Quarterback glory for Drew Brees and Matt Flynn; the playoff picture; and farewell Jason Taylor
NFL topics this week include the quarterback achievements of Drew Brees, Tom Brady and Matt Flynn; the QB nightmares of Tony Romo, Mark Sanchez and Tim Tebow; the playoff picture; and farewell Jason Taylor.
Only themselves to blame
Rex Ryan will be kicking himself, Jerry Jones is probably kicking Jason Garrett, and you just know that the ghost of Al Davis is shouting "Just win, baby" at the Oakland Raiders. The race to the playoffs was complicated but all the Jets, the Cowboys and the Raiders really had to do on the last day of the regular season was win.
The Jets defeat was largely self-inflicted: Santonio Holmes and tackle Wayne Hunter argued on the field, but Holmes had apparently already fought with QB Mark Sanchez before the game.
With five minutes to go in week 14 the Cowboys were as good as in the playoffs, leading the Giants 34-22. Then Eli Manning led yet another of his fourth quarter comebacks, the Giants were back and delivered the coup de grace on the last day. A familiar refrain is already being called: "Can the Cowboys win with Romo?"
The Raiders faced the Chargers - a team who watched their own playoff hopes drift away during a long winless run - in Oakland but still couldn't win. As Bleacher Report says:
"The Raiders haven't won a Super Bowl in almost 30 seasons and haven't made the playoffs in almost a decade. A once proud franchise became an absolute laughingstock in the mid-2000s, proving that although the "renegade" label will sell a lot of t-shirts, it doesn't win football games.
Davis' death last October provided an opportunity to change the culture of the entire organization. For the first time in almost 50 years, someone other than Davis will be making the decisions. I'm not advocating a total alienation of the traditions that made the Raiders great, but a modernization of ideas and philosophies that will make the team what it should be: the finest organization in professional sports."
There will be plenty of self-analysing, management-changing and draft-hoping going on at lots of franchises for the rest of the winter. Feel free to post your own post-mortems below. SB
In the meantime, 12 teams are still in with a chance of winning the Super Bowl. Here's how the next few weeks line up (all games will be covered live by Guardian US sports):
Wild-card weekend
7 Jan ? Cincinnati Bengals @ Houston Texans
7 Jan ? Detroit Lions @ New Orleans Saints
8 Jan ? Atlanta Falcons @ New York Giants
8 Jan ? Pittsburgh Steelers @ Denver Broncos
Divisional play-offs
14 Jan ? New Orleans or New York or Atlanta @ San Francisco 49ers
14 Jan ? Denver or Pittsburgh or Cincinnati @ New England Patriots
15 Jan ? Houston or Denver or Pittsburgh @ Baltimore Ravens
15 Jan ? New York or Atlanta or Detroit @ Green Bay Packers
AFC/NFC Conference championships
22 January
Super Bowl
5 February at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis
New England have forgotten how to start games
On one level it feels rather churlish to pick holes in the AFC's top seed ? a 13-3 team who closed out the regular season with an eight-game winning streak ? and certainly any rivals would do well to address the logs in their own eyes before attending to the speck in New England's. Yet the manner of the Patriots' victories these last three weeks cannot be ignored: on each occasion, they have offered their opponents a considerable head-start.
An eventual 28-point margin of victory over Buffalo on Sunday spoke to the gulf in quality between the two teams, but the fact remains that the Patriots had at one point trailed 21-0. Likewise, against the Dolphins a week earlier, they had reached half-time staring at a 17-0 deficit. In week 15 they were obliged to recover from 16-7 down against the Denver Broncos. They gave up 167 rushing yards in the first quarter of that game alone.
Given that not one of those teams finished the season with a winning record, it is safe to assume that sterner tests lie ahead in the playoffs. Although a rematch with Denver remains a possibility, a more likely scenario would pit them against the Steelers in the divisional round, then the Ravens in the AFC title game. Against the teams who ranked first and third in the league for total defence during the regular season, even New England might find such deficits hard to recover. PB
Extraordinary quarterbacking
Before this season only two QBs had ever thrown more than 5,000 yards in a season - Dan Marino and Drew Brees. This year three achieved the feat (Brees, Tom Brady and Matthew Stafford). The all-time list now looks like this:
1. Drew Brees 2011: 5,476 yards
2. Tom Brady 2011: 5,235
3. Dan Marino 1984: 5,084
4. Drew Brees 2008: 5,069
5. Matthew Stafford 2011: 5,038
Aaron Rodgers would probably have reached the mark too had he not been rested. And, what happened in his stead? Stand-in Matt Flynn passed for 480 yards and 6 TDs. Does this mean that the Packers offense is great no matter who plays QB? Or that the Packers are blessed with two great quarterbacks? Either way it seems likely that Flynn will get to play more next season. As AP reports:
"Matt Flynn's teammates just assume he is headed elsewhere after the season, most likely as a candidate to start for a quarterback-starved team in another NFL city. And that was even before Flynn's jaw-dropping performance for the Green Bay Packers on Sunday.
...Flynn already had the attention of general managers around the league after nearly beating New England last season, and he'll become a free agent in the offseason."
So, where might he go? Well the teams with the worst records in the NFL already have the choice of some great QBs in the draft, with the blindingly obvious choices being Stanford's Andrew Luck and Baylor's RG3, who did their draft prospects no harm in their recent college bowl performances.
But what about the nearly and not-so-nearly teams?
Will the Jets, for instance, decide they have gone as far as they can with Mark Sanchez? Or how about the Redskins after yet another under-performing season?
And, of course, no QB debate is complete without a discussion of Tim Tebow. After his stellar start at the Broncos, Tebow has had three consective defeats and faces a tough playoff task against the Steelers. Even more worryingly for Denver was the way that Kansas City closed him down, particularly late in the game, when other teams had previously allowed him the space to lead some outstanding comebacks. Do the Broncos still believe? SB
Greatness can still be found in bad teams
Jared Allen finished an agonising half-sack short of matching the all-time record of 22.5 in a season, set by Michael Strahan in 2001, though for those of us who enjoy watching him play, that's probably a good thing. "I probably would have thrown my helmet into the crowd, jumped up, ran up, kissed my wife and my baby in the suite, walked into the locker room and quit," he joked afterwards when asked how he would have celebrated had he broken the record.
It is probably nothing more than an interesting anomaly that all of this year's top three sack artists (Allen, DeMarcus Ware and Jason Babin) should play for teams who failed to make it into the playoffs but there is always some sadness at this time of year at the knowledge we have seen the last of so many thrilling performers for the next eight months. There will be no more ridiculous one-handed grabs from Larry Fitzgerald, no more electric runs from Maurice Jones-Drew, the league's leading rusher despite playing on an offence that ranked dead last overall. PB
Bye Bye Jason Taylor
Saddest of all though, there will be no more Jason Taylor as an NFL player. One of the greatest defensive ends ever to play the game bowed out on Sunday by helping the Dolphins to eliminate their division rival Jets, before being carried off the field by his team-mates ? whom he then reduced to tears with an emotional goodbye speech. But if we won't ever get the chance to see him maul another quarterback, scoop up another fumble or ruining another Cowboys fan's afternoon, at least in these days of YouTube we can relive all the times he did just that over the past 15 glorious years.
Join us for live coverage of all the NFL playoffs this weekend.
And, as an extra treat, we have a liveblog of the BCS National Championship game between LSU and Alabama next Monday.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/blog/2012/jan/03/nfl-playoffs-quarterbacks-matt-ryan-jason-taylor
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