The Eagles really needed Sunday. And the reason why—as their second-year coach, Nick Sirianni, saw it—was because the two games they just played without quarterback Jalen Hurts, back-to-back losses to the Cowboys and Saints, really surfaced some warts that might have been otherwise masked through a 13–1 start.Hey, listen, it’s healthy to drag yourself through the mud and really look yourself in the mirror and say, I’m gonna look myself in the mirror, and I’m gonna say, ’That really sucked.
It was bad enough to where, Sirianni conceded afterward, he probably wouldn’t have played Hurts in another circumstance. “Obviously, if we would have taken care of business,” he says, “then he probably wouldn’t have played.” That, of course, is in large part because the staff would’ve rested other starters, and they weren’t about to put Hurts out there surrounded with backups.
. We just got to play like that more consistently each week. We didn’t play up to our standard in the last two weeks. That was the whole message of the week, playing up to our standard and playing up to our identity of what we want to be.” And as he looked around the room—a couple of hours after the win—seeing offensive coordinator Shane Steichen, pass-game coordinator Kevin Patullo and tight ends coach Jason Michael close by at Steichen’s suburban house, was a pretty nice reminder, too, of the chance they have in front of them, after bringing home that 14th win.
“You start with our community and you work down from there,” Taylor says. “On a big scale, the people that were outside the hospital, the stadium, that understood the situation. It’s the first time in NFL history, in my understanding, that a game started and didn’t finish, and you had a stadium full of people that reacted appropriately and with compassion. I know people who … that was their Christmas present, to fly in and go to that game.
“When I tell you there were thousands of cards, there were thousands of cards,” Taylor says. “They were all in my kitchen.” “Part of the reason why we’ve won our last eight games is this team has started strong and found a way to control the game,” Taylor says. “There’s an exception or two along the way where that hasn’t happened. But that’s what this team has really done. And then you get a chance to lean on the strength of our defense and the explosiveness of our offense and finish games off.
One such thing? The Bengals had a game Sunday that was really a worse version of what happened in Foxborough on Christmas Eve, starting that game looking like they were going to run the Patriots out of their own stadium. The Patriots, though, had other ideas, and hung around and hung around and hung around just enough to where the Bengals needed to force a fumble at the wire to win.
The 32-year-old completed 69.8% of his passes for 4,282 yards , 30 touchdowns, 11 picks and a 100.9 passer rating, having the sort of season that compares to any Wilson had over his decade as a Seahawk. ,” Carroll says. “And he was calm and poised and perfectly in the mentality to go ahead and get this win. We knew exactly what the situation was, we handled it all, he had a couple timeouts and things we needed—that was more on the coaches than anything on the field—but he did a great job, again.He’d have to, and more than once.
“We’ll all be texting around and all that stuff and staying connected, so that we see what happens, and we’ll be rooting for [the Lions],” Carroll says. “My thinking is, they haven’t won there in Green Bay very much lately. So, man, the odds are really high that they’re gonna win this time.”A few hours later, it was reality. The Seahawks are playoff bound.It’s been a weird first season for Mike McDaniel in Miami.
Thompson ran for two yards, found Jaylen Waddle for nine, ran another yard, found Waddle again, with Waddle drawing a horse-collar flag, and that pretty much put Miami where it needed to be to set up Jason Sanders with a 50-yard field goal to win it—one the former first-team All-Pro stroked with ease.
And that was enough, for now, to put the long-term quarterback questions to the side. There’ll be time to answer those.The Texans’ firing of Lovie Smith isn’t a shocker. That’s mostly because I don’t think the Rams’ coach knows right now how he’ll feel in a week or two—once he’s fully detached from a 5–12 season through which he lost stars Matthew Stafford, Cooper Kupp and Aaron Donald for extended stretches., and I think looking back at that can be instructive. It was two days after the Super Bowl that Stafford and Kupp came to his office, knowing that McVay was mulling things over, with a pretty direct and aggressive message for their coach.