What to know from NFL Week 13: The Browns win big, the Jets blow it, and Wentz gets benched
The Las Vegas Raiders saved their playoff hopes with a Hail Mary in the final seconds. The Minnesota Vikings nearly squandered theirs with a disastrous possession. The Jacksonville Jaguars might have snapped their 10-game losing streak if not for an overtime interception. The New York Jets torched their first win with an outrageous — and ultimately fireable — decision from defensive coordinator Gregg Williams, keeping them winless and leading the race to the bottom for Lawrence, the Clemson star expected to be the first pick in next year’s NFL draft.
It was a sequence made for NFL RedZone, and it captured only a small portion of Sunday, a day that included the benching of a franchise quarterback and the possible emergence of a quality NFC East team. Here is what to know.
The Cleveland Browns are no joke. The Browns compiled a hollow résumé for the season’s first 12 weeks, winning eight of 11 games but mostly sputtering against top competition. Beating bad teams was a monumental step forward for the Browns, but it was hard to take them seriously as a force in the AFC.
That is no longer the case. The Browns overwhelmed the eight-win Tennessee Titans in the first half and held on for a 41-35 victory, running their record to 9-3. Benefiting from the symphonic play-action passing game of Coach Kevin Stefanski, Baker Mayfield passed for 290 yards in the first half and became the first Browns quarterback since Otto Graham — Otto Graham! — in 1951 to throw four touchdowns before halftime.
Stefanski stands beside Mike Tomlin and Brian Flores as a coach of the year candidate. One year after an abject disaster and imploded expectations, the Browns have clinched their first winning season since 2007 and are on the verge of their first playoff appearance since 2002.
The Browns led 38-7 at halftime. Despite a sloppy final quarter, the performance served notice. Cleveland muddled through several bad-weather wins against lousy teams. The Browns may have rarely been impressive, but those victorious slogs seem to have imbued them with confidence. It’s hard to cleanse the stench of a dozen losing seasons. Stefanski has done it in 12 games.
What was Gregg Williams doing? The road to 0-12 is paved with perplexing decisions, and none could be more confounding — and yet on brand — than Williams’s defensive play-calling on Las Vegas’s final possession.
The Raiders took over on their 39-yard line with 35 seconds left, fortunate to still be in the game after the Jets stopped them inside the 10 on fourth and three. Carr started the drive with a 15-yard toss to tight end Darren Waller, who may have been the NFL’s best player Sunday: 13 catches, 200 yards, two touchdowns.
After a spike with 19 seconds left, the Raiders still needed a miracle. Williams provided it. He sent the house at quarterback Derek Carr and left his defensive backs in single coverage. Nelson Agholor streaked behind his man, but Carr lofted a pass too far into the end zone.
Williams had witnessed the folly of blitzing, had been taught a lesson without penalty. With his good fortune, he made the same ruinous choice. He blitzed Carr all-out again on third down. Henry Ruggs III, the fastest player in this year’s draft, sprinted past cornerback Lamar Jackson. Carr hit him in stride for a 46-yard touchdown that kept the Raiders in the AFC wild-card race.
“I couldn’t believe they all-out blitzed us,” Carr said during a video news conference. “I was thankful.”
“We were trying to create pressure,” Jets Coach Adam Gase said. “[Carr] hadn’t done well with it all game. That’s what happened. We had a couple free runners, but we didn’t get there.”
Carr may have struggled with pressure all game, but the rest of the game had not been played with passing deep as Carr’s only option. The only way to lose the game was to let a receiver get open deep, and the Jets strategized to let exactly that happen. It’s tempting to assume or joke that the Jets were tanking for Lawrence. But that’s who Williams is as a coordinator. He thinks the answer to every question is to blitz, no matter how obvious it is not to. It cost the Jets their first win and Williams his job — the Jets fired Williams on Monday morning, according to multiple reports.
Years from now, the call may seem sage. Lawrence is regarded as perhaps the best quarterback prospect since Andrew Luck. There are no sure things, but Lawrence is as close as it gets. The Jets remain in position to draft him. Gase likely won’t be around to coach him, and Williams definitely won’t be.
Carson Wentz got benched. The final straw for the Philadelphia Eagles finally came midway through the third quarter. Wentz submitted another performance indicative of his season, completing 6 of 15 passes for 79 yards while taking four sacks. He held the ball too long. He was skittish in the pocket. He was inaccurate. He was all the things that have made him one of the NFL’s worst quarterbacks this season.
The Eagles turned to rookie second-round draft pick Jalen Hurts, whose performance suggested they should have turned to him earlier. He immediately completed a 35-yard pass to first-round pick Jalen Reagor, whose speed Wentz could never exploit. Hurts finished with 109 yards on 5-for-12 passing with a touchdown and an interception, which came after the game had been decided. The Eagles put a brief, mild scare into the Green Bay Packers before losing, 30-16.
Hurts was decisively the better option Sunday, but figuring out what to do with Wentz will not be simple. Even if the Eagles want to move on from Wentz after this season, his $59 million dead salary cap hit in 2021 makes any kind of transaction complicated, if not prohibitive. Given how Wentz began his career, and how he played before tearing knee ligaments in 2017, it’s remarkable that he is now an albatross.
The NFC East may have at least one quality team. The division has been the butt of jokes all season, but who would want to see the New York Giants in the first round? The Giants have won four straight, none bigger than the 17-12 upset they pulled on the Seattle Seahawks behind backup quarterback Colt McCoy, depth running back Alfred Morris and a defense suddenly playing as well as any unit in football.
The Giants have two wins over the Washington Football Team, which will give them control of the division even if Washington can pull an upset Monday at the undefeated Pittsburgh Steelers. They have not lost by more than three points since Oct. 4. If Daniel Jones can limit his mistakes when he returns from a hamstring injury, which should be next week, the Giants will not be the pushover division champ the NFC East seemed poised to produce.
Justin Jefferson is a star. Given the depth and excellence at the position in the past two drafts, it takes a lot to stand out as a young wide receiver. It’s too early to tell who the best wideout from the past two classes will be, but Jefferson will give DK Metcalf, Terry McLaurin, A.J. Brown and all the rest a run for their money.
Jefferson caught nine passes for 121 yards in the Vikings’ 27-24 overtime victory over Jacksonville, surpassing 1,000 yards for the season and catching a go-ahead touchdown in the third quarter. If not for Justin Herbert, Jefferson might be the rookie of the year favorite.
The Vikings were a mess for large portions of Sunday, but by outlasting the 1-11 Jaguars, they improbably moved into playoff position after a 1-5 start. The Vikings improved to 6-6, and the Arizona Cardinals’ loss to the Los Angeles Rams dropped them to the same record. The Vikings still must face the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the New Orleans Saints, but they’re still in it.
The Chicago Bears might have to clean house. The Bears’ 5-1 start has been fully revealed as a mirage. They had a 10-point lead and the ball with six minutes left and still lost, 34-30, to the going-nowhere Detroit Lions.
Few coach-executive tandems have fallen farther or faster than Matt Nagy and Ryan Pace. They turned the Bears into an innovative, fun division winner in 2018. Chicago is 13-15 since. Its offense has turned from fresh to inept. Mitchell Trubisky has gone from flawed but promising to broken, forever the quarterback Pace chose over Deshaun Watson and Patrick Mahomes. The defense, the best in the league two years ago, has not been the same since defensive coordinator Vic Fangio left for Denver.
The Bears are only one game out of the playoff picture, but they have also lost six in a row. The last four weeks of the season may decide whether the Bears allow Nagy and Pace to fix what has gone wrong or if it’s time to start over.
The Patriots are alive. The AFC wild-card race is loaded. All the Patriots did Sunday, really, was keep pace. They’re still two games out of the final wild-card spot. But they have won four of five, Bill Belichick is their coach, and their 45-0 destruction of the Los Angeles Chargers — which included a touchdown on a punt return and another off a blocked field goal — was impossible not to notice.
The Patriots are playing like a playoff team now, but they’re still fighting uphill. The Buffalo Bills, who have beaten them once, can take a three-game lead on New England with a victory Monday night against San Francisco. The Indianapolis Colts and Miami Dolphins moved to 8-4 and occupy the last two wild-card spots. The Raiders are 7-5, and the Baltimore Ravens are 6-5 with a Tuesday meeting with the Dallas Cowboys on tap.
But there’s good news for the Patriots. They hold head-to-head tiebreakers over the Dolphins, Raiders and Ravens, who are all vying for the last AFC playoff spot. They probably have to win out to make it, but the way they played Sunday, that doesn’t seem impossible.
