I hope everybody had a meaningful National Tight Ends Day.
I can’t say I’m particularly religious at this point in my life. Earlier this year, my son Alge asked me whether Antonio Gates was actually real. I wasn’t sure what to tell him. When I say my prayers in front of my Jeremy Shockey shrine, I don’t know if anybody hears them.
But the traditions of National Tight Ends Day bring us together, and help us reflect on what really matters in life: positional versatility.
May we all block and receive this year in peace.
– Rodger Sherman
Today’s Lineup
🍻 SKOL🍻 or ☹️ COAL ☹️
A rare Chiefs faceplant — what does it mean?
The Giants’ Nineaissance
🙌 And then there was one 🙌
🥶 Vikings 16 🥶
🧲 Colts 10 🧲
After losses by the Chiefs and 49ers, the Minnesota Vikings are the last undefeated team in the NFL.
The Minnesota Vikings are the last undefeated team in the NFL?
This fact has baffled the NFL. The data nerds are running the numbers again; the tape-grinders are pressing rewind. Scientists across the league are pouring various green liquids into graduated cylinders with puzzled looks on their faces.
I feel like you could find a pretty solid number of NFL fans who straight up have no idea this is happening, since it’s entirely taking place in 1 p.m. matchups with teams like the 2-5 Colts, mainly because of players who aren’t on anybody’s fantasy team. The Vikings haven’t lost yet, but the person in your league who drafted Justin Jefferson probably has.
Sunday’s win over the Colts was not exactly convincing: Yes, Minnesota throttled the Indianapolis offense, holding Daniel Jones to 106 yards and an interception. But they also trailed until the fourth quarter, scoring their only touchdown
We must face the toughest question of our age: Are the undefeated Vikings, hypothetically the best team in the NFL, actually a good football team? Let’s play a quick round of 🍻 SKOL🍻 or ☹️ COAL ☹️ to find out:
🍻 SKOL 🍻 The Vikings have played six games. They’ve won six and lost zero. That’s the most games they could have won, and the least games they could have lost. None of the other 31 teams in the NFL have managed to do this.
☹️ COAL ☹️ The Vikings have been feasting against weak competition. They’ve just played the Buccaneers, Dolphins, Colts, and Saints back-to-back-to-back-to-back, all teams with at least five losses on the season. They’ve played two opponents with winning records, the Packers and Bears, back in Weeks 1 and 2. Their opponents have a combined record of 16-25.
🍻 SKOL🍻 The Vikings rank sixth in DVOA, with the first-ranked defense and first-ranked special teams …
☹️ COAL ☹️ …. and the 27th-ranked offense. And while sixth is good, you’d expect the last undefeated team in the league to be, you know, first.
🍻 SKOL🍻 The Vikings’ spectacular defense is unlike anything the league has seen in years. They’ve allowed just 74 points; every other team has allowed at least 100. It’s the fewest points any team has allowed through six games since 2019. They’re allowing 12.3 points per game; no team has finished the season allowing that low a total since the 2002 Buccaneers.
☹️ COAL ☹️ That brilliant defense is paired with one of the worst offenses in the NFL. They’ve scored only 125 points, the fewest of any 6-0 team since 1978. They have the fewest yards and the lowest offensive success rate of any team in the league.
🍻 SKOL🍻 What Brian Flores is doing with this defense is absolutely diabolical. They have been blitzing at a historically high rate — over 70 percent while nobody else is even at 50. Then on Sunday, they posted the highest blitz rate since anybody started tracking, blitzing on 85.2 percent of the Colts’ dropbacks. It’s a symphony of violence that is absolutely frying quarterbacks’ brains. The stats are bad — Vikings opponents have thrown three touchdowns and seven interceptions and have yet to hit 1,000 passing yards through six games — but no numbers could capture the looks of fear and confusion on the face of every QB they play. It’s like trying to beat a grandmaster in chess while getting punched in a different organ once a minute. (And they don’t even tell you which organ they’re going for!)
☹️ COAL ☹️ Yeah, but, like ……… at some point, they’re going to have to score points, right? Like, it’s not like they’re being intentionally bad on offense because their defense is so good. They’re not scoring because they can’t score.
🍻 SKOL🍻 What’s more likely? That opposing quarterbacks figure out how to solve the violent riddle the Vikings ask them every week? Or that Kyler Murray figures out how to throw the ball to Justin Jefferson? Personally, I’m betting on #2.
The thing about football, though: Eventually, we’re going to find out. The Vikings have the hardest remaining schedule in the NFL. They’re about to play four teams over .500 in a row. If they’re still undefeated at Thanksgiving, we’ll have every answer we need about this team.
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Fantasy Genius Of The Week
Fantasy Genius is the must-have fantasy football tool to unlock the lore, stories, and stats of YOUR league. Stuff like “Who in your league is the best at making trades?” or “Who in my league is the most addicted to getting 1.7 points from Kyle Pitts?”
This week’s Fantasy Genius of the Week: Titans RB Tony Pollard! 129 rushing yards, 3 touchdowns, 3 receptions, 26 yards (36.5 fantasy points)
Tony Pollard had the most fantasy points of anybody this week. More than any running back, more than any quarterback. Yes, the one from the Titans. Pollard was #91 in average draft position this year, and was only started in about 61 percent of fantasy leagues.
And if you’re one of those 61 percent, you’re a Fantasy Genius! (And if you’re one of those 39 percent who left him on the bench, maybe just scroll down to the next section.)
Quite frankly, it’s baffling. Pollard is 29 years old, in his eighth NFL season; he scored more fantasy points Sunday than in any other game in his career. He had three touchdowns on Sunday after scoring just one in the Titans’ first five games of the season. And he did it against the Cleveland Browns, a team that had only allowed one rushing touchdown all season long. In eight years in the NFL, in 119 career games, Pollard had posted more rushing yards only three times.
But a Fantasy Genius does research. They would have looked at Tony Pollard’s career high in rushing and seen that it came … last December, in a matchup between the 1-11 Titans and the 3-9 Browns, when he went for 161 yards and two touchdowns.
For whatever reason, Tony Pollard hates Cleveland and the Cleveland Browns. I’m not sure why. They’re not a division rival, Pollard has never played for them or any of their main rivals, and he’s from Memphis, which doesn’t feel geographically connected to Cleveland. But twice is a trend. If the Titans play the Browns next year, you’d better get Tony in your lineup.
I wanted to see if I’d ever left anybody as good as Pollard on the bench — so I opened up Fantasy Genius’ research tool to look through my league’s history and sorted for the highest performance ever by a benched player on my team. Turns out in Week 5 in 2019, I left Will Fuller on the bench as he went for 219 yards and three touchdowns for the Texans. (I still won, though.)
Wanna look up stats from the history of YOUR league? Become a Fantasy Genius! Subscriptions start at $3.99 a month and give everybody in your league access — that’s, like, 30 cents per player in a 12-team league. And use promo code RODGER to get 20 percent off!
📈📉 The Champs & the Chiefs 📈📉
🕛 Seahawks 20 🕛
💘 Chiefs 3 💘
It’s always weird when the Chiefs get smushed.
Once upon a time, Kansas City’s defining trait was explosive, innovative offense, dreamed up by Andy Reid, made possible by Patrick Mahomes’ golden arm. In the back stretch of the Mahomes era, that explosion has faded; the team’s calling card these days is “getting into a dogfight with the best and the worst teams in the league and somehow winning most of them.”
Sunday night in Seattle, though, they had nothing. The defending Super Bowl champs knocked them on their asses for 60 minutes. (It could’ve been a mere two-possession loss if Harrison Butker had made all his kicks, but alas, he missed two of them, so it was a three-possession game.) Cris Collinsworth noted that Mahomes had a look on his face that said “I can’t believe this is happening to me.”
What can we take away from a rare beatdown of these Chiefs?
There was a pretty good storyline going about the first few weeks of the season. Kenneth Walker III, the guy who won MVP of last year’s Super Bowl for the Seahawks, was really pretty good, and everybody was stupid not to realize it in the offseason. He had come to the Chiefs and totally unlocked their offense.
In his first game against his old team, the offense became re-locked. The Seahawks clamped down their former teammate for just 36 yards on 14 carries.
The idea that the entire Chiefs offense revolves around Walker seems to hold water. Everything crumbled with the star RB unable to get anything going. Mahomes was constantly under pressure as the game got more and more out of reach, and he straight-up missed a lot of throws.
Mahomes has played 153 games for the Chiefs, regular season and post. The Chiefs are 117-36 in those games, a 76.4 win percentage. Of those 36 losses, 28 of them have been decided by eight points or fewer. That means just eight of them are multi-possession losses like this one, just 5.2 percent. (For comparison, 43 of Tom Brady’s 383 career games were multi-possession losses, 12.2 percent, and 41 of Peyton Manning’s 282 career games, 14.2 percent.)
It’s just the fifth time Mahomes has lost by more than 17 points. Unfortunately, two of those five took place in Super Bowls (the 31-9 Super Bowl against Brady’s Buccaneers in 2021 and the 40-22 loss to the Eagles in 2025). The only two previous times the Chiefs lost by this much in the regular season were in 2021, which ended with a loss in the AFC Championship game to the Bengals.
So, does it Mean Anything that the Chiefs got wrecked this hard? Again, it’s tough to say; it doesn’t happen very often. But I’m inclined to say yes: The Chiefs had not exactly looked like world-beaters despite their undefeated record, trailing the Raiders late and going to overtime with the Colts. Their offense is 14th in points per game, middle of the pack.
You know what it really means though? The Seattle Seahawks, the team that dominated the Super Bowl last year, is probably pretty good, and I was stupid for not talking more about it.
9️⃣ Revolution Number Nine 9️⃣
🌃 Giants 27 🌃
🐂 Texans 21 🐂
Sometimes, a quarterback wins a game because of external factors. Like, say, they’re playing on a team with an incredible defense, or they’re throwing to one of the greatest wide receivers in the NFL. Last year, this was J.J. McCarthy, who managed a .500 record with the Vikings despite some of the least competent quarterback play in the league.
And sometimes a quarterback goes out and wins a game with incredible throw after incredible throw, ripping passes over and through well-played defense. To my utter shock, this, too, was J.J. McCarthy, reborn in his first start with the New York Giants.
Look at this dude.
I have not always been particularly fond of the quarterbacking talents of young Jonathan James McCarthy. (See my post entitled “J.J. McCarthy is the worst” from last November.) But in five quarters with the Giants, he looks like he could reclaim a career that seemed totally lost — and help the Giants hang on to playoff position with Jaxson Dart out for the season.
Let’s not sugarcoat it. When I said J.J. McCarthy was the worst with the Vikings, that was not an opinion. That was a fact. He was the worst passer in the league in category after category, and statistically, one of the worst quarterbacks in recent memory.
The Vikings traded McCarthy a few weeks ago for a fifth-round pick to a Giants team desperate for answers after the Dart injury. Initially, he was Jameis Winston’s backup.
But Jameis Winston absolutely loves throwing interceptions and spent large swaths of the offseason doing “fan experience” content for Fox’s World Cup coverage. Not ideal.
McCarthy famously claimed to have a hyper-intense alter ego named NINE with the Vikings, saying “I love feeding that wolf.” Nine crashed and burned with the Vikings, and number nine was taken with the Giants, so now he wears number 18. Nine 2.0???
Last week the Giants were trailing by 24 in the fourth quarter when they brought in McCarthy. He threw for 243 yards and ran for 26 in the fourth quarter alone. It was the most total yardage by any quarterback in any fourth quarter in almost 20 years, since Drew Brees had 294 total yards in 2008. And he wasn’t even playing at the beginning of the quarter!
Sunday’s game by McCarthy was the best game I’ve ever seen him play. (And I watched him play at Michigan!) He made throws into tight windows under pressure, he made throws on the run, he threw the deep ball accurately.
I mean. Look.
And he didn’t even throw any stupid picks.
AND HE DID IT AGAINST THE TEXANS. I thought the Texans had the best defense in the NFL at the beginning of the season. I don’t think I think that anymore, but they weren’t playing sloppy out there. McCarthy was tearing them apart.
(You could maybe ask questions about Vikings coach Kevin O’Connell, once heralded as a QB guru who could get basically any player to put up points, dumping McCarthy and having one of the league’s worst offenses with Kyler Murray. But we already talked about that, right?)
Admittedly, McCarthy was not exactly critical to the Giants’ game-winning drive in overtime: There was a 42-yard run by Cam Skattebo, then a 30-yard game-winning touchdown run by Devin Singletary, a winding, juking highlight for a player who had been a healthy scratch for most of the season.
But for the first time in his NFL career, McCarthy showed why he was a top-10 pick. That’s a pretty good thing for a team already in first place in their division to discover in late October.
The Giants uploaded McCarthy’s locker room victory speech. I couldn’t help but notice that McCarthy said “I felt you guys have my back all day … and I’ll have yours the rest of the way.” A nice subtle “to be clear, I’m the starter now” drop.
And if he keeps it up …………. WHICH BRASH YOUNG BLOND FIRST-ROUND QUARTERBACK WITH EGREGIOUS FACEPAINT WILL THE GIANTS CHOOSE?!?!?!?
🦁 Lions 20 🦁
🧀 Packers 17 🧀
NFL highlight of the year: Detroit’s entire offense celebrating an offsides penalty that gave them a key late first down:
Essentially losing this game for Green Bay: Rookie kicker Trey Smack, who missed a 26-yarder and a 35-yarder. He’s the first kicker since 2019 to miss two field goals under 35 yards in the same game; the rest of the NFL’s kickers combined have missed only field goal shorter than 35 yards this whole season. Smack was the only kicker picked in the entire NFL Draft this year; I kinda think he got bumped up the draft board because of his cool, field-goal-specific name.
🅰️ Falcons 29 🅰️
⛏️ 49ers 20 ⛏️
After surviving injury after injury this season, the Niners finally found out which pieces of their offense cannot be replaced. They were already without Mike Evans, who carried the team on his back through large swaths of the season, and then Christian McCaffrey got hurt in Sunday’s game. Although backup Kaelon Black had a nice 30-yard touchdown run on his first drive, after that the Niners went fumble-pick-turnover on downs-touchdown-pick-fumble and suffered their first loss of the year.
🐴 Broncos 30 🐴
🏜️ Cardinals 16 🏜️
The Cardinals gave up two of the most humiliating long touchdowns I’ve seen in an NFL game in a while. It’s one thing to give up a long touchdown because of an outstanding offensive play by a superstar with otherworldly talents; on Sunday the Cardinals let Bo Nix run for 62 yards because nobody noticed he was there:
Play of the Day goes to Adam Trautman, the Broncos tight end who sees Nix running downfield and flashes his hands, successfully convincing a defensive back that there’s an incoming throw when Nix is running right behind them.
🏴☠️ Buccaneers 43 🏴☠️
🐈⬛ Panthers 13 🐈⬛
After this one, Carolina has won the biggest blowout of the season so far (34-3 win over the Falcons, with Cooper Rush and Jack Strand) and lost the second-biggest blowout of the year (this 30-point loss). Carolina is still technically leading the division at 3-3; I simply have no idea who’s going to end up winning.
🐯 Bengals 35 🐯
🐦⬛ Ravens 13 🐦⬛
The Ravens outscored the Bengals 13-0 in the first half; the Bengals outscored the Ravens 35-0 in the second half. I’ve never seen anything like that, and neither have you: The last time a team turned a 13-point halftime lead into a 20-point loss was in 1950.
The last two games with Tyler Huntley at QB, the Ravens have scored a TD on their opening drive, and then didn’t score another TD for the rest of the game. So hey, the opening script is working! Good job by the offensive coordinator!
👷 Steelers 16 👷
⚜️ Saints 10 ⚜️
A developing trend: international games featuring “a team that has international marketing rights in the market where the game is being played” (in this case, the Saints in France) and some of the sports’ biggest fan bases. There were way more Steelers fans in Paris … and way more 49ers fans in Melbourne … and way more Eagles fans in London. It’s bad enough to give up a home game. It’s gotta be way worse to travel across the ocean and have 80,000 fans from another country rooting against you!
I really appreciate that Pittsburgh is fully leaning into The Largest Tight End Ever, 6-foot-7, “265-pound” giant Darnell Washington. He had three touchdowns in his first three seasons in the NFL, and three this year, including a goal line fade on Sunday:
🐬 Dolphins 28 🐬
🛩️ Jets 25 🛩️
It’s official! Everybody in the NFL has won a game besides the Chargers. The rebuilding teams like the Titans … the openly tanking teams like the Dolphins … the teams that had to play third-string QBs like the Commanders … all of them got a W before the Chargers, a team expected to push for the playoffs.
Oh, yeah, this was supposed to be about Miami. Good for them!
⭐️ Cowboys ⭐️ @ 🦅 Eagles 🦅
8:15 p.m., Philadelphia (ESPN)
Like I wrote last week: The Cowboys are cursed in primetime. Cursed enough to lose to Tanner McKee and a team embroiled in a controversy about proper handling of blood clots? Let’s find out!
