WHAT WE LEARNED: NFL WEEK 12

BY ADAM GREENE

December is upon us and for a quartet of NFL franchises, that’s got to be good news.

FOUR TEAMS WENT WINLESS IN NOVEMBER

If you root for the Los Angeles Rams, the Seattle Seahawks, New Orleans Saints and Detroit Lions, then you had a bleak November. Of course, for Lions fans you could have said the same thing about October and September and go ahead be clearing your throat to say it about December, but these other three are more of a surprise.

With the Saints, the explanation is pretty simple. They lost their starting quarterback in Jameis Winston who wasn’t exactly lighting up the skies in the first place. They replaced him with Trevor Siemian and now Taysom Hill and it’s probably not going to change a whole lot. After a promising start, this team is likely missing the playoffs.

Seattle is a completely different story. This is pretty much the exact same team that went 11-5 a year ago. And while you can blame one of their November losses on the absence of Russell Wilson, Chef Russ has been back at QB for the last two weeks and the Seahawks have been dominated by the Arizona Cardinals, starting their own back ups and lost to the Washington Football Team, also QBed by their No. 2. Their only win over the last two months was the Jacksonville Jaguars, which means for the first time since 2017, Seattle will probably be watching the playoffs at home.

It’s a recipe for a full team overhaul, beginning with their 70 year old head coach Pete Carroll and probably a potential trade for some solid draft pick compensation for Russell Wilson. The dude floated the idea of a trade this offseason, even handpicking a few teams as his possible destination. Wilson will probably still get some real consideration in a trade, but the market could be flooded this year with Aaron Rodgers, Deshaun Watson and Jimmy Garoppolo, not to mention guys like Marcus Mariota, Mitchell Trubisky and Jameis Winston.

As for the Rams, their 0-3 mark in November has been a real gut punch. Matthew Stafford is a significant upgrade over Jared Goff and there’s no way the team is sitting at 7-4 with Goff still at the helm. But LA sold that they were getting an Aaron Rodgers or Patrick Mahomes that had just been languishing on a bad team in the trade and, three months in, that doesn’t look like the case.

If you look at Stafford’s career, he’s never beaten a team five games (or more) over .500 even once. And he’s now 9-70 all time against teams with winning records.

Stafford has thrown pick sixes in three consecutive games and is the NFL’s active leader in that stat. Sean McVay has come out in defense his hand-picked QB and he should. Like I said, with the way the defense is currently playing, this team would probably be 3-8 with Goff behind center.

“There’s a lot of different snaps, there’s a lot of things that he (Stafford) has done at a high level,” McVay told reporters. “When you want to just isolate those individual plays, of course we want to be able to play better. It’s not always exclusively on him. We’ve got a guy that’s got great ownership, I’ve got great confidence in this guy and I’m not gonna sit here and criticize our players. I’m gonna be able to look at it, try to say, ‘Hey, here’s where we can fix it, here’s where we can correct it’ and that’s where I feel like my job is as a coach.”

And he’s right. A good bit of this is on him. He thought he could turn Stafford loose and, for the first two months of the season, it worked. Now, McVay has to get in there and manage Stafford a bit. Get the Detroit out of him, if you will, like the chucking throw to Odell Beckham Jr. in the San Francisco 49ers game or the desperation heave to avoid a safety against the Tennessee Titans. Those are losing plays and Stafford absolutely made them.

It’s time to do some real teaching instead of just assuming Stafford has it all together. Because that Detroit Lions stink is starting to overwhelm the good he’s shown this season.

IF THE PLAYOFFS STARTED TODAY

AFC

1. Baltimore Ravens (8-3)

2. New England Patriots (8-4)

3. Tennessee Titans (8-4)

4. Kansas City Chiefs (7-4)

5. Cincinnati Bengals (7-4)

6. Buffalo Bills (7-4)

7. Los Angeles Chargers (6-5)

Wild Card Games

Chargers at Patriots

Bills at Titans

Bengals at Chiefs

On the bubble: Las Vegas Raiders (6-5), Denver Broncos (6-5), Indianapolis Colts (6-6), Pittsburgh Steelers (5-5-1), Cleveland Browns (6-6) and the Miami Dolphins (5-7).

Looking at the field and the games ahead, anything can still happen in the AFC. We have some big AFC games that will settle plenty of this, realistically this week with the Chargers at Bengals, Ravens at Steelers and Broncos at Chiefs. All have a real chance to reshuffle the deck, or all but end a few teams’ postseason shots for good. The Patriots at Bills game on Monday night is for AFC East supremacy and probably the No. 2 seed. While people may have been excited about the Pats in the preseason with Mac Jones, I don’t think anyone expected this.

NFC

1. Arizona Cardinals (9-2)

2. Green Bay Packers (9-3)

3. Tampa Bay Buccaneers (8-3)

4. Dallas Cowboys (7-4)

5. Los Angeles Rams (7-4)

6. San Francisco 49ers (6-5)

7. Washington Football Team (5-6)

Wild Card Games

WFT at Packers

49ers at Buccaneers

Rams at Cowboys

On the bubble: Minnesota Vikings (5-6), Atlanta Falcons (5-6), New Orleans Saints (5-6), Philadelphia Eagles (5-7), Carolina Panthers (5-7), New York Giants (4-7) and Chicago Bears (4-7).

While the AFC can boast some postseason level match ups this week, the NFC is phoning it in pretty hard. The Cowboys at Saints Thursday night is serious, at least on paper as is the Buccaneers at Falcons on Sunday, but I don’t expect either of those games to be especially competitive.

Follow Adam Greene on Twitter @TheFirstMan.

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