NFL 2024: The Week 2 thread (Week 18 for Panthers fans)

Hey! They're the Hornets now, and they had a .256 winning percentage last year! That's twice as good as the Panthers' .118!

Again, the best part of being a Giants fan recently, has been that they generally let me know by week 3 or 4 whether or not I can just ignore them and hae my fall Sundays totally open.

The greatest 3rd round draft pick since Joe Montana.

Week 1 Thoughts:

The 2018 QB class - In a week where QB play across the board was terrible, the 2018 1st round QBs stood out (you know, besides the Rosen One). Baker's redemption arc seems complete. Josh Allen single-handedly (heh) dragged the Bills to victory. Lamar accounted for basically all of Baltimore's offense in a playoff-caliber game that they just couldn't quite finish out. And then there's Darnold, who came out on fire in the first half, and the opening drive of the second half, with Minnesota mostly bleeding the clock dry after that. A few teams should be kicking themselves at not being the team that gave Darnold a shot, especially...

Browns and Giants QB nightmares - The only thing worse than not having a good QB is not having a good QB but paying someone like they are. Excuses for Deshaun Watson are drying up, while a new assault accusation has surfaced. The NFL currently has no plans to place Watson on the commissioner's exempt list, but a review of Watson's contract seems to suggest that a team suspension for "conduct detrimental" could be used to default Watson's deal. Meanwhile in New York, I have to imagine the Giants already have $22 million of dead cap from terminating Daniel Jones' contract written in ink on the 2025 cap projections. There's little reason for these teams to not be giving Jameis Winston and Drew Lock their shots.

O-Line alignment "cheat" - On the one hand, it is great to see flags finally being thrown to dissuade offensive linemen (tackles specifically) from cheating their pre-snap alignment so far back that they're practically wingbacks. At the same time, it is infuriating watching officials give a free pass to the biggest offender in the league, Jawaan Taylor.

Tepper's gonna grab some hats - The Panthers targeted Dave Canales for one primary, obvious reason: his work in the redemption arcs of Geno Smith and Baker Mayfield. He was given a 6-year deal, no doubt to sweeten a deal that few head coaching candidates wanted to consider. And the first look at Canales' fixed-up Bryce Young saw Young posting a worse passer rating (32.8) than any game as a rookie, by a healthy margin. The one thing that has to happen for this regime is Young progressing, and so far that progression is only backwards. A good defensive performance might have helped ease the sting for the new head coach, but instead the new look Saints offense ran them off the field.

Jake Moody - Jake Moody.

Dak breaks the $60m/yr mark - Given the timing of the news, it's almost escaped discussion how Dak's 4 year, $240m contract extension reset the QB market, representing a full $5m/yr jump from the previous $55m high mark of Burrow/Love/Lawrence. Which kind of sucks, because it robbed us of some great week-to-week Cowboys drama, examining every good and bad Dak performance and discussing how it was going to impact Dak's future price, along with the will-they/won't-they question of whether Dak will remain in Dallas at all. It was smart of Dallas to avoid that, but it doesn't make sense why Jerry allowed it to look like that's where things were headed.

No post-Super Bowl hangover for the 49ers - At least, not yet. But after wrapping up two headlining holdouts at the 11th hour, plus going into the game missing not one but two All-Pro players (Talanoa Hufanga still working his way back, and CMC being a surprise late inactive), the table was set for a big letdown game in front of a national audience. Instead, they treated Rodgers like he was still a Packer, and wounded the pride of a defense that thought it was championship caliber (and who to their credit did slow down the 49ers enough in Jets territory to force a lot of field goals).

Let's check in with my divisional predictions and see how they're feeling after one week:

Dolphins were on the verge of going down 24-7 before the Jags started handing them the game on a silver platter, but that explosiveness finally showed up late when the opportunity came. Bills did indeed look dangerous but less than complete. Rodgers showed a couple flashes of his old self but couldn't be that guy consistently.

Bengals were bad, but otherwise nailed it so far. Watson is worse than an anchor, he's a hole in the bottom of the boat. Steelers had the second worst offensive performance of a week 1 winning team.

Chiefs get to be good and have the thumb pressed on the scale for their benefit. Chargers won the turnover battle and ground out a win. Denver's 3.3 yards per play and 3 turnovers were about what I expected from them.

This was looking good deep into the Jaguars game. See if you can spot where things changed:

Basically a microcosm replay of the 2023 Jaguars season.

Tennessee somehow gave their game away even harder, to a much worse team. As for the Colts, Anthony Richardson made a couple dazzling highlight plays, but completed a grand total of 9 passes.

The big miss here was suggesting the Giants have a 6 win roster. Dallas didn't really take their offense out of second gear, but there was no reason to as they handled Cleveland so thoroughly. Eagles won and Saquon looked great, but Hurts was a turnover machine in a tight game. Washington's leading wide receiver was Luke McCaffrey with 18 yards, a dink-and-dunk attack that would make Alex Smith proud.

Lions are who we thought they were. Packers new look D was not inspiring, and Love injury hurts, but the roster talent is clearly still there for a playoff push if they can avoid dropping too many early games. DARNOLD reclamation is in effect! And I guess the Bears made noise in their win, even if some of it was how over his head Caleb was.

Niners settled for field goals a little too much, but overall were one of the least rusty teams in a decisive win. Rams gave Detroit a good battle on the road. Seahawks didn't really spark much on offense, but they handled Denver, with a late Denver TD making the game look closer than it was. Cardinals defense indeed isn't there, as the offense stuck it to Buffalo, but defense couldn't stop Josh Allen from sticking it right back.

I didn't see 47 points coming, and it was against the hapless Panthers, but the Saints offense finally joined the 2020s and it showed. Baker's hard at work showing last year wasn't a fluke, and making Cleveland look even stupider by proxy. The Falcons hype that I was not buying is gonna be a lot quieter this week. And those Carolina "question marks" are looking more like poop emojis.

So far, none of these takes feel like they're approaching "aged like milk" territory.

Kansas City, San Francisco, and Dallas looked like the best teams in week 1, with Detroit and Baltimore probably rounding out a completely unsurprising top 5.

The NFL should give Travis Kelce a pass from speaking to the press for the rest of the year.

One thing I predicted in some fantasy football discussions was that Brian Thomas Jr. was going to post a better statistical season than two out of the three "Big 3" WRs drafted ahead of him.

One week into the season, and he's the one out of the four that looked most like a starting WR. BTJ consistently won on routes, and caught all 4 of his targets, including a toe tapper along the back of the endzone for a TD. Was the highest PFF graded rookie WR and the 15th highest graded WR overall this week.

Harrison dropped one of his 3 targets and caught only one for 4 yards. Odunze caught only one of 3 for 11 yards before spraining his knee and missing the next few weeks. Nabers caught 5 of 7, though he dropped one and his average target was only 6.9 yards downfield (obviously far more a result of their QB disaster than anything Nabers did).

I was not all that hyped about the BTJ pick during the draft, but he ramped up so much over the course of the summer that it became obvious he wasn't just going to start, but also get a major target share in an offense that was 6th in pass attempts a year ago.

There's a reason BTJ was the consensus next WR prospect after those big 3, which is the argument I use to not give Trent Baalke credit for making the pick.

The tl;dr--"not only is he a Smurf, he's a Smurf with terrible mechanics."

He's just waiting for Jesus to show up and fix Bryce, just like he apparently fixed Canales' narcissism, porn addiction, alcohol addiction, and philandering.

Floridians are having a bad go of it on prime time this week.