WHAT WE LEARNED: NFL WEEK SIX

BY ADAM GREENE

Every week the NFL landscape shifts, so it’s time once again to gain our bearings and figure out where we’re standing.

FIRING YOUR BAD COACH EARLY IS SMART

For the second week in a row a team that fired its incompetent head coach picked up its first win of the season as the Atlanta Falcons took out the equally moribund Minnesota Vikings 40-23.

Raheem Morris won his interim head coaching debut for Atlanta just as Romeo Crennel did the week before with the Houston Texans. Why does this happen?

It’s simple. The players on these teams are just as frustrated with their worthless head coaches as the rest of us. These professional athletes aren’t dumb. They’ve been playing this sport at an elite level their entire lives and they know exactly what they aren’t getting in a commander.

You can see it happening right now with the Dallas Cowboys. As the team flounders out to a 2-4 record and an all but guaranteed losing record with starting quarterback Dak Prescott out for the year, the leaks and complaints have already started. Mike McCarthy is bad at his job. This wasn’t a secret before the season to anyone other than Cowboys owner Jerry Jones apparently, but now the secret is fully out.

When the organization makes that change, they get hopeful. Maybe they like the interim guy better. Maybe they get excited at the prospect of bringing in an elite new coaching prospect. I mean, if you’re the Texans and you keep getting connected to Kansas City Chiefs’ offensive coordinator Eric Bieniemy, it’s tough to keep the enthusiasm down.

Going 0-16 in the NFL should be just as tough as going 16-0. In a league with a worst drafts first rule, wide open free agency, a salary cap and, more importantly, a salary floor, no team should be bad enough to go winless in the modern NFL. Yet two teams have; the 2008 Detroit Lions and the 2017 Cleveland Browns. And the unifying trait of both those losers is that they refused to fire their head coaches in the season.

Detroit let Rod Marinelli play out the full 16 game stretch and the Browns, because they’re the Browns, not only didn’t load head coach Hue Jackson into the nearest trebuchet, they brought him back the next season. Then fired him and immediately got better.

The present day Lions too have a major coaching issue, but my guess is they’ll be the last to pull the trigger on firing their coach. Matt Patricia is undoubtedly terrible and this season already lost. But Detroit has won two games and, with their schedule, could pick up at least three more before the year’s out. Patricia should be fired before Thanksgiving. Hell, they should have fired him last year. But this is the same organization that let Marinelli drive them into the turf. He’s probably safe until New Year’s.

The New York Jets Adam Gase, on the other hand, is all but packed and ready to go. For the Jets, you almost want to be strategic when you fire him at this point to try to maximize that post-firing win possibility. With the Buffalo Bills, Kansas City Chiefs and New England Patriots all coming up this month, there’s no point. Those are all guaranteed losses.

After that, they travel to Los Angeles to take on the Chargers. And while LA has its own coaching issues that should be addressed with a pink slip, they’ve shown that they’re a significantly better team than the Jets. No, the best bet for a Gase firing boost comes after that game when New York hosts the Miami Dolphins and newly anointed rookie quarterback starter Tua Tagovailoa. Barring a catastrophic performance from a good team, that might be the only chance New York has of winning a game this season. You can’t waste it with Gase still calling the shots.

GOOD TEAMS CAN STUMBLE

This is what makes NFL football not only the most entertaining sport on the planet, but the hardest to handicap. Week Six saw not one, but three of the NFL’s better teams and predicted playoff participants lay emu eggs and none of them have a good excuse as to why.

The day started with the New England Patriots falling to the Denver Broncos at home, 18-12. The Pats, with Cam Newton back under center as he returned from COVID-19 isolation, managed just one trip to the end zone and a couple of field goals in a game they should have won by double digits.

In the 4 p.m. block, we got what appeared to be one of the best match ups of the year when the surging and undefeated Green Bay Packers led by Aaron Rodgers traveled to Tampa Bay to play the Tom Brady led Buccaneers. This one looked like a wild one on paper, but unfortunately it didn’t stay there.

The Bucs won 38-10 and Aaron Rodgers played like he’d been body swapped with his brother Jordan.

It got no better for the Los Angeles Rams who, like the Packers, boasted one of the league’s top offensive attacks as they played the injury decimated San Francisco 49ers. While the final score was close, with the Niners winning 24-16, the game never felt in doubt. The Rams offense had scored on its opening drive in six straight games. Against SF, they had one first down in the opening quarter.

Obviously, all three of these teams are too good not to bounce back. Everyone takes a bad loss and maybe, in the grand scheme of the season, getting it out of the way early is a good thing. You certainly don’t want to soil the bedsheets like that in December on a playoff run.

But none of these teams can afford tripping up this weekend. The Pack travels to a dangerous Houston Texans team that should have beaten the Tennessee Titans last week. The Patriots host the same 49ers team that just ran it down the Rams’ throat. Those same Rams welcome the Chicago Bears Monday night, a team that seems to have their number on defense. In the first meeting between Sean McVay’s Rams and Matt Nagy’s Bears, Chicago won 15-6. Last year, McVay got his victory, but it was 17-7.

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