Every week of the 2022 NFL season, we will celebrate the electric plays, investigate the colossal blunders, and explain the inexplicable moments of the most recent slate. Welcome to Winners and Losers. Which one are you?
Winner: Sitting on Our Couches, Watching Football
I lie to myself in July. I’ll be in a pool with a refreshing alcoholic beverage, or staring out on a brilliant vista after a rewarding hike, and I’ll think to myself, “You know what? You don’t need football. There’s so much more to life than Sundays spent indoors with junk food on the table and RedZone on the big screen.” And it seems right. I promise to pull back a little from football fandom and see what the rest of the world has to offer. And then Week 1 hits, and I realize that I was wrong. Yes, there might be a whole world out there—but does that world have seven hours of commercial-free football? I don’t think so. At 3 p.m. EST, as the first set of games of the NFL season hurtled towards ludicrous conclusions, I realized that I was home. (Like, literally—I was on my couch.) There were nine games in the early slate of the first Sunday of the NFL season. Five of them were decided by three or fewer points. Six of them featured fourth-quarter lead changes. Five of them featured a team coming back from a double-digit deficit to tie or take the lead. Two of them went to overtime. Everything was golden. The Washington Commanders and Jacksonville Jaguars were both projected to go well below .500 this season—but they put together a thriller with 24 fourth-quarter points, including a spectacular game-winning catch by Washington rookie Jahan Dotson: The Browns defeated their ex-quarterback, Baker Mayfield, on a 58-yard, game-winning field goal by rookie Cade York. It would’ve been good from, like, 70: The Saints trailed 26-10 early in the fourth quarter—but the Falcons are incredibly passionate about blowing fourth-quarter leads, and allowed 17 unanswered points to end the game, including the first two touchdowns Michael Thomas had scored in three years: In the haze of RedZone, even the most boring stuff seems like a blessing. After blowing a 20-3 lead, Texans head coach Lovie Smith decided to take the coward’s way out and punt on fourth-and-3 from midfield with 20 seconds remaining in overtime, ensuring a tie rather than risking a loss. It was an admission of fear and failure—and it seemed like the most thrilling thing ever to happen. “THEY’RE PUNTING FOR THE TIE!” I screamed, to nobody. Those relaxing pools and rewarding vistas are still out there. I’ll see them next year. My weekends are booked for the next few months.
Winner: The Mahomes-Tyreek Split
The Jacksonville Jaguars inadvertently tore apart one of the NFL’s best teams. After Christian Kirk signed with the Jags for $72 million, all the other, better wide receivers in the league started wondering why they were getting paid so little. Soon, the Chiefs traded Tyreek Hill to the Dolphins, who were willing to make him the highest-paid receiver in the NFL, leaving Patrick Mahomes without his top target. How would the two exes look in Week 1? Mahomes seemed completely unbothered without Hill, throwing for 360 yards and five touchdowns against the Cardinals. He still has Travis Kelce, who went for 121 yards and a touchdown. And new additions JuJu Smith-Schuster and Marquez Valdes-Scantling combined for 10 catches and 123 yards in their Chiefs debuts. Maybe Kansas City’s 488 yards and 44 points tell us a lot about Arizona’s defense—but it seems like Patrick Mahomes is gonna keep doing Patrick Mahomes stuff, even without his top receiver. Here he was celebrating his fourth touchdown, unaware he’d soon throw a fifth: In Miami, Hill led the Dolphins in receiving with eight catches for 94 yards against the Patriots. He didn’t score in Miami’s 20-7 win, but seemed pretty pleased with his new coach and his new coach’s testicles: Here’s the quote (with video) from Tyreek Hill on Mike McDaniel going for it on 4th and 7: “McDaniel’s gonna need a wheel barrow for his nuts to carry them around.” pic.twitter.com/WcepqVugRn — Clay Ferraro (@ClayWPLG) September 11, 2022 Mahomes and the Chiefs looked exactly as good as they were with Hill—but Hill has unlocked a new element to these exciting young Dolphins. Everybody wins!
Loser: The Rodgers-Davante Split
It’s been a running joke that the Packers haven’t given Aaron Rodgers the receiving help he needs—and that was when he had Davante Adams, an All-Pro talent who led the league in receiving touchdowns in 2020. In the offseason, the Packers traded Adams to the Raiders, who signed him to the largest contract for a wide receiver in NFL history. Now, his no. 1 receiver is Allen Lazard, who has fewer career receiving yards in four seasons (1,448) than Adams had last year (1,553). And Lazard was out for Sunday’s game against the Vikings, meaning their best receiver was … uh … fourth-round draft pick Romeo Doubs? I think? It’s bleak. Rodgers had a miserable time trying to find anybody to pass to against the Vikings. He finished the game with just 195 passing yards, no touchdowns, and an interception. Meanwhile, Vikings receiver Justin Jefferson had 184 receiving yards and two touchdowns by himself. Rodgers’s leading receiver was AJ Dillon, a running back. At one point, he found rookie receiver Christian Watson deep for a potential touchdown … but Watson whiffed on the ball: Adams, for his part, had a solid debut with the Raiders, going for 141 yards and a touchdown in a loss to the Chargers. But his quarterback is now Derek Carr, who threw three interceptions in a game the Raiders lost by five points. (Rodgers threw four interceptions total last season.) We shouldn’t draw too much from Week 1; after all, Rodgers played one of the worst games of his career in a 38-3 loss in Week 1 of last season, then won MVP—but he had Davante Adams to throw to last year. A better wide receiver isn’t just going to magically appear in Green Bay, unless Aaron takes some particularly potent hallucinogens.
Winner: Emergency Kickers
Chiefs safety Justin Reid has a famous gimmick. Reid played soccer in high school and has a solid leg and decent kicking form. His previous team, the Texans, let him kick in some preseason games, and he went viral for kicking a 65-yard field goal in Chiefs training camp last month. But that party trick went from fun fact to critically important on Sunday, when Kansas City’s real kicker, Harrison Butker, injured his left ankle on a kickoff in the first quarter. Luckily, the Chiefs have the most famous emergency kicker in the league. Reid took over, drilling an extra point and booming this kickoff for a touchback. (Yes, I’m dropping in a highlight of a kickoff for a touchback, perhaps the least exciting play in football.) Normally, punters slide in and take over kicking duties in the rare case of a kicker injury. Reid was the first non-kicker, non-punter to score on a kick since Cowboys safety Jeff Heath in 2017. Eventually, Butker returned to the game, but Reid continued kicking off. Maybe Butker wasn’t fully healthy (and his approach on his field goal attempts was notably shorter than normal)—or maybe it was just because Reid was so good at kickoffs. Reid managed five touchbacks on seven attempts, a 71 percent touchback rate. That’s significantly better than the league average of 57.5 percent. And it stands to reason that when Reid fails to kick a touchback, he gives the Chiefs an advantage, because their coverage unit will feature 11 professional tacklers instead of 10 tacklers and a kicker. Reid wasn’t perfect—he missed an extra point, and one of his kickoffs was returned to the 48-yard line. But after seeing Reid kick in an actual game, it feels like his talent may be more than a gimmick. I think the Chiefs may have found their new safety slash kickoff specialist.
Loser: Emergency Long Snappers
The Cincinnati Bengals experienced multiple disasters on Sunday. Joe Burrow, the God-King of Southwest Ohio (and Louisiana), threw four interceptions, the most in a single game of his NFL or college career. Despite their supposedly revamped offensive line, Burrow was sacked seven times, including a strip sack for a fifth Burrow turnover. Tee Higgins, who went for 1,000 receiving yards last year, suffered a concussion and left the game in the first half. In spite of all these disasters, the Bengals still had a chance to beat the Steelers and start the season 1-0. Ja’Marr Chase scored a touchdown with two seconds left in the fourth quarter, which tied the score at 20, and the Bengals would have certainly won if Evan McPherson had made the extra point. But the easy chip shot was stunningly blocked by Steelers safety Minkah Fitzpatrick, forcing overtime: That block was the result of the actual biggest disaster that befell the Bengals on Sunday: Their long snapper, Clark Harris—best known for his alarming resemblance to the “two chicks at the same time” guy from Office Space—suffered a biceps injury and had to leave the game. In 2015, I wrote an article about how “mid-game long snapper injury” may be the situation NFL teams are least prepared for. It happens rarely, because there aren’t a lot of injury risks when snapping the ball. But when it does happen? Chaos. NFL teams do not carry backup long snappers. You’d think that a center could easily fill in—they also snap the ball!—but they’re mainly focused on blocking rather than delivering speedy, accurate snaps. And if these special teams snaps are just a little bit off, or just a little bit slow, it can seriously hamper a team’s ability to kick or punt. The Bengals turned to tight end Mitchell Wilcox, who had never…
