Welcome to your Monday roundup of the best and worst of NFL Sunday — by which we mean the single very best thing and single very worst thing. Because the stuff in the middle doesn’t matter, really.
THE VERY BEST THING ABOUT THE NFL THIS WEEK: It wasn’t an inspiring Sunday in the NFL. Weeks that leave you reflecting on how great the Thursday night game was rarely are. But it was somewhat inspiring to see a couple of the games tapped as the worst on the slate deliver the best action.
The Bills put together a stirring comeback to knock off a Bucs team that is rapidly humiliating pre-season picks that had them as Super Bowl contenders, and the Miami Dolphins, freed by an arm injury to Jay Cutler, put 17 points on the Jets in the fourth quarter to come from behind for a win.
[relatedlinks]
Both victories, by the way, temporarily put the teams in a tie for first place in the AFC East, until the Patriots won the Sunday nighter.
While the Packers and Saints were slogging through a rainy affair and every other game on the early slate was either a blowout or a field-goal kicking contest, it was nice to see a couple of offences that don’t get enough respect deliver some clutch scoring.
THE VERY WORST THING ABOUT THE NFL THIS WEEK: The Indianapolis Colts were shut out 27–0 by the Jaguars on Sunday. Their secondary was shredded by Blake Bortles. Their quarterback was sacked 10 times. And none of this was even really outside the realm of expectation. This is the low the Colts exist at now.
Since Chuck Pagano and Jim Irsay began playing fast and loose with the obviously extremely serious shoulder injury suffered sometime in 2015 by franchise cornerstone Andrew Luck, the Colts have devolved from a badly coached mess with some decent players to a horribly run, badly drafted, terribly coached and awfully executed mess.
With some devastating misfortune thrown in for good measure. They are perhaps the worst team in the NFL — with apologies to the winless Browns, who at least kept it close yesterday, and the 49ers, who did not. The Colts easily have the league’s worst point differential, and if Luck’s injury is as bad as the constantly shifting timeline indicates, they could be headed for an extended and embarrassing revelation of just how much weight the No. 1 QB carried for everyone else.
Consider that since Luck went down last year…
His timeline has been repeatedly revised, from completely ready for the 2017 season to expecting him to be ready for Week 1 to out for Week 2 and beyond to returning to practice then being unceremoniously shut down from practicing to why even bother at this point?
[snippet id=3669923]
In the meantime, his club has won exactly two games, been blown out in many others, sits at the bottom of their division, has the league’s worst offensive line, has a top receiver that is more than willing to point out just how bad the offensive line is, and just lost their most successful pick from the 2017 draft, first-rounder Malik Hooker, to a season-ending injury.
Oh, and Pagano insists on giving 34-year-old Frank Gore more carries than promising rookie Marlon Mack because… this team still needs veterans on the field?
Suffice to say that it was six years ago that the Colts looked to have struck paydirt by losing Peyton Manning for the season just in time to get Andrew Luck to replace him. And a repeat of that fluke is rapidly becoming the best-case scenario in Indy.
