15. If they couldn’t pick up the first down, they still could’ve kicked the go-ahead field goal—so falling short wouldn’t have been catastrophic. Still, getting it, with Dallas out of timeouts, would effectively end the game. So the play-call there was crucial. And Mike McDaniel’s wouldn’t be cute with the bells and whistles he’s known for.

On this play, McDaniel’s Dolphins weren’t going to sucker punch anyone. They were going to hit Dallas between the eyes, with a gap run, and a tailback getting behind his pads and a pulling guard. Six yards later, McDaniel’s swing connected, the Cowboys were on the canvas, Jeff Wilson Jr. had the first down, and Miami had a 22–20 win, with Jason Sanders finishing it with a walk-off chip shot.

How’s that for answering all those questions?

“It was a grit play,” Wilson told me, as he made his drive home from Hard Rock Stadium.

It was also one, Wilson said, he actually called for a couple drives earlier. It was then that the veteran back approached McDaniel (who coached Wilson for four years in San Francisco and traded for him in November 2022) and told him to “let us finish the game.” McDaniel responded by sending Wilson on to the field for the final drive, and telling him, “Be ready. I’m about to come to you.”

Wilson had just 26 carries on the season, and just two Sunday, at that point. But McDaniel trusted him, and the line, and the result spoke for itself.

“He listened,” Wilson says. “The play call was simply for our O-line, and it was mano a mano, who wants it more? In that situation, I believe that nobody in this world, no NFL team on our schedule, would want it more than us. We weren’t going to be denied.”

Now, no one’s handing out a trophy for that one run. But symbolically, it did mean something to the Dolphins. And it seemed to say something, too, both about where they are now, and where they could be going in January, after taking Dallas’s best shot and coming back from the 17-play, 69-yard drive Dak Prescott engineered to give the Cowboys the lead inside the game’s final four minutes.

How much? We’ll see. Late Sunday, they seemed to think it said plenty.

“We’ve proved what we need to prove to ourselves on who we are,” Wilson says. “I don’t think that’s a question, like we’d question our identity. We know who we are. But the proof’s in the pudding. You can’t lie about numbers and the truth. We haven’t beaten a lot of good teams. Dallas was a good one that we knocked off today.”

The Dolphins will get another one next week (the Ravens), and one more the week after (the Bills), so any doubt left over should be cleared up soon. Not that the Dolphins or McDaniel have any of their own.

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Goff and the Lions are bringing postseason football back to Detroit after clinching the NFC North :: Matt Krohn/USA TODAY Sports

We’re going to get to the Lions in the MMQB Lead on the site Tuesday, but I wanted to make sure we found a way to get Jared Goff some credit for what’s happened in Detroit. So I’ll do it here. And we can start with how the trade that made Goff a Lion was the rare home run for both sides.

The Rams got Matthew Stafford. He won the Super Bowl the following year. He’s helped bridge Los Angeles through a retooling of the roster. The deal was a resounding win for L.A.

Meanwhile, the Lions used the 2022 first-rounder they got for Stafford to trade up for Jameson Williams, and traded down with the ’23 first-rounder they got in the deal for picks that netted Jahmyr Gibbs and Sam LaPorta. And the ’21 third-rounder they got wound up being Ifeatu Melifonwu, who’s had his development short-circuited by injury, but has come around of late, and had the NFC North–clinching interception to end Sunday’s win over the Vikings.

Then, you have Goff. From the minute coach Dan Campbell and GM Brad Holmes landed him, they swore that, while he might’ve been a necessary salary dump for the Rams to complete the deal, the Lions never viewed him that way. Holmes was with Goff in L.A. Campbell remembered being denied a trip to the Super Bowl as a Saints assistant by Goff in January 2019. Both had a belief he could take the baton and run with it.

He has, and then some. Goff threw for 4,438 yards, and 29 touchdowns against just seven picks last year. This year, with two games left, he’s at 3,984 yards, 27 touchdowns and 10 picks. But more than just the numbers, and they’ve been really good as the Lions have slowly put pieces (such as Williams, Gibbs, LaPorta and Amon-Ra St. Brown) around him and a fantastic offensive line, it’s a steadiness and big-game experience he’s brought to an intense, tough group that’s made all the difference in the world.

And that, to me, was reflected in how Goff responded when I asked him whether, deep down, the win was personally satisfying, given how the Rams let him go two years after he took them to a Super Bowl. He’d have been justified to pound his chest or get some licks in. He didn’t.

“I’m so much more proud of my teammates and all the people that have been here,” he said, as he was leaving U.S. Bank Stadium for the flight home. “That’s overwhelming. The emotion of any personal vindication or personal satisfaction, sure, I’m happy I was able to do it. And happy I was able to be a part of it. But to be honest with you, it’s the guys in this locker room. It’s Taylor Decker being here for eight years, hasn’t done it. Frank Ragnow being here for six, hasn’t done it.

“It’s those guys that I think about, that I’m proud to be a part of it with them, and proud to be the first one in a long time to be able to do it.”

Safe to say, Goff’s made a lot of folks proud the last three years.

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Last week, we handed Coach of the Year to Cleveland’s Kevin Stefanski—this week, it’s time to give Browns GM Andrew Berry and his staff their due. Because what’s happened with the supposedly cursed franchise, since hard luck started to hit the Browns again (and again and again) is tough to comprehend.

In this golden era of offense, the Browns lost their unit’s centerpiece, Nick Chubb, in Week 2. At a time when quarterbacks have never meant more, Cleveland’s on its fourth starter at the position. Amid a league-wide crisis of offensive line depth, Stefanski’s crew is rolling its fourth and fifth tackles out there. And the team’s top-ranked defense has had to go to its fourth and fifth safeties, and has been without No. 1 corner Denzel Ward and middle linebacker Anthony Walker for stretches.

Yet, the Browns are 10–5, with double-digit wins for just the third time since coming back into the league in 1999. That’s a credit to Stefanski and his staff for coaching around all the injuries, of course. But it’s also a credit to Berry’s group for finding answers everywhere.

And Sunday’s 36–22 win over the Texans brought good examples of how the team’s scouts operate, in how they acquired the game’s two biggest stars.

Start with receiver Amari Cooper, who had 11 catches for a franchise-record 265 yards and two touchdowns. Cooper, you’ll remember, was acquired as a Cowboys salary dump—Dallas dealt him, and his $20 million per year contract, to Cleveland for a fifth-rounder and a swap of sixth-rounders. Coming off a down year, and with Dallas looking to find more touches for CeeDee Lamb, Cooper was seen as overpriced and his trade market sagged.

The Browns had been in the market for a veteran receiver. They figured Mike Williams and Chris Godwin would be franchise tagged. They worked on a trade with the Falcons for Calvin Ridley, then Ridley got suspended. And as they dug in, they anticipated an uptick in the price of receivers and figured, if the market exploded, the nonguaranteed $60 million Cooper was due over three years could end up being a bargain. Other teams tried to wait out Dallas, thinking Cooper would be cut, which created the opening for Cleveland to strike.

And within months, new deals for Tyreek Hill, Deebo Samuel, DK Metcalf, Cooper Kupp, Terry McLaurin and A.J. Brown would make Cooper’s deal look reasonable.

Then, there’s the guy who threw Cooper the ball Sunday. Joe Flacco threw for 368 yards and three touchdowns in his fourth start for the Browns. The week he was signed, just before Thanksgiving, Berry asked his assistant GMs, Glenn Cook and Cat Raîche, to sort the veteran QB stack independently. He did the same. Berry wanted the group to be deliberate in finding the right third quarterback to add to the roster, with Dorian Thompson-Robinson starting, and get the bulk of the work done before making the Deshaun Watson injury news public.

Meanwhile, Berry had Stefanski do background work, and Stefanski went to Gary Kubiak, who had Flacco in Baltimore. Kubiak raved about him. That was part of the discussion when the personnel folks reconvened. By then, three quarterbacks were under consideration, and there was disagreement over who ranked second and third, but agreement that Flacco was first. The Browns then brought him in. Flacco moved well in his workout. He also showed himself to be a Nolan Ryan, i.e., He’ll be able to throw when he’s 75.

You know the rest. Cooper’s had back-to-back 1,000-yard seasons and is under contract for another year, and Flacco’s been a godsend. And, again, there are plenty of people who deserve to take a bow for all of this.

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Rudolph was the latest in a long line of backup quarterbacks to succeed right away this season :: Kareem Elgazzar/The Enquirer/USA TODAY Network

The Steelers’ win over the Bengals might have revealed something subtle. And to get ourselves there, let’s take what Pittsburgh coach Mike Tomlin said in his postgame press conference, after his team looked shockingly dominant in taking apart Cincinnati and rolling to a 34–11 win late Saturday afternoon.

Tomlin was addressing how his third-stringer, Mason Rudolph, looked in the game.

“He was Mason,” Tomlin said. “He’s got a belief in himself. He’s aggressive in his play style. I thought he did a really good job not displaying a lot of rust.”

The coach, of course, was referencing that Rudolph hadn’t started a game in more than two years. On the other hand, his counterpart Saturday, Cincinnati’s Jake Browning, was making his fifth consecutive start and riding a wave of momentum.

So how was it that Rudolph threw for 290 yards and a 124.0 passer rating, and the red-hot Browning was picked off three times in a blowout loss?

What if I told you the rust was the advantage?

In this, the Year of the Backup Quarterback, I’ve started to believe that what we saw in Pittsburgh on Saturday is, in fact, the norm. A new quarterback coming off the bench can, indeed, give his team a spark, and he has the advantage—especially if he’s been around for a while, and Rudolph’s in Year 6 in Pittsburgh—of a staff that knows how to play to his strengths without those strengths having been exposed to the opponent. Once a guy has played for a while, though, like Browning has, that advantage starts to evaporate.

So we have seen that Browning, Joshua Dobbs and Dorian Thompson-Robinson can look good in spurts, have people wondering whether the world just missed on them and then eventually come crashing back to earth. That is not to say, of course, that Browning or Dobbs can’t be someone’s long-term backup—they probably can be. It’s that if you ask more from them than to cover for a few games, you’ll find yourself in trouble.

Which is also to say that whether it’s in a week, or a couple weeks from now, this same clock will probably strike midnight on Rudolph.

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I’ve said it a few different places, and I’ll say it here now—don’t sleep on Jayden Daniels. LSU’s Heisman winner, a veteran of 55 college starts at two schools, was probably considered a Day 3 pick three months ago. Now, I don’t know whether I’d call him a lock to go in the top 10, but I certainly wouldn’t bet against him landing in that range, or higher.

And that was only cemented Sunday morning, when I texted a handful of high-level scouts to get their take on the 23-year-old veteran of five college seasons.

The premise was one I got from one of the ace producers over at NBC Sports Boston. He wanted to know, for our pregame show, whether Daniels had a chance, in the eyes of NFL teams, to catch North Carolina’s Drake Maye as the second quarterback in the draft class of 2024. For a while now the presumption has been that USC’s Caleb Williams would be the first pick in the draft, and Maye would go second. Has Daniels shaken that up?

Depends who you ask.

“It might be going in the opposite direction,” one AFC exec texted me. “Jayden is pulling away from Drake for me. … He makes every throw, his deep accuracy is rare, he’s explosive as a runner but is a pocket passer. It’s like [Deshaun Watson].”

Another AFC exec agreed that there’s “not much“ separation between the two, though they’re “different types of players.” And an NFC exec agreed that the gap is “not big anymore. Jayden’s going to have to go to a team that will build around his skill set, like [Anthony] Richardson with the Colts. But he’s gonna go early.”

One AFC scout dissented from that sentiment, texting, “I think Drake has a Pro Bowl ceiling. His floor is Dak [Prescott, before this MVP month] and his ceiling is [Justin] Herbert. I had Jayden as a quality backup with the ceiling of a system starter, more in-line with the Jimmy [Garoppolo] or Kirk Cousins range. … I like him, his athleticism adds value. I just didn’t love him as a passer.”

Of course, we’ll all know more a few months from now, after these teams get to dig in some more and really get to learn about these kids. But already, the quarterback class looks like it’s strong at the top, has some depth, and should be a really fun one for all of us to dig into.

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The Chiefs’ offense might simply not be good enough this time around. My barometer for Kansas City, because of how much I think of them, has been the Patriots’ dynasty. So for the bulk of this year, I viewed them like one of those old Tom Brady–led New England teams—yeah, they haven’t looked great, but in the end, they’re going win their division and be there at the end, giving them the leeway to spend the season working the kinks out.

It’s what they did last year. It’s what the Patriots always used to do.

But after Monday’s loss to Las Vegas, I’m drawing another New England comparison here—specifically to the 2006 team.

That was Brady’s seventh year, and it was the year that Bill Belichick and Scott Pioli went a step too far in leaning on their quarterback. Confident he could make it work with less at the skill spots, and with Brady on a bigger contract (than he had been), New England held its investments on defense and along the offensive line, and cut corners at the skill positions, letting David Givens go in free agency, then trading Deion Branch right after Week 1.

It didn’t work. The receiver problem incensed Brady, caught up to the Patriots at the end of the AFC title game and probably cost them a title. In the months to follow, Belichick and Pioli corrected it by trading for Randy Moss and Wes Welker, and signing Donté Stallworth, and the Patriots didn’t lose again until the following February.

This is Mahomes’s seventh year. Tyreek Hill was traded a year and a half ago, after the Chiefs went on a spending spree to fix the offensive line. Travis Kelce, who’s now 34, doesn’t look the same this year, be it because of injury or age (and I texted, during the game, with a couple coaches who feel that way). They’ve added draft picks, in Skyy Moore and Rashee Rice, and Rice looks like a real player. They’ve added pieces, in the linemen and Isiah Pacheco, that should allow them to lean on the run game.

But they aren’t as tough to deal with as they used to be.

“Kelce has looked banged up,” one AFC exec texted. “I think they are running into a situation where their ground game would help the offense explode, but they are used to going through the QB first. The receiver room is not as talented as years past, but they have enough explosive playmakers—when they run the ball.”

So maybe running the offense through Pacheco more is the answer. Maybe Kelce will get healthier and find a spark. Maybe Mahomes will show, again, he can carry a heavier burden.

I just don’t think it’s the sure thing I might have a few weeks ago.

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There are a lot of outcomes still on the table in the NFC South. The Buccaneers have looked like the best team of late and, at 8–7, they have the best record, too. But the Saints and Falcons are right there with them, at 7–8, and a New Orleans win next week could seriously muddy things up.

With that established, we have a good idea of who two of those teams are. Even with new quarterbacks, the Bucs and Saints have veteran groups, full of guys who’ve been with those teams forever.

The Falcons are the enigma. They’ve hit on draft picks. They’ve hit on free agents. They’ve built strength along the lines of scrimmage and sure look like a rising young team in a lot of ways. But the plan to tread water at quarterback has not gone the way Arthur Smith and Terry Fontenot drew it up, which led to Taylor Heinicke’s reinsertion into the lineup Sunday.

And, yet, in a weird way, Heinicke being back in there showed where the ceiling for this team is, how the group is still ascending, and why Arthur Blank is trending toward giving Smith and Fontenot another year.

The Falcons throttled the Colts 29–10, but it wasn’t just that. It was how the young nucleus drove the win, and in particular how Bijan Robinson, Kyle Pitts and Drake London led the way.

“There’s a reason we drafted all of those guys top 10,” Heinicke said, over the phone from the locker room. “They’re all really good playmakers. In my mind, coming into the game, it was, Let’s play fast and I’m going to get the ball out of my hand and give it to those guys. Let them do what they want with it. That’s why we got them.”

So that part, for the GM and coach both in their third year, is there.

And the quarterback shuffle also showed that the culture is, too. Smith told Heinicke and displaced starter Desmond Ridder of his decision to make the switch. The first time Smith did this, about a month ago, the quarterbacks talked it through, with Heinicke flat-out saying to Ridder, We can’t let this get between us. Ridder then tried to do what Heinicke had done for him as a backup—and he repeated it this week.

Now, that Heinicke was efficient and threw for 229 yards and a 99.2 rating won’t make or break the guys in charge. But that he was in position to play well, because he had good players around him, and the right sort of environment, does count for something.

“It’s huge,” Heinicke says. “You don’t want those toxic quarterback rooms. We have a great quarterback room. We’ve pushed each other since OTAs and training camp. … It kind of is what it is. We can’t control it. Let’s be there for each other. I told him back then, you’re going to get another shot, just stay ready. We’ve done a great job. The fact that our quarterback room is so close? We just want to win.”

And I think the Falcons are closer to that than you might think.

If the other two South teams stumble, I’d bet more people will notice it, too.

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We learned Sunday that Saleh will be back in 2024 :: Vincent Carchietta/USA TODAY Sports

I don’t mind whatsoever the Jets bringing the band back together. On the morning of Sept. 11, I was pretty convinced that Robert Saleh’s group was on the verge of a very big year—I had the Jets finishing second to the Bills in the AFC East and making it to the conference title game.

That night, Aaron Rodgers went down. Soon thereafter, a thin offensive line unraveled under the weight of injury. Which meant the team’s hope that it could give Zach Wilson the redshirt year he needed to turn his career around evaporated, and his shortcomings were ripped wide open with a depleted front that couldn’t keep him off his back. At that point, no amount of defense or Garrett Wilson could stop the downward spiral.

That it’s so easily explainable, to me, is why running 2023 back in ’24 is logical.

Owner Woody Johnson made the decision to do just that official Sunday morning, before the Jets raced to a 27–7 lead early, then had to come from behind late to beat the Commanders 30–28.

“Woody has got a tremendous standard, like we all do,” Saleh told me, riding home Sunday. “He’s as frustrated as all of us. He understands the game of football as good as any owner I’ve been around. He understands what’s been happening, and he’s communicating on a day-to-day basis and challenging us to find different ways to win. Just his overall communication has been great. He’s been awesome.”

A lot of that communication, of late, has been to take stock of what’s gone wrong this year—so it won’t happen again with Rodgers back in the lineup in 2024. Of course, that they’ve been talking about these things was a pretty good tell that this is the way Johnson’s been leaning for a while.

As for what might change? We’ll have a story on that, with more from Saleh, up on the site later on Tuesday.

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We’re almost to the finish line. And we have a lot to hit on. So let’s get to all that in this week’s quick-hitters to close out the holiday weekend …

• One thing working in the favor of Raiders interim coach Antonio Pierce getting the job full-time in a few weeks—the personal experience of owner Mark Davis. Word has circulated over the past couple months that Davis regretted not giving Rich Bisaccia a full shot after the 2021 interim coach got the Raiders to the playoffs, and nearly knocked off the eventual AFC champion Bengals in the wild-card round. Bisaccia steadied a team rocked by the situations surrounding Jon Gruden, Henry Ruggs III and Damon Arnette. And if Davis is seeing similar qualities in Pierce, it’d hardly be surprising to see him remove the interim tag from Pierce’s title.

• While we’re there, it’s fair to think defensive coordinator Patrick Graham should be a viable candidate for the job, too. His defense has allowed just over 15 points per game over the seven that Pierce has been in charge. He’s done it with the team 31st in the NFL in cap space allotted to defensive players. On Monday, his unit more or less single-handedly won the game—scoring twice (first on a Bilal Nichols fumble recovery, then on a Jack Jones pick-six), and holding Patrick Mahomes (235 yards, TD, INT) and Travis Kelce (five catches, 44 yards) in check. So, as a guy who’s interviewed for jobs before, it’d stand to reason that Graham would get a look from Davis.

• The Patriots most certainly haven’t quit on Bill Belichick. But given the way Bailey Zappe has sparked the offense, it’s certainly fair to wonder whether the players had given up on Mac Jones. Jones’s string of bleep-ups in games coincided with similar plays showing up in practice. And while Zappe’s no world-beater, the players at least know what to expect when he’s in there. It really showed in Sunday night’s win in Denver, particularly on the third-and-3, back-shoulder throw to DeVante Parker that put the Patriots’ game-winning drive in motion with less than a minute left.

• Based on the enormity of the rebuild they undertook, I don’t know that what the Bears have gotten from Matt Eberflus and Ryan Poles this year is far off what you’d expect—a cleaning out in Year 1, and some struggles early in Year 2, with the team catching stride later in the season. The wild card here would be team president Kevin Warren, who inherited Eberflus and Poles, and whether he feels strongly about bringing in his own guys.

• That was an ugly win by the Bills, but those were the games they were losing earlier in the year. There’s a maturity it takes to get one on a night when you don’t have your A game. And the Bills showed that maturity Saturday. Now, if they can only get a Baltimore win over the Dolphins …

• Bryce Young was better Sunday (and DJ Chark Jr., for what it’s worth, was excellent), but he still misses way too many open throws. One thing I’ve noticed with the Panthers’ quarterback is that he’s really had trouble throwing from bad body positions.

• I still think C.J. Stroud’s the Offensive Rookie of the Year, but man is Puka Nacua making this harder than I thought anyone could a month ago.

• Speaking of Stroud, the Texans could really use him now. But it’s good for the sport that the team is being judicious in bringing him back from a concussion.

• I could see this Seahawks team taking someone out in the wild-card round. I could also see, pretty easily, Seattle missing the playoffs. But Geno Smith gutted it out, and made some big-league throws down the stretch to beat the Titans—maybe none bigger than a rope he fired off to Jaxon Smith-Njigba to convert a third-and-14 on the game-winning drive.

• Merry Christmas, everyone! We’ve got a great couple of weeks ahead.