Week 13 NFL Takeaways: Eagles’ Run Game Is More Than Just Saquon Barkley

While the MVP candidate is clearly the engine, other players are doing their part. Plus, how the Commanders and Seahawks have rebounded from skids, the Bengals are 4–8, the Bills are AFC East champs again and more.

Barkley topped 100 yards rushing for the eight time in 12 games as an Eagle / Tommy Gilligan-Imagn Images

Jump to a topic

1. Philadelphia Eagles
2. Washington Commanders
3. Seattle Seahawks
4. Los Angeles Chargers
5. Cincinnati Bengals
6. Chicago Bears
7. NFC North roundup
8. Buffalo Bills
9. ​​Hit on Trevor Lawrence
10. Quick-hitters

Week 13 has one game left, and we’re here for you, recapping the weekend, and setting up Week 14 (which has an awesome Thursday nighter) ahead. As we’ve been doing all season, we’ll publish the takeaways Sunday and update them live through Monday morning. So come back again if not all 10 are here yet …

Philadelphia Eagles

The Philadelphia Eagles keep coming, behind a powerful run game that’s more than just Saquon Barkley. And the moment of clarity on that came with 9:21 left in Baltimore on Sunday, with the ball sitting at the 50-yard line and Philly in first-and-10, up 14–12, with a chance to extend the lead.

Barkley over left tackle, 14 yards. Jalen Hurts on a keep over right guard, 11 yards. Barkley back over right tackle, 25 yards, touchdown.

The sequence did more than just provide this interconference showdown with some drama. It stood for what the Eagles have forever stood for—and proved to be just what they were looking for as, over the past couple of months, they sought their identity for 2024.

“You’re getting a full effort from everybody,” coach Nick Sirianni told me, as he drove back from the office, after returning from Baltimore with a 24–19 win. “Saquon’s gonna get talked about a ton and rightfully so, but the tight ends are blocking well. I thought [tight end] C.J. [Uzomah] came through the line of scrimmage, had some really good pulls, and we got some good plays on that. We have receivers running off downfield, getting blocks downfield—there’s really a good one with Parris Campbell and Jahan Dotson doing their part to help Saquon score that touchdown.

“Just a group effort with the entire run game.”

So yes, Barkley’s the story. He hit over 100 yards from scrimmage again on Sunday, which makes that 10 times in 12 weeks he’s gotten there. He’s got a shot at Eric Dickerson’s single-season rushing record (2,105), and Chris Johnson’s scrimmage yards record (2,509). He’s amazing, and deserves all this after a tumultuous six-year start to his career as a New York Giant.

But the reality is he’s just the engine of a truck that seems to be running the league over on a weekly basis. And just as that truck ran the Baltimore Ravens over for the aforementioned touchdown, it blasted through Baltimore to finish the game on the Eagles’ next possession. Philly ran the ball 10 consecutive times on the Ravens, grinding out two first downs and tearing five minutes off the clock, leaving Lamar Jackson with just 1:03 to work with when he got the ball back down 12. Tyler Steen came in as a sixth lineman in spots. Philly hid nothing.

It was, essentially, Here it comes, try to stop it.

“You have to fight and claw for everything you get against that team,” Sirianni says. “I mean, they are tough, they’re a tough team, it’s a really good run defense. But yeah, the defense makes a stop, we have the ball, and we’re not quite in range yet, to go up 12. We wanted to score a touchdown, they held us to a field goal. But we took five minutes off the clock.”

And in finishing off the Ravens to score their eighth straight win, the Eagles also brought the vision Sirianni and his staff, including coordinator Kellen Moore, cooked up during the Week 5 bye to full form—it was back then, through a lot reflection and one-on-one talks between Moore and Hurts, that the Eagles made the call to lean on Barkley, the run game and the play-action game off it (A.J. Brown and DeVonta Smith were beat up at the time).

Turns out that, even at 2–2, they knew what they were doing.

“The panic from anyone was all on the outside,” Sirianni says. “What an overreaction of the NFL media.”

Sirianni then laughs, “No offense, but what a crazy overreaction. We’re 2–2. And communication’s key to our organization; we make a key of that always. We also make it a key not to listen, when people are telling us how s---y we are or how good we are, we don’t listen, we just do what we need to do to get better, and that’s what that week was for. …

“People get so wrapped up in the scheme, because it’s an easy thing to look at—look at this guy and how they drew this up and did that. At the end of the day, football is about tackling, it’s about getting off blocks, it’s about beating blocks, it’s about blocking, it’s about catching the football, it’s about fundamentals.”

And these are things, now, that Philly’s doing better than just about anyone else.

Don’t believe it? Ask Barkley. It’s all unfolding before his eyes.

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Washington Commanders

The Washington Commanders got right Sunday, in large part because of their emphasis on the six days before their game against the Tennessee Titans. Washington came into the week riding a three-game losing streak that had some people wondering whether Jayden Daniels had hit a rookie wall, and others questioning whether offensive coordinator Kliff Kingsbury had a counterpunch for what defenses were throwing at him. These, of course, are all in-the-moment story lines that the rest of us on the outside spend (waste?) time ruminating and opining on.

On the inside? The Commanders stuck to the script.

“Before the season, everyone thought we were going to be terrible,” says veteran tight end Zach Ertz, who I spoke to after he had one of Washington’s six touchdowns Sunday. “When we were 7–2, everyone was saying we were great. Then when we were 0–3 the past three weeks, everyone said we were terrible again. It’s really about us at the end of the day. The emphasis on practice is something that I so much believe in. I love practicing. I love the emphasis, truly getting better on the grass. I really can’t say enough good things about it."

In other words, Dan Quinn, Kingsbury and Daniels simply stayed the course when others might’ve veered. And Sunday’s 42–19 rout of Tennessee showed the value in that.

Daniels, another week removed from his rib injury, finished 25-of-30 for 206 yards, three touchdowns, a pick and a 114.7 rating. But he was just the sidecar to a dominant Commanders run game that busted loose for 267 yards on 45 carries. Meanwhile, Quinn’s defense held the Titans to 245 yards, many of them accumulated after the game was out of hand. The score was 28–0 before the game’s 20-minute mark, and never got closer than 28–13.

That part was significant in itself, proving to Ertz that the energy the Commanders had played with earlier in the year was back.

“It felt great to go up 14–0 on this team—it really just set this tempo for the game,” Ertz says. “When you’re in those ruts, you’re in those holes, it takes guys like Bobby Wagner, myself, that have put in a lot of time to make sure guys don’t start pressing and trying to do too much. We are a good team. We have talent on this team. Guys just need to be themselves. I felt like we got back to the basics this week, really had a great week of practice. I really felt like it set the tempo for the game.”

And it wasn’t just starting the game fast, it was starting individual series fast too, where (and in particular with a rookie quarterback) winning on first and second down consistently meant creating manageable down-and-distance spots for Daniels.

“Over the last two weeks in particular, against the Eagles and the Cowboys, we were just behind the sticks consistently,” Ertz says. “It’s too hard in this league to be consistent and successful when that’s the situation you’re presented with. We played more like ourselves today, regardless of who we were playing against, we were playing like ourselves.”

So the energy was back, the details were back, and in turn so were the Commanders.

The rest of the schedule is manageable, too, for what it’s worth. Next week, finally, Washington gets its bye week. After that, the Commanders only face one team with a winning record over the season’s last four weeks.

Which is to say a lot of things are lining up for them.

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The Seahawks are back in sole possession of first place in the NFC West. / Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images

Seattle Seahawks

The Seattle Seahawks got satisfaction for a couple of their stars Sunday, and affirmation on where the team is headed. And the story on the latter really starts a few weeks back, when Seattle was on its bye, and had hit a real rough patch in Mike Macdonald’s first year, losing five of six after a 3–0 start.

Clearly, the team and its 37-year-old coach needed to regroup, and even reset a little.

So Macdonald gave everyone a real chance to do both.

Generally, players have exit meetings at the end of the season with their coaches. These meetings are usually frank and honest, and designed to give a player not just a review of where he stands, but also a roadmap to get to where a team sees his future. So, Macdonald thought, why not just do that in-season, rather than wait until season’s end.

“We were really able to see where we’d been at individually throughout the year so far, and what expectations were coming back out of the bye week,” veteran defensive lineman Leonard Williams told me after the game. “We talked about treating each game going forward as if we’re already in the playoffs. I think just going into it with a new mindset, treating each game as an entire situation to win, we’ve just been playing with a lot more urgency.”

The results have followed—after being blown out by the Buffalo Bills, and losing a heartbreaker to the Los Angeles Rams right before the bye, Seattle dispatched the San Francisco 49ers, Arizona Cardinals and, Sunday, the New York Jets in Jersey. And the win over the Jets brought the aforementioned satisfaction as a bonus.

For both Geno Smith and Leonard Williams, there was, admittedly, a little extra about this one. Smith was drafted by the Jets in the second round of the 2013 draft, while Williams was picked with the No. 6 pick two years later. Sunday was the first time either have returned to the Meadowlands with an opposing team to face the Jets (both spent time with the New York Giants after starting their careers with the Jets, and Smith faced the Giants last season), and there was an unspoken motivation the two carried with them, but didn’t really mention to one another until this week.

“We tried to treat it like [another] game,” Williams says. “They were just the next opponent in our way. During the game, that was the only time me and him said something to each other. It was like, Hey, we deserve this one. It was real short and sweet. That’s the motivation we needed today."

Both channeled it well.

Smith finished with more yards (206 to 185) and a better passer rating (94.3 to 73.1) than Jets quarterback Aaron Rodgers. And Williams exploded for two sacks, three tackles for loss and an interception he took back 92 yards for his first touchdown at any level of football.

“Mike just called a great play,” Williams says. “We had a technique where two interior D-linemen are supposed to rush the guard and the center. That gives them the idea that we’re rushing. Then, last second, we pop out. It’s a late disguise, late pop-out that the quarterback isn’t expecting. I just happened to be right there in the crossing route. The ball was in arm’s reach, so I reached out and poked it. I got a good bounce, and it came right to me.

“The thing that got me most excited was seeing all my guys, the whole cavalry running down the field. They were more excited than me to get into the end zone.”

But Williams was pretty excited in his own right. The Seahawks were, too, and with good reason after their third consecutive win, and sole possession of first in the NFC West.

Even better, the coaching staff’s blueprint for the players is now crystal clear in a lot of ways, and was very much so in those meetings, which mirrored how Macdonald is handling other important parts of his operation. In training camp, for example, the new staff eschewed the loud music that played under Pete Carroll and scheduled longer practices where corrections can be made on the field, and not wait until everyone is back in the classroom.

“It’s just that attention to detail,” Williams says. “He’s super detail-oriented, super brainy. The way he thinks of the game is very calculated.”

And through 12 games, it’s adding up to a lot of good things.

If things go according to plan, they’ll only get better from here.

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Los Angeles Chargers

One area where Jim Harbaugh and his staff deserve a nice little hat tip: talent development. It showed up Sunday in the Los Angeles Chargers’ 17–13 win over the Atlanta Falcons, and on one play in particular where the coaching, scheming and playing all lined up.

This one came with less than two minutes left in the third quarter, the Falcons clinging to a 10–9 lead and going for it on a fourth-and-5 from the Chargers’ 40. The snap before, the Chargers sent a zero blitz at Kirk Cousins to generate an incompletion. So on fourth down, DC Jesse Minter had a call that was married up with that one, to show the zero-blitz look again, before backing off it and trapping the flat to take away a hurried throw.

It was part of a bigger effort to consistently show Cousins one thing and give him another. On this one, he fell into the trap. As he threw, cornerback Tarheeb Still, sitting back, broke on a ball thrown to outside receiver Darnell Mooney, which he was freed up to do with Ja’Sir Taylor dropping to cover the slot after showing blitz. And from there, Still had such a head of steam that the 60 yards he had to cover to score came as simple as a wind sprint.

“Ball came out, I just made a play on the ball,” Still told me postgame. “That was really my teammates learning to communicate it, and I was just there to make a play.”

More than just that, it was Minter having his players ready to do this stuff in his first year as an NFL play-caller, and Harbaugh and the staff bringing in a ton of young guys capable of adapting, quickly, to the rigors of pro football.

You can take Still’s rookie class and isolate it for proof. Right tackle Joe Alt, the fifth pick in the draft, is already operating like a Pro Bowler, to give the Chargers high-end bookends on the offensive line. Second-rounder Ladd McConkey, stepping into the considerably-well-sized shoes of Keenan Allen and Mike Williams at receiver, had another nine catches for 117 yards Sunday. And Still’s not the only rookie corner who’s gotten the job done—Cam Hart started from Weeks 6 to 11, before missing the past two weeks with an ankle injury.

As Still sees it, there’s a common thread tying the draft class together, and it’s the same thing that, really, ties the whole roster together and ties Harbaugh to his players as well.

“All of us are competitors in L.A. Competitors are welcome here,” Still says. “Guys take pride in that. We are competitive. Coaches do a good job of coaching us up and preparing us to get us ready. It’s a big shoutout to the coaches, what the coaches do, they do a great job preparing us, and we do a great job executing. It all works hand in hand.”

And that’s part of what’s pretty exciting about where the Chargers are headed under Harbaugh, with a showdown against the Kansas City Chiefs set for next Sunday night at Arrowhead. You have veterans such as Justin Herbert and Joey Bosa and Derwin James and Khalil Mack, who are dutifully chugging along, and then you have guys, like Still, who should keep getting better.

All of it showed up with the team coming off an emotional loss to Harbaugh’s brother last Monday, in how they locked back in with the 10 a.m. Pacific start on the other side of the country in Atlanta on Sunday. As they’d expect it to keep showing up going forward.

“We just came back to practice and attacked it,” Still says. “Nobody really wanted to be the guy moping around or why me or poor me. We didn’t really want that. We came to practice, attacked practice and played hard. Guys knew that we had to get back on track, get back on the winning side of things. Everyone took that serious. Nobody made excuses.”

As a result, they needed none on this Sunday, with an eighth win now under their collective belt—and the promise of so much more ahead.

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Cincinnati Bengals

It feels like the position that Joe Burrow is in right now should be a wakeup call for the Cincinnati Bengals. In case you missed it—and you might have, since Cincinnati is 4–8—Joe Burrow has been putting up MVP-level numbers of late. His passer rating has topped 100 in eight of 12 games. He’s thrown for 1,093 yards in Cincinnati’s past three games. He’s been in shootout after shootout. He’s been knocked around. And he’s still standing.

Just knowing what I know about Burrow, he doesn’t care about any of that—all he cares about is the team’s record.

Meanwhile, the Bengals said goodbye over the past few offseasons to safety Jessie Bates III, defensive tackle D.J. Reader and tailback Joe Mixon; and went through tumultuous times with receivers Ja’Marr Chase and Tee Higgins, as well as edge rusher Trey Hendrickson—starting all the way back in the spring—over contracts, which had an impact on how much all those guys were around between April and August.

Burrow has grit his teeth and dealt with it, as Bates, Mixon and, most recently, Reader have come alive in new spots. He’s helped to develop the team’s young backs and receivers. And with the season approaching its final stretch, the Bengals are flailing to stay alive.

I don’t think any Burrow-quarterbacked team should be 4–8. And in Sunday’s loss to the first-place Pittsburgh Steelers, watching the 27-year-old flailing to keep up with a Pittsburgh team that has a good, but not great, offense, and a really great defense, it was pretty clear to anyone watching that there’s a lot on Burrow to bail the team out on a weekly basis.

So I was looking for a way to best illustrate it, and I came across this stat on X, courtesy of Bengals play-by-play man Dan Hoard, via local news anchor Charlie Clifford … Tom Brady lost only four starts over the course of his career when his team scored 33 or more points—Burrow’s lost four such games this season alone.

Now, because of his contract, things were always going to be a little more challenging for the Bengals from a roster-building standpoint. But the Chiefs, Bills and Ravens have navigated those challenges with their star quarterbacks without hitting this sort of roadblock. And I’d say that means this offseason is going to be on the Bengals to right a lot of the wrongs that cropped up this year.

To be clear, I think a lot of the right people are in place. Zac Taylor’s done a great job over six years, and Duke Tobin’s been, on balance, really good in a couple of decades as the team’s scouting chief. But as Burrow said himself a ways back, the Bengals are in a championship window as long as the quarterback is wearing their stripes. And to me, that should create a mandate to compete at that level in every area of the organization, starting with the investment that’s necessary to get there every year.

So here’s hoping you see the Bengals go a little further to make sure their players are signed and their roster is complete, and that Burrow is in a good spot where he doesn’t have to put on the cape every week to play at that level.

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The Bears became the third team to fire a head coach this season, letting Eberflus go after a Thanksgiving loss / Mark J. Rebilas-Imagn Images

Chicago Bears

The Chicago Bears need a culture makeover more than they need an offensive guru. First, I’ll say that, really, this mess isn’t on new-ish team president Kevin Warren or general manager Ryan Poles. It was this way well—well—before they arrived in Chicago. Now, it’s their job to make sure, one way or the other, it isn’t that way long after they’re gone.

The way Matt Eberflus’s firing went down is the perfect example of why the franchise needs a real agent of change, rather than just a football strategist.

There was enough evidence Thursday to know that, regardless of how the Bears pulled the plug (whether it was that night, over the weekend or in January), that they were going to pull the plug had become a forgone conclusion. The messy end to what had been a gutsy comeback in Detroit only mirrored close losses to the Commanders, Green Bay Packers and Minnesota Vikings, with a game-management element tied to last-minute devastation.

After the loss to the Vikings in Week 12, Eberflus apologized to the team for coaching missteps down the stretch. But there was no such mea culpa Thursday, and the world saw how that one went down. Ball at Detroit 35 and snapped at 36 seconds, Bears down 23–20 with a timeout left, Caleb Williams took a six-yard sack at the hands of Za’Darius Smith. From there, the offense got on the ball and, inexplicably, ran the clock down to six seconds before snapping it, creating an all-or-nothing situation, taking a game-tying field goal off the table.

That was all bad enough, and we don’t need to relitigate it days later. The real death knell for Eberflus was the aftermath. The locker room scene postgame was ugly, with captain Jaylon Johnson one of the louder voices—and the players’ feelings reflected in Keenan Allen’s public comments, that the guys between the lines had done all they could to win.

Whether you believe the staff failed them or not, Eberflus didn’t take accountability in the moment with the players, nor did it happen in his postgame press conference or morning-after Zoom call with local reporters. And that’s the kind of thing that’s tough to come back from as a coach, especially since it was part of a larger pattern, dating back to the Hail Mary loss in D.C.

And while, yes, Williams had responsibility in the Detroit debacle, he’s a rookie, and it’s a coach and his staff’s job to know what he is and isn’t capable of in the moment. Which makes it inexcusable that they flew back to Chicago with that timeout in their pocket.

Anyway, that wasn’t the end of it. Lots of folks who were in the locker room postgame had a good idea it was over for Eberflus, and that ownership and the front office drew out his firing through two extra press sessions and a full morning’s work for the staff isn’t a great look either. Eberflus and his assistants went through their day-after routine on Friday, with the staff set to leave for a weekend off at noon CT. It wasn’t until 11 a.m. CT that Eberflus called the meeting to tell his staff he was out, and Thomas Brown would replace him as interim coach.

If that part sounds familiar, remember, it was just two and a half weeks earlier that the firing of OC Shane Waldron was handled similarly—with Waldron going through a full Monday before being replaced by Brown on the Tuesday after a loss to New England.

Saying all this stuff isn’t related is, plainly, whistling by a graveyard that George Halas isn’t going to rise up to save his proud old franchise. Lovie Smith was the last coach to post consecutive winning seasons in Chicago, and that was two decades ago. The last guy to do it three years in a row was Mike Ditka. And right now, the rest of the NFC North is a collective 30–6, and each of the other three teams has a relatively young coach and healthy quarterback situation.

So obsess over Williams and Williams alone, if that’s what you need to do. Worry about building an offense rather than a team, if you want. If I were the Bears, I’d go the other way, and do what that franchise has needed to do for a generation, and empower someone who’ll change the place. Make it Bill Belichick, or Mike Vrabel, or Aaron Glenn, or someone who’ll fix not just the problems we saw Thursday, but also the ones that have been around forever.

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NFC North roundup

While we’re on the NFC North, the Detroit Lions-Green Bay Packers game this week should be electric. That one’s on Thursday, and both teams will have a full week ramp-up to it—since each played on Thanksgiving. It’s the first in a series of three games (preceding Packers at Vikings in Week 17, and Vikings at Lions in Week 18) pitting the iron of the NFC North against one another down the stretch, with two games separating the three teams going into Week 13.

I think we learned a little something about each of them in Week 12.

For the Lions, it was about winning in a different way. They’d played two down-to-the-wire games in two months, and hadn’t had to win a clunker in a while. And after a flying start—the Lions outgained the Bears 279 to 53 in the first half, forced three-and-outs on Chicago’s first four possessions and had the ball for nearly 23 of the first 30 minutes—the Lions weirdly hit a ditch, and opened the door for the Bears to roar back from a 16–0 deficit after the break.

There’s a lot for Detroit to clean up, of course, in the aftermath. But there were two very real positives the Lions can build off moving forward. First, they had to be incredibly resourceful on defense, with guys on that side seemingly going down every other play and the line taking the brunt of it. Three of four starters up front, plus key reserve Levi Onwuzurike, were nicked up during the game. Second, they essentially had to end the game twice.

The first was on a fourth-and-14 after a shaky pass interference call on a heave of a throw from Williams bailed out the Bears. The second one, of course, Chicago helped out.

“Whatever you want to call that PI call at the end on the prayer he threw up—we had to win twice,” Lions DT D.J. Reader told me. “We went out there and got it done. Just resilient, no matter what happens, no matter what’s thrown at us, we’re going to go out there and get it done. We fully believe in ourselves.”

And they should.

Hours later, the Packers showed where they are, with gutsy decisions to go get Jeff Hafley to run the defense (and let Joe Barry go), and add Josh Jacobs and Xavier McKinney to the offense and defense, respectively (while letting homegrown guys Aaron Jones and Darnell Savage Jr. go) paying off in giving the roster more ways to win. It doesn’t need to be Jordan Love lighting up the skies every time out—though it was Love against the Dolphins coming through with 274 yards and a 129.2 rating.

Meanwhile, the Vikings, and Sam Darnold in particular, showed a ton of resilience in battling back from a 19–6 deficit late in the third quarter against the Cardinals. To that point, Darnold was 9-of-15 for 89 yards, going 1-of-6 to start the third quarter and leaving the home crowd audibly restless. Then, he did what he’s done all year, fighting through to go 12-of-16 for 146 yards and two scores the rest of the way.

So we get a big one Thursday, with two more big ones to come in January, to shape how things finish up in what’s become football’s best division.

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Allen and the Bills have now won five consecutive division titles. / Mark Konezny-Imagn Images

Buffalo Bills

The Buffalo Bills clinched their fifth consecutive AFC East title Sunday, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. No, the 49ers didn’t have Nick Bosa or Trent Williams. Christian McCaffrey went down early on in this one, and Brock Purdy was just coming off his own throwing-shoulder injury, so it’s not like this was the old San Francisco machine that the Bills were toppling.

Still, 35–10 is 35–10.

And 220 rushing yards on a sloppy track, when everyone knows you’re running it, is pretty impressive, too. The numbers are juiced a little by a 65-yard touchdown jaunt by James Cook in the second quarter that put the Bills up 14–3—Buffalo’s lead stayed in double-digits from that point on on—but if you subtract it, and three Mitchell Trubisky kneeldowns, you’re still at 155 yards on 34 carries (4.6 yards per rush).

Above all of the particulars, though, is that the Bills are at this point as a franchise. Prior to 2020, the New England Patriots owned the AFC East, winning it 17 times in 19 years, and in the last 11 of those years in a row. The idea of someone else grabbing the division by the throat the way the Patriots had seemed pretty unlikely.

Also, at that point, going into 2020, with Tom Brady leaving the Patriots, the other teams in the division were in a similar spot to the Bills—having drafted quarterbacks (Sam Darnold with the New York Jets, Tua Tagovailoa with the Miami Dolphins), and hired coaches (Adam Gase in New York, Brian Flores in Miami) very recently. The next year, the Patriots would draft Mac Jones. And of the six coaches/quarterbacks for those teams, just one, Tagovailoa, is left standing.

Meanwhile, Buffalo replaced veterans in the secondary, offensive line and receiving core, got younger all over the place as a result this year, and just won its fifth division title in a row, proving, again, that it has replaced New England as the division’s measuring stick.

So take a bow, Sean McDermott and Brandon Beane. You’ve done a lot of good for one of the NFL’s most passionate fan bases. And the best may be yet to come.

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​​Hit on Trevor Lawrence

Texans LB Azeez Al-Ashaair probably deserves whatever punishment the league is going to give him for his vicious hit on Trevor Lawrence. For those who didn’t see it, in Sunday’s Jacksonville Jaguars–Houston Texans game, Lawrence went into a slide to finish what wound up being a six-yard run. While he was already well into the slide, Al-Ashaair launched himself into Lawrence, connecting above the neck and slamming his head off the turf. Lawrence laid motionless for a few seconds, briefly went into the fencing posture, then was carted off by Jags officials.

As soon as Al-Ashaair connected, as you’d imagine, Jaguars players burst to Lawrence’s defense. Some were on the field. Some came off the bench. Cornerback Jarrian Jones was part of the latter group and got ejected for throwing a punch at a Texans player.

“It was a dirty hit,” said veteran tight end Evan Engram, who got in Al-Shaair’s face shortly after the hit. “Obviously those hits are always in question. Trevor was going down, and I saw it out of my peripheral. I got a pretty clear view of it, and in that moment, just [reacted on] instincts. It just didn’t feel like a clean hit, so just go stick up for my quarterback.

“I mean, I saw him sliding and then I saw the hit, and then just, honestly, it just took over. I just knew it was wrong. It was just a dirty play, and you stick up for your guys.”

I’m a little torn here in that I think the Jags’ players did the right thing, but, I’d guess, that Al-Ashaair didn’t have any ill intent. It’s a brutal game, and sometimes things happen.

Here’s hoping, then, that Lawrence is all right, and takes all the time he needs to get healthy.

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Quick-hitters

We’re wrapping up for the week, and that means getting you your first quick-hitting takeaways for the month of December …

• The New York Giants should go with Drew Lock the rest of the season.

• I can’t really come up with a logical explanation on the Justin Tucker thing, other than maybe the Baltimore Ravens’ kicker is just getting old.

• The Jets clinched a ninth consecutive losing season Sunday, and Aaron Rodgers is now at three in a row himself. Asked whether he’s contemplating a quarterback change, interim coach Jeff Ulbich answered, “Not as of today.” Which would qualify as a pretty shocking answer, had I told you two months ago that Ulbrich would say that on Dec. 1.

• Awful seeing Taysom Hill, always a fun-loving guy and a great story, go down on Sunday.

• Mike Tomlin bluntly saying George Pickens “has just got to grow up” is a pretty good illustration of why he fell to the 52nd pick in the 2022 draft, even with all that ability. He had his problems with unsportsmanlike conduct this time, in the Steelers’ win.

• Hollywood Brown should be back on the practice field with the Chiefs  during Week 15 or 16, and back on the game field either in Week 17 (against the Steelers) or Week 18 (Denver Broncos). Kansas City had big plans for him and Xavier Worthy before Brown got hurt during the preseason. We’ll see whether it’s too late to execute them now.

• The finish to Las Vegas Raiders’ loss to the Chiefs on Black Friday won’t help Antonio Pierce’s case for keeping his job. But Pierce has managed to keep his players motivated, and the young guys developing. Vegas, for what it’s worth, has gone from the NFL’s third-oldest roster to its sixth-youngest in a year’s time.

• Jared Verse keeps showing up in big spots for the Rams.

• Because the Dallas Cowboys are so average, the emergence of DeMarvion Overshown has slipped under the radar. Which is very rare for a Dallas player.

• We’re gonna have more on Anthony Richardson’s improvement on the site Monday, with a look at the Indianapolis Colts’ QB and his draft classmates.

Editors’ note, Dec. 2 at 10:15 a.m. ET: This story has been updated. It originally said Sunday was Geno Smith’s first time returning to MetLife Stadium as a visitor, but he did face the Giants in 2023.