Week 17 NFL Takeaways: The Vikings Are Very Confident

A few play calls down the stretch show this team believes it can win the No. 1 seed. Plus, Jayden Daniels is not playing like a rookie, several teams clinch, Phil Simms remembers Greg Gumbel and much more.

Jordan Addison celebrates his touchdown with Darnold. The Vikings have 14 wins and a chance to clinch the top seed in the NFC. / Brad Rempel-Imagn Images

Jump to a topic

1. Minnesota Vikings
2. Washington Commanders
3. Cincinnati Bengals
4. Los Angeles Chargers
5. Tampa Bay Buccaneers
6. Buffalo Bills
7. Philadelphia Eagles
8. Remembering Greg Gumbel
9. Which teams will rest starters?
10. Quick-hitters

Week 17 has been an extended, drawn-out affair kicking off on a Wednesday (!). 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 …

Minnesota Vikings

Every coach is going to tell you how much he believes in his team. Kevin O’Connell showed everyone early Sunday night. His Minnesota Vikings had watched a lead that looked safe melt away, as a burgeoning rout became a barnburner. What was 27–10 midway through the fourth quarter became 27–25, with Minnesota facing big tactical decisions.

First-and-10, 2:18 left, Green Bay Packers carrying all three timeouts. The conventional coaching manual would demand O’Connell run the ball, force Matt LaFleur to burn his timeouts and see how the chips fall from there.

The Vikings’ third-year coach lit that manual on fire.

Sam Darnold threw off play-action on first down to fullback C.J. Ham for 13 yards, and the clock ticked down to the two-minute warning. O’Connell then called a run to Cam Akers, which was dropped for a one-yard loss. Timeout, Packers. And from there, in second-and-11? A tight-window throw to Justin Jefferson for nine yards, and a throw to the flat in play-action to Akers for six yards, with timeouts from the Packers after both. Ballgame.

Minnesota, as a result, is 14–2. O’Connell’s program is humming. And there may be no bigger illustration of why than that sequence, where the coaches trusted the players they’ve developed and taught, to execute a plan that everyone believed in.

“K.O. is just confident in us—and if he believes that we’re going to get it done, then we believe that we’re going to get it done,” veteran running back Aaron Jones, in his first season as a Viking, told me over the phone early Sunday evening. “If there’s a fourth down and he leaves us on the field, in his mind and our mind, we’re going to pick this up. He’s going to give us the best play call to get us into whatever look we need.”

And it’s at the point now where when O’Connell, GM Kwesi Adofo-Mensah and that football operation make a decision, the rest of us should trust them too.

This was supposed to be a reset year. Gone were Kirk Cousins and Danielle Hunter. In came Darnold, J.J. McCarthy, Jonathan Greenard, Andrew Van Ginkel and Dallas Turner to replace them. Stephon Gilmore was added to the defense over the summer. Jones was picked up after the Packers discarded him, following the Josh Jacobs signing. As part of all the turnover, Minnesota carried nearly $70 million in dead money on their 2024 books.

Yet, here they are, because no one there saw it that way, headed into Week 18 with a chance at a franchise-record-tying 15th win and the No. 1 seed in the NFC bracket. They’ll get their chance at revenge on the Detroit Lions, and a shot to stay home through the NFC playoffs, an idea that would’ve seemed preposterous a couple of months ago to everyone except, well, them.

“Nobody really believed in us,” Jones says. “They were saying you’re going to win six games and finish last in the division. Everything we did was done in the dark, but it was never dark in that facility. It was always fun to come to work. We always believed in each other. Coach told us we would be right where we are right now.”

Jones then added, “I believe he can see the future if you ask me."

The moves the Vikings made in the offseason would indicate that Jones is right on that.

And none more so than the one to acquire Darnold. O’Connell and I discussed that one in last week’s takeaways, and the coach more or less begged for the football-watching public to stop looking at Darnold like some sort of scrap-heap pickup, and remember why he was once the third pick in the draft. It showed, again, on Sunday. Save for the pick he threw to Packers corner Carrington Valentine (who did a nice job baiting him), Darnold was damn near flawless—hitting on 33-of-43 throws for 377 yards, three scores and a 116.1 rating.

Darnold responded to his pick with an eight-play, 70-yard drive to stake the Vikings to the 27–10 lead, then was nails at the end of the game, delivering darts on the first two of the aforementioned throws O’Connell trusted him to make, before getting helped out a bit by Akers on the third.

“Sam is resilient,” Jones says. “He’s an underdog. He’s tough as they come. You may see him get hit, come out for a play and then come right back in. You may see him hobbling back in there, and he’s in there the rest of the time. He’s a true leader. He keeps us calm, cool and collected in that huddle.”

That, really, seems to apply to all the Vikings right now.

I don’t know if they’ll go into Detroit and knock off the mighty Lions next Sunday. But it’s not like that would be a major upset—and given where Minnesota was expected to be at the beginning of the year, that’s pretty impressive.

Jones, for his part, was waiting around to prepare, having already undergone treatment on his bruised quad before we spoke. He told me he was held out as a precaution late in this one.

Remarkably, they have bigger fish to fry.

“I’ve turned the page already, getting the body right,” he says. “It’s seven days, but it’s going to feel like the snap of a finger.”

The Vikings will be ready, though. And confident, for sure.

---

It’s hard to believe Daniels is a rookie, when you watch him play. / Geoff Burke-Imagn Images

Washington Commanders

No one with the Washington Commanders is talking about, or treating, Jayden Daniels like he’s a rookie anymore. That much was clear to me as I talked to veteran tight end Zach Ertz about the Commanders’ game-winning possession in overtime Sunday night—and how easily it came out of his mouth that his quarterback, eight months removed from draft night, was such a big reason Ertz was so calm as the temperature rose on the game against the Atlanta Falcons.

The Commanders had fallen behind 17–7. The offense looked disjointed. Penalties, at one point, put Washington in a second-and-30. The guys weren’t playing fast, and some of it even spilled into the first possession of the second half. Something needed to change.

“It’s really just finding that rhythm. We’re at our best when we’re playing fast and playing aggressive,” Ertz says. “We just weren’t doing that in the first half, just weren’t finding the rhythm. We just had to take a deep breath and be us. When you got a guy like Jayden pulling the strings and you got Kliff [Kingsbury] calling the plays, we feel like at any point it can flip regardless of how it’s looked up until that point in the game.

“And it really did."

I stop Ertz when he says that—and mention how he’d just said a rookie, playing the most difficult position on the field, was the calming force.

“Yeah,” Ertz continues. “What he’s done is rare.”

The rare stuff dug the Commanders out of that 17–17 hole with 17 consecutive points. Then, more rare stuff would lift Washington up in overtime.

And it starts, again, with how level Daniels was throughout.

Even after throwing for 103 yards and rushing for another 61 in the second half, it sure looked like Washington might be cooked at the end of regulation. Faced with defensive looks Atlanta hadn’t previously shown, the offense went three-and-out after Michael Penix Jr. drove the Falcons 68 yards for the game-tying score.

But rather than sulk or worry about it, Daniels moved on, confident the defense would create another chance for the offense to win the game, and getting to work on what he’d do with the ball when he and his unit got it back. His calm then became everyone’s calm.

“From the moment he got here, his poise has been second to none,” Ertz says. “He’s the most mature rookie I’ve ever been around. You couldn’t tell if he threw for 500 yards or 100 yards the way he’s out there each play. Really it’s just a calming presence for everyone because he has a quiet confidence. He knows how good he is. We know how good he is. He’s not someone that lives and dies with every play. He really is a steady influence on the team.”

The game-winning drive could make anyone watching feel that.

There weren’t any massive plays. He just calmly kept moving the sticks. A scramble for seven, a throw to Ertz for 10, another run for seven and a Bijan Robinson gain of one. Then, a 16-yard run, a four-yard throw to Ertz and, well, you get the picture. The Commanders were in third down just twice on the 12-play, 70-yard drive and converted both.

The second of those was the game-winner to Ertz.

“We repped that route so many times,” Ertz says. “He’s just got a lot of trust in me to find a way to get in front of a defender. If I’m able to get my body in front of a defender, then I’m going to have a great opportunity to catch the ball. Jayden threw it about 1,000 miles an hour and said, Either you’re catching it or no one’s catching it. I saw it a little late. That’s why it snuck up on me at the end. But I tried to find a way to get the ball, and roll onto my back so the ball didn't have a chance to hit the ground. It was just awesome.”

And if it looked a little like Ertz in his prime again, there’s a reason for that.

Thanks to the coaches and the quarterback, and the front office, the three-time Pro Bowler feels like he’s got a new lease on his professional life at 34. He’s not the only one who feels that way and, yes, because of his age, he knows this won’t last forever.

But he’s enjoying it now, just like everyone in that place seems to be.

And while he can also see what everyone else can—that the future in Washington looks very, very bright—he believes there’s a pretty good present to keep attacking, too.

“The most important positions in an organization are the owner, the GM, the head coach and the quarterback,” Ertz says. “It seems like from when Josh [Harris] got the team to the hires he made with A.P. [GM Adam Peters], D.Q. [Dan Quinn] and then drafting Jayden—it seems like they knocked them way out of the park. Jayden’s only going to get better which is so scary to think about.

“So I do think they’re building something special for down the road, but they’ve also got something special now, being able to have an opportunity to play Dallas next week, put another game on film and just see what happens at the end of the year. I love D.Q.’s constant message that every week is a championship week for us. He started saying that during preseason games to Week 1 against the Bucs. The mindset hasn’t changed for us even though the games have gotten bigger.”

Which makes sense. Since what Daniels, Quinn and everyone else in Washington have done sure looks like it’s plenty good enough.

---

Cincinnati Bengals

Zac Taylor had a different Joe Burrow story than one you might expect from his Cincinnati Bengals’ wild Saturday win over the Denver Broncos. Yes, there was the six-play, 59-yard drive to put Cincinnati up 24–17 with less than two minutes left in regulation. There was the speed with which he put the Bengals in position for an ill-fated Cade York field goal attempt to win it. There was the unforgettable dime to Tee Higgins for 31 yards, and the game-winning touchdown on the next snap to get Cincinnati somehow, someway, back to .500.

The Bengals’ coach acknowledges all that should (and did) get its due.

But the play he was excited to use to explain just how special Burrow has become came out of the overtime’s two-minute warning, with the Bengals in first-and-10 from the Denver 47.

“The season’s on the line—we’re putting the ball in his hands,” Taylor said on his way out of Paycor Stadium. “He checked to a speed option. I think we walked through that play one time. And he checked to the speed option in overtime, versus a double-A look. We talked about it, but he got to it to Khalil Herbert, who’s had how many carries? Maybe 10 on the season. [Note: It’s actually now eight, in seven games since the Bengals traded for him.] He got us 13 yards.

“[Burrow’s] awareness to get to a play like that just shows his next-level thinking. It’s just unbelievable that a play we don’t rep, it’s for one look only, he got the look in the most critical point in the season and checked to it. … It's just unbelievable the way his brain works."

True to Taylor’s recollection, I went back and looked at it, and D.J. Jones was lined up in one A-gap, with linebackers Justin Strnad and Cody Barton hovering over the other one—with the call clearly exploiting a scheme made vulnerable on the edges because of the alignment. Thus, it proved how deep Burrow’s well of knowhow is in his fifth NFL season. And even more so because it featured the quarterback as a runner, in setting up the pitch.

“He executed it to perfection,” Taylor says.

There was a lot of that when it mattered most on Sunday, and at this point, that’s become par for the course in Cincinnati, too, to the point that it’s affected the team’s mentality.

Yes, it’s been a tough year, and the team’s been through a lot. But even when things seemed to keep coming undone, and the defense got beat for Marvin Mims Jr.’s miracle touchdown, and York missed the chip-shot winner, the group didn’t flinch—a good sign that even the bumps of the year haven’t shaken the foundation the last half decade has laid in Cincinnati.

“I saw confidence,” Taylor says. “I probably didn’t have the greatest body language in the world when we missed [the kick]. I immediately looked up and our defense was trotting out there. You can see they had that look in their eye like, Great, it’s on us. There was certainly belief there in the way that they had played that they would step up and get the ball back.”

And what helps is when you know you have Burrow, playing at an otherworldly level. Again, despite everything, he’s leading the league in passing yards (4,651) and touchdowns (42), and was even before adding to those totals Saturday, and is third in the pass rating (109.8).

Which only begins to explain his value to the franchise.

“Eight games in a row thrown for 250 and three touchdowns. That’s the most in NFL history by two. Last week he broke it. This week he’s starting to shatter it,” Taylor says. “In critical moments, we’re putting the ball in his hands and he’s delivering. He absolutely deserves to win the MVP. It’s a shame our record’s not better than what it was because, to me, it wouldn’t be a conversation. There’s great players in this league doing great things. But I’ve watched him play 16 games and I wouldn’t take anybody over him the way he’s played this year.”

Now, we’ll have to wait and see if he, and the Bengals, get a shot to play past Week 18.

---

Los Angeles Chargers

Jim Harbaugh has done what he always does, in Year 1 with the Los Angeles Chargers. That is, of course, to create a program, instill a tough-minded identity and win. And win and win.

But just winning wasn’t what was remarkable about the obliteration of the New England Patriots in Foxborough on Saturday. It was how resounding it was—by a 40–7 count. It was the style the Chargers played, grinding out nearly as many rushing yards (147) as the hosts had total yards (181). It was through the fourth-down gambles Harbaugh took, that his players paid off. It was the fact that it was cold, raining, kicking off at 10 a.m. PT and after a six-hour flight.

It was a program win, and an appropriate one for a playoff clincher. So when I asked Derwin James what Harbaugh’s given the team, the afternoon’s star didn’t skip a beat.

“Culture,” James said from the locker room. “He gave us a culture. We know who we are when we look in the mirror. I feel like we’re building that team that nobody wants to play. We don’t have to rah-rah or go talk on Twitter. We’re just going to continue to show how we play week in and week out. We’re doing a great job with coach Harbaugh leading us.”

Then, there’s the other part of what Harbaugh’s building with the Chargers, and has always built: This has become a very smart team on top of the rest of it.

James, on Saturday, pulled off a rare feat from his safety spot, registering two sacks that resulted in turnovers on downs (I’m not sure how to look that up, but I have a hard time believing a safety has ever had two fourth-down sacks in the same game before). The cool thing is that as much as it was about his incredible physical ability, it was also about how prepared Jesse Minter and the defensive coaches had him for the moment.

“It was knowing their protections and being relentless trying to get there,” James says. “I feel like the other guys on the D-line did a great job holding up their gaps and holding up the other end, so I could get there. It was a complete team effort. … And in the weekly study, just studying habits, I knew they’d leave me one-on-one with the running back, even if they knew I was coming—I just needed to beat him. On one of them, I was able to beat him. And the other one I was free off the protection.”

All of which underscores how far the Chargers have come, and also how Harbaugh and James have found kindred spirits in one another.

At training camp, the running joke was how “Do as Derwin would’ve done it” had become a Harbaugh commandment. When I raised that to James, he laughed and agreed that he’s forged a unique relationship with his head coach.

“I love him so much,” James says. “He’s like a father away from home—not a coach, a father, teaching me how to become a better leader. I just want to give everything for that man. I’m happy he’s my coach. … He’s authentic. He’s real. You know what you’re going to get every day. His track record speaks for itself. Everywhere he’s been, he’s been winning.”

Which is why seeing it happen in L.A. should surprise no one.

---

Mayfield has proved to be the perfect quarterback to follow Tom Brady in Tampa. / Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images

Tampa Bay Buccaneers

It hasn’t been perfect, but the Tampa Bay Buccaneers deserve a lot of credit for coming out of their Tom Brady era cleaner than New England did. You heard for a lot of years that the Patriots were a model franchise, and rightfully so. Within that noise was a casual assumption that Tampa was a fortunate beneficiary of it, going on a short run with New England’s iconic quarterback.

Well, guess what?

The Buccaneers now have two winning seasons in two years after Brady’s retirement, which is more than the Patriots have mustered in five. They could win their second division title in as many years after No. 12 walked out the door—the Patriots are 0-for-5 in that category. And, impressively, they’ve gone from having one of the oldest rosters in the league to one of the youngest this year (they ranked second before the season), without taking a step back.

That group played like a Brady-led team Sunday, smacking the Panthers around 48–14.

It didn’t guarantee anything—the Bucs still need to win next week to have a shot at winning the NFC South or a wild card. But Tampa is now assured of another winning season and a chance to get 10 wins, and that’s no small accomplishment if you look at how some other franchises have come off runs with Hall of Fame quarterbacks.

And there’s no better example of how the torch has effectively been passed than with a guy like Tristan Wirfs, who was a rookie on the title team of 2020 and now is a captain on a big second contract—upholding the standard that was set for him four years ago.

“We’re just doing our best to lead by example,” Wirfs said over the phone Sunday. “We know what it takes. We’ve been to the playoffs four times now, hopefully going to make it a fifth. Three division titles. We’ve been there. Bringing these young guys along, we know what it takes. We’ve had incredible older guys show us the way—Lavonte [David], Mike Evans, Will Gholston, Vita Vea, Tom, Rob [Gronkowski], all these old guys coming in and showing how it should be done. Now it’s our time to do the same thing for the young guys.”

It was a mix of, well, all of the above in the shellacking of Carolina.

Mike Evans, in Year 12, led the Bucs with eight catches for 97 yards and two scores. But right there with him was rookie Jalen McMillan, with two touchdowns of his own. Fellow rookie Bucky Irving had 113 yards to lead a 202-yard effort on the ground. Defensively, guys such as Zyon McCollum (team-high six tackles and a pass breakup), Calijah Kancey and Yaya Diaby (a sack apiece) flanked standbys Vea and David.

And then there’s the guy who actually replaced Brady, Baker Mayfield, who’s not just been a really good quarterback for the Bucs, but the perfect personality to be up next after Brday—the former two-time walk-on who wasn’t ever going to be shaken by what someone else thinks of him. As expected, Mayfield was comfortable in his own skin from the jump as a Buc. On Sunday, he played that way, too, with 359 yards and five touchdowns.

“Everyone always says he’s a lineman in a quarterback’s body,” Wirfs says. “The O-line is going to hang out tonight and watch the Falcons-Commanders game. He’ll be there. He hangs out with us all the time. We do things together. Mine and his kids are eight days apart. We get to do a lot of stuff together. We’re able to do stuff with him that we couldn’t do with Tom just because of who Tom was.

“We go out to dinner with Bake. We get drinks with Bake. We go to the movies, do whatever. To have that relationship off the field is pretty special.”

Wirfs then explained that for Sunday Night Football—“Big Commanders fan tonight,” he says—they’d either go to an out-of-the-way bar on Davis Island that the linemen frequent or to Mayfield’s house. Regardless, he continued, they know next week will matter.

Again, it’s not perfect. But they’re still playing relevant football, which is a credit to the standard Brady set and also a testament to what he had around him in Tampa.

“Tom is Tom,” Wirfs says. “You can’t compare anybody to him.”

So, really, the Bucs aren’t trying to. And that’s serving them well.

---

Buffalo Bills

The challenge in beating the Buffalo Bills has changed. Not that the New York Jets ever had a chance to do that Sunday—the Cancun-minded New Yorkers who showed up in Orchard Park had as much a chance of winning this one as you or I did.

Still, if you can cut through the quality of the opponent, you’ll see something that keeps showing up, again and again, with this version of Josh Allen’s and Sean McDermott’s team.

Nine different guys caught the ball. Five different guys scored touchdowns, including one named Tyrell Shavers, who scored on a 69-yard catch-and-run from Mitchell Trubisky. This week happened to be a bigger James Cook week, but Ty Johnson and Ray Davis are very much in the run-game mix. And the defense is balanced enough that it can use an all-time great like Von Miller sparingly, and still get five guys in on four sacks of Aaron Rodgers.

In other words, it was another one of these days that the 2024 Bills have gotten used to having, where lots of hands are pulling on the rope—this one just happened to result in a 40–14 rout that locked up the AFC’s No. 2 seed. And the guys will tell you it’s something they could see coming all the way back in August.

“I don’t remember which [preseason] game, but there was a point where everybody on the football field was getting touches,” eighth-year tackle Dion Dawkins says. “The ball was not just going to one person. When the ball can move around the field and everybody who’s in a position to catch catches it and scores and gets yards, that’s when you see, Holy smokes, seven or eight people touched the ball today, the running back and the quarterback, receivers, tight ends. It usually doesn’t happen like that.”

The low-hanging fruit to take here would be to attribute this to the departure of Stefon Diggs—and it’s fair to ask about that. We’ve seen it before with quarterbacks, where not having to constantly feed one receiver helps open the field for them and gets them to play free.

But to do that would be to discredit the job McDermott and GM Brandon Beane have done building up the roster’s middle class, on both sides of the ball. The distribution of targets and catches on offense is just a microcosm of it. The reality is they have a depth of talent across the roster that fuels it. And, of course, a quarterback who ties it all together.

I did, for what it’s worth, ask Dawkins whether he thinks Allen is the league MVP. He answered as you’d expect: “I know he is. I don’t even have to say it. The film is showing it. Josh’s film is showing exactly what an MVP-caliber quarterback, player, person is. He continues to do it on and off the field every single game. Every single time he touches the football field, it’s there.”

But so, too, now is the leadership. And it’s not like he was ever lacking in that area. It was more that he’d defer to guys such as Micah Hyde and Jordan Poyer. Now, he doesn’t.

“He’s definitely more vocal,” Dawkins says. “He’s more assertive. He’s not afraid to speak up in any manner anymore—not that he was ever scared to speak up, but he’s not afraid to speak up. Josh will bark. Josh will assert his dominance. He’ll make his presence known if things are going wrong. He’s going to speak up. If we’re playing around too much in practice, he’s going to check it and say let’s lock in. Not to say that he wasn’t doing that in the previous years, but he’s doing it at a higher level now.”

Wild as it sounds, it feels like the Bills are, too.

They have 13 wins for the third time in five years. They’d probably get to a franchise-record 14 next week, if they had anything to play for (which they really don’t). And they have the second seed, which means they won’t go on the road until the AFC title game, where another rematch with the defending champion Kansas City Chiefs could be waiting.

No one on the Bills’ roster is going to make predictions on what’ll happen there at this point—they have to get there first, of course. But what’s obvious, in a year where the team is carrying nearly $70 million in dead-cap money, and where it resolved to turn over so much of the roster and get younger, is that Buffalo heads for January as dangerous as ever.

“Coming in, nobody wanted us to win,” Dawkins says. “Nobody expected us to be as good as we are. There’s no Diggs and there’s no Gabe Davis. There’s no Micah Hyde. There’s no Poyer. They were counting us out in the beginning. We had to reidentify who we are. And when you have a group of men that play football at a high level together, something good is usually going to come out of it on the backside.”

In this case, something good certainly did.

---

Ignore the drama and look at the Eagles’ record / Bill Streicher-Imagn Images

Philadelphia Eagles

Forget the hysterics, the Philadelphia Eagles deserve your respect. Consider this: Nick Sirianni is now fifth all-time in NFL history in winning percentage (.697) and second in wins through four years (47), only to two-time Super Bowl champion George Seifert. The Eagles are 13–3 and locked into the second seed, with a shot at going to a third Super Bowl in eight years.

And this is the team that everyone talks about like they’re the (with all due respect) Jets?

Very few folks are going to laud Philly for Sunday, but I will. Without Jalen Hurts, and even after they lost backup Kenny Pickett, the Eagles left no doubt playing an archrival that came in having won four of five. The final was 41–7, but Philly could’ve named its score against the Dallas Cowboys. Pickett threw a touchdown pass, third-stringer Tanner McKee threw two, Saquon Barkley hit 2,000 rushing yards for the season while going for 167 on the ground, and the defense choked out Cooper Rush, only yielding a single touchdown while scoring one of its own on a pick-six.

Maybe it’s time to see this team for what it is? Maybe?

Or maybe, believe it not, the Eagles have come to actually like it the way it is.

“You pretty much have to turn into Marcus Aurelius to function,” All-Pro right tackle Lane Johnson joked to me postgame. “Yes, we know we’re expected to win. We know we’re in a passionate city. What that does is it makes you heighten your focus and put more into your work and what you do and take it more seriously. Pressurized environments can do a lot of great things. We love the fan base. It’s what it’s always been about.”

However they want to process it, the Eagles, organizationally, have responded this year, to last year’s “down” year—a playoff season that resulted in Sirianni’s staff being overhauled.

Both coordinators, Kellen Moore on offense and Vic Fangio on defense, have been upgrades.

And Barkley has supercharged everything. As we wrote last week, the Eagles viewed the availability of such an elite back this offseason as a sort of market inefficiency. Like so many other veteran additions they’ve made of late (A.J. Brown, Darius Slay Jr., Mekhi Becton, Zach Baun), they were proven right, and with more than just Barkley as a player.

In fact, one thing Johnson brought up immediately, when we discussed the accomplishment was how when Barkley arrived in the spring, one of the first things he did was take his linemen out golfing.

“It was super competitive, but super fun,” Johnson says. “We hit it off personally, early. Then as we got into the building and to practice and got some reps in, we knew that this guy was special. As a part of LeSean McCoy’s run, I thought, as a rookie, that it was going to be easy and a regular thing. And here I am in Year 12. Shoutout to the coaching staff and Saquon.”

Then, there’s the other guys who deserve a shout out for Sunday—the Eagles’ incumbents, led by Johnson himself.

This year’s been an adjustment for the venerable right tackle—the year that, finally, the Eagles’ core four linemen were broken up. Jason Kelce and Fletcher Cox retired. Brandon Graham was lost to injury. That left Johnson as the torchbearer for a standard that’s somehow transcended its coaches and tied generations of Eagles together.

“All three of those guys are really good people and embody the passion of this city,” Johnson says of Cox, Kelce and Graham. “I’ve seen a lot of change, too, being the older guy now. Not all bad, but some different. It’s a little different, the people we’re working with [now] than we were 10 years ago."

But what’s being passed on by him hasn’t changed much. That standard hasn’t, either.

Which, it turns out, is set just as high as everyone in Philly would like it.

---

Gumbel was an all-time great NFL broadcaster who called two Super Bowls. / Kyle Terada-Imagn Images

Remembering Greg Gumbel

Greg Gumbel is one of the all-time great NFL broadcasters. But that goes without saying. His record, of course, speaks for itself.

What was cool to hear the past couple of days was all the other stuff. How he treated everyone around him. How passionate he was about his work. How every day seemed to be a good day for him. How dignified he was about his illness (even some closest to him didn’t know how bad it was until the end). And mostly how consistent what you heard about him was, from just about everyone who knew him.

I talked to one of the guys in our business who knew him best on Saturday, a day after his family announced his passing, after a battle with cancer, at 78.

Phil Simms and Gumbel worked together as CBS’s A team over the first six years the network had the AFC package, from 1998 to 2003. They called two Super Bowls together (Baltimore Ravens over New York Giants and New England Patriots over Carolina Panthers), with Gumbel becoming the first Black broadcaster to do play-by-play on one in January ’01.

But what Simms will remember most? Just how funny he was. And he had a story to illustrate that as we talked—from a game in Kansas City, with him, Gumbel and sideline reporter Armen Keteyian getting out of a car at Arrowhead together.

“Three older women are standing there and one of them goes, Oh my gosh it’s Bryant Gumbel and George Clooney,” Simms says. “We wore that thing out—I talked about it openly on the air that day.”

Gumbel, being mistaken for his younger brother, took it all in stride, like he did everything.

Along those lines, Simms says he’ll also remember how Gumbel loved good TV, and would get after his partner if he hadn’t seen a show he thought was good with great detail—“Any show, he could basically recite word for word”—and how he loved the Rolling Stones.

“I’m going to say he went to 100 of their concerts,” Simms says.

And all of these qualities, the passion and the recall and the command, played back into what made him great a broadcaster—capable of captaining any ship, from the biggest NFL games to Selection Sunday and everything in-between.

“Everything I’ve told you would lend itself to him being exactly what you’re saying,” Simms says. “It was never about him. What bothers me a bit is I talk about him and people go, Well, you’re just saying that now because he’s gone. I go, No I’m not. We’re all in agreement, all of us, that were around him for all those years. We say the same thing and we saw it the same way. You’re never panicked with him. The simpler the better with him.

“The meetings we’d have with the players and coaches, they were funny. But they were really funny when somebody walked out of the room because he would start going, Could you believe he just said this? We would laugh like we were crying. His mind was special.”

Clearly, a lot of things about Gumbel were. Here’s hoping his family can find some peace in his memory, and in the way he handled his final days.

---

Which teams will rest starters?

The four teams that played on Christmas are in an interesting spot. The Kansas City Chiefs and Houston Texans are now locked into their seeds—Kansas City, of course, is the No. 1 seed in the AFC, and Houston is the No. 4. The Pittsburgh Steelers and Baltimore Ravens, meanwhile, have a division title to sort out. If Baltimore beats the Cleveland Browns on Saturday, the Ravens will win the AFC North for a second consecutive season. So the Steelers will know by the time their game kicks off that night whether they have a shot.

That leaves three of the teams involved in the Saturday-Wednesday round robin with potential decisions to make on banged-up players.

The Chiefs probably have the biggest questions to answer. Chris Jones sat out Christmas Day with a balky calf, and Kansas City could want to give him the extra rest this week. Travis Kelce’s got a lot of mileage on his legs. Patrick Mahomes, of course, is coming off the high ankle sprain. So if you’re the Chiefs, do you sit all three, knowing that it’ll mean a three-and-a-half-week layoff for two of them, and a four-week layoff for Jones?

The Steelers, meanwhile, could choose to give George Pickens and T.J. Watt a breather, if the Ravens win the early Saturday game and take the AFC North title off the table. Or they could play to beat out the Chargers for the fifth seed, which would mean going to Houston for the first round instead of Baltimore.

And in these cases, how these teams handled their situations will likely affect others.

The Chiefs are playing the Broncos, and the Steelers are playing the Bengals. Kansas City rolling over against Denver, in a win-and-in spot for the Broncos, would eliminate Joe Burrow and Cincinnati. But if the Chiefs put together a representative effort and beat Denver, then the door cracks open wider for Burrow’s Bengals (who’d still need Miami to lose) in the AFC, so long as they beat that Pittsburgh team that may or may not go full-throttle.

Going through this is enough to give yourself a headache. So here’s the main thing—if a certain circumstance or two arises, then the AFC’s final playoff spot could legitimately come down to who’s actually trying in Week 18.

---

Quick-hitters

Just 17 games left in the regular season, and we’re going to serve up some quick-hitters to help recap what we’ve seen already as Week 17 winds down. Let’s go …

• Huge credit to the Los Angeles Rams for winning the NFC West again—that’s Sean McVay’s fourth division title and sixth double-digit win season over his eight years. For context, you have to go back 30 years to find the six double-digit win seasons the Rams posted before McVay’s arrival in 2017. Over those 30 years, they only won three division crowns.

• This seemed to be the week that the bottom fell out on the high-effort teams such as the Panthers and New Orleans Saints.

• I think criticism of Raheem Morris for his clock-management down the stretch is fair. But man did he and his coaches have Penix ready to roll. There are a lot of good signs through two weeks that Atlanta really has something in the No. 8 pick—a guy, truth be told, the coaches would’ve felt comfortable starting in Week 1, had he been ready.

• The Packers are probably past the point of looking for attaboys based on the amount of grit they showed. But they did show a lot of grit Sunday.

• Brian Daboll’s team played for him Sunday, and you can see the flashes of where the Giants see their future. Too little too late? I’m not sure. But I think the Maras and Tisches are looking for reasons to go forward with the current setup, and Daboll might’ve just helped them get there.

• For what it’s worth, the Giants and Las Vegas Raiders are easily the most aggressive teams on the draft quarterback trail—both had high-level execs at the Pop-Tarts Bowl, where Miami’s Cam Ward played, and the Alamo Bowl, where Colorado’s Shedeur Sanders wrapped up his college career.

• Mac Jones may have made himself some money Sunday. He was sharp playing against the Tennessee Titans’ defense, completing 15-of-22 throws for 174 yards and two touchdowns; helped get the most from Brian Thomas Jr.; and sure looked like a guy who could be a nice bridge for someone next year.

• Mike McDaniel can take a bow, too, for better adjusting his offense to Tyler Huntley than he did earlier in the year. The Miami Dolphins, 20–3 winners in Cleveland, got a nice, efficient effort from the veteran backup and remain alive as a result.

• The Lions might want to sit some guys Monday night, without much to play for.

• Finally, be sure to check out the rest of my Monday column—we’ve got a lot to get to on the coaching carousel there!